Iris Murdoch: A Life

In October 1939 Frank came up from Larkhill Officer Cadet Training Unit on Salisbury Plain to take his Pass Mods (exam). He was in Oxford one week, and spent ‘a very placid evening with a Bolshevicka of my acquaintance’ – certainly Iris.² Though under-age, having just turned nineteen, he had already volunteered, on 2 September, one crucial symbolic day before the formal outbreak of hostilities. He ‘simply wanted to fight’, Frank’s act created a stir because it ignored government regulations safeguarding undergraduates from being called up before their twentieth birthday. His parents tried to have his enlistment rescinded on the grounds of his age, but that made him the more determined. There was also the question of the Party line. On the outbreak of war the Communist Party, after one week of supporting a war on two fronts – i.e. against Fascism and Imperialism – finally declared it an Imperialist war ‘waged between Hitlerite Fascism and British and French Imperialism for profit and domination’, and thus to be opposed. Some Spectator readers wanted University Labour Federation scholarships withdrawn.³ Leo Pliatzky quipped: ‘Dulce et Decorum est/?? die for Vested Interest’, and ‘Here dead we lie/For F.B.I’.⁴ The Oxford CP, Iris told Mary, spent a week sorting out their line, and two unpublished poems suggest that Iris battled with her own doubts.* Two months before the outbreak of war Frank had probably participated with Michael Foot in a deputation to the House of Commons against conscription: a Prime Minister as bad as Chamberlain might use powers to conscript to break strikes instead of to fight Nazis.⁵ This deputation paradoxically included many progressive and idealistic souls who were willing voluntarily to join up despite the statistic their fathers never let them forget – that the expectation of life of an infantry subaltern on the Western Front in the First World War had been three weeks.⁶ In the intervening months Frank had been upset by the USSR-German non-aggression pact, and ‘hit in the kidneys’ by the Soviet aggression against Finland. On the outbreak of that ‘Winter War’, on 30 November 1939, Frank burst into Leo’s rooms in Corpus, very distressed. Leo found some way of rationalising and justifying the conflict; Iris, too, despite her signs of hesitation, continued to support the USSR. Yet, if only momentarily, Frank’s trust in the Russians was shaken.⁷ He was well able to be independent-minded. Iris never had cause to doubt that in 1944, on trial for his life, Frank bravely and defiantly declared himself a Communist. Yet he also appears attractively indifferent to the heresies of ‘democratic centralism’ and ‘factionalism’ alike.⁸ The ‘placidity’ of the evening suggests that his emotional turmoil of May and June may by now have lessened. Iris’s could be a soothing as well as a stimulating presence. But he was still in love, and stayed so.

Across this autumn 1939 poem Frank wrote ‘BILGE‘, rejecting the poor poetry more than the political line. Iris – like Frank, having spent a week in Surrey that June at a CP student summer school – had evidently questioned his having volunteered. She stayed pacifist until June 1941, three months after he sailed from England. He had elected her to be muse, soul-mate, keeper of his conscience, and she was often capable of the ‘passionate intensity’ Yeats feared. Small wonder Denis Healey identified Iris at that time with the epithet ‘this latter-day Joan-of-Arc’.¹⁰

Frank’s poem, if a gesture of independence, proposes a more equal relationship between them. He and Iris must have discussed the war and his motives in enlisting as they processed, near Magdalen Bridge, through the moonlit Oxford blackout. A whimsical writer had commented on the vision of Oxford lit only by moonlight as ‘almost worth a war':¹¹ against such callow aestheticism, Frank wryly notes that ‘somehow most of us could do without a war even so.’

Over the succeeding months other friends were called up, degrees interrupted or compressed. Noel Martin would leave Corpus in June 1940, with mounting debts and the certainty of being called up that August, to work at Holton Manor Farm, Wheatley, as a farm labourer for forty shillings a week.* Before leaving Oxford, he telephoned Iris from the kiosk near the Gothic martyrs’ memorial, proposing marriage. She gently declined. Refugees, many of them learned, flooded the Oxford streets. Iris wrote: ‘East London & East Europe jostle for Lebensraum on the pavements of the High & Corn … A thousand people sleep & live in unimaginable conditions in the Majestic Cinema. The main stream seems to have been diverted into our backwater.’¹² Britain’s internment of refugees who had been fighting Fascism, some suicidal, drove her ‘frantic’. Undergraduates and dons alike who were left in Oxford included the aged, ordinands, the unfit, and those awaiting active service. ‘Youthful dons & adult male undergraduates,’ wrote Iris, ‘are as rare as butterflies in March.’¹³

Part of Somerville having been requisitioned by the Radcliffe Infirmary, she was living in her second year in considerable freedom at 43 Park Town in North Oxford with Anne Cloake, Lindsay Patterson and Jean Courts. The others soon married, Anne to the left-wing economist Teddy Jackson, Jean to the philosopher John Austin, of whose lectures Iris was appreciative.¹⁴ Elderly refugees from the London Blitz on occasion joined the household; they all huddled together in the basement during the few air raids. Their landlady Miss Lepper kept a benign eye on them, and they were glad to get away from college cooking. Iris and Jean subsisted for a while on sardines, bread and as yet unrationed oranges.¹⁵ Iris was painting a lot; many of her paintings of the time had ladders in them. One survives: of a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses – the first UK edition came out in 1936 – lying by a blue pottery jar of coltsfoot.¹⁶

In November 1939 Iris published an untitled poem, ‘You take life tiptoe':¹⁷

T.S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’, which had come out in 1936, six years before the other quartets, may lie behind the poem’s visionary attempt to see all time as indivisible.¹⁸ What were the ‘unashamed certainties’ whose reality she asserts? They were not always to be those of the left, though vehemence, later yoked to mildness and reserve, accompanied the different phases of Iris’s beliefs. Only-children, she observed, ‘are completely secure in our point of view’.¹⁹ One of her ten 1982 Gifford lectures was entitled ‘Certainty’. And to be named ‘Bolshevicka’, even in fun, suggests a recognition of Iris as possessing ‘certainties’. Mary Midgley recalls that Iris (unlike Frank) always championed the USSR; a position easier to defend after 1941, when Russian courage in resisting Hitler saved Britain from being invaded itself.

Throughout the bitter winter of 1939–40, the coldest since 1895, Port Meadow, which had flooded, was frozen. All Somerville, it seemed, skated,²⁰ Mary breaking a leg in the process. And after five terms – in the spring of 1940 – they took ‘Mods’ in the fan-vaulted early-Tudor Divinity Schools, beautiful but, no doubt for wartime reasons, unheated. They brought hot-water bottles but still froze in the three-hour exam sessions. The Eldridges, Noel (involved, like Iris, with student journalism and politics), twin sister Lilian and their mother, visiting Iris for tea in Somerville, found her sitting cross-legged, keening and crying with alarm, sure she had failed. In the event she got a second, and wrote generously to Clare Campbell to congratulate her on her first, vindicating the honour of their sex:

Perhaps there was a streak of absolutism in both Iris and Frank: in her, for sticking to the Party line; in him, for ignoring it. Headstrong as she always was, Iris was cross when she experienced the ‘confusion and suspension of judgement’, which she with scornful humour associated only with ‘New Statesman liberals’.²² The sources of some ‘unashamed certainties’ lay in the exigencies of the period, but received expression – very differently – in two immensely influential male tutors. One, Eduard Fraenkel, must have been known to Frank. The other, Donald MacKinnon, she wrote to him about. Their imaginative impact on her was lifelong: both helped mould and form her. Both are ‘larger than life’, and it is hard to convey their uniqueness and present them briefly as more than collections of eccentricities. The relationships with both went awry.

In May 1940 Iris and Mary moved on to Greats. Isobel ('Iso') Henderson was their tutor for ancient history. Lively and interesting, from a fortunate and distinguished background, widowed in the first weeks of her marriage, she lived with her family in Lincoln College, very different from the somewhat boarding-school existence of dons resident at Somerville. Her father J.A.R. Munro was a distinguished historian and Rector of Lincoln. She was very much a child of Oxford, worldly, good at power-broking.²³ Physically beautiful, fair, with a lovely voice, polyglot and passionate about music, horse-racing, poetry, cricket, Spanish culture and sailing in the Mediterranean – ‘One is always wrong not to like things,’ she used to say. If you did not like music or horse-racing, she felt, you simply had not taken the trouble to find out enough to make your enjoyment real. ‘She had a basic certainty,’ a colleague recalled after her death in 1967, ‘about what had been best in ancient civilisation, and was still the best in the liberal European civilisation of which she felt herself a part.’²⁴ This certainty that a continuity existed between the ‘brilliant but terrible people’ of the ancient world,²⁵ and those of the modern world, Iris inherited. Frank’s letters abound in it, and are forward-looking too.

Although Noel Martin simply followed Iris into Fraenkel’s seminar on the Agamemnon, tutors normally recommended their better students for it. The seminar had no designed relevance to the syllabus. Iris recalled Isobel Henderson²⁶ saying briskly in the first year, ‘Go to Fraenkel’s classes – I expect he’ll paw you a bit, but never mind.’ Iris did not mind Fraenkel putting his arm about her, or stroking hers. This was before the days when such demonstrativeness was deemed gross moral turpitude. Fraenkel ‘adored’ Iris;²⁷ Iris ‘loved’ Fraenkel. She had private tuition from him, and he gave her Wilamowitz’s Pindar in March 1940. Their relation was chaste. Not all undergraduates had Iris’s confidence, or were so reverential.²⁸ A little later Mary Warnock was disturbed to find Fraenkel’s mixture of superb pedagogy and indiscretion, the marriage in him of the intellectual and the erotic, exciting.²⁹ Preparing for a class was for Warnock like dressing for battle, to ensure that Fraenkel’s ‘pawings’ stayed within the bounds of acceptability, and that tears were, if possible, avoided. Iris had no objection to ‘difficult’ men (or women). She was moreover later to make of the relations between eros and intelligence a whole philosophy.

The German tradition of the Seminar was new to Oxford. Between twelve and twenty people sat around a long table, in the ground-floor room in Corpus ‘so visibly ancient that one had the impression of forming part of a timeless tradition of scholars’.³⁰ Fraenkel presided at the top, for two hours between five and seven, once a week. There was ‘a lot of passion around, including Fraenkel’s passion for dominance’.³¹ Many distinguished scholars acknowledge these famous Agamemnon seminars, which went on for years, as their own first-beginnings. To Hugh Lloyd-Jones, later Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, the remarkable impact of Fraenkel’s teaching was due to them.³² To the future scholar Kenneth Dover they were simply ‘what mattered most at Oxford’.³³ To Iris, Fraenkel gave

The ‘terrifying’³⁵ seminar has also been described as a circle of rabbits addressed by a stoat.³⁶ To try out an idea on Fraenkel was awesome – his head would begin to shake, his cheeks quivered with dissent. Iris’s class-notes include Fraenkel’s expostulations at variant readings from previous scholars: ‘Nonsense’ – ‘Unspeakable!’³⁷ He could be persistent in following up a casual remark and liked to reprove error. Hugh Lloyd-Jones recalled, ‘How terrifying it could be to see him bearing down on one.’³⁸ Yet a note next day might admit that his view needed qualification, and in the preface to his exhaustive and heavy-going three-volume study of the Agamemnon, published in 1950, he particularly acknowledged his indebtedness to the ‘common-sense of the young’. Iris later noted, ‘The best teachers are a trifle sadistic.’³⁹

Dover was unfrightened, since the seminar was attended by dons – Wade-Gery from Corpus, Bryan-Brown of Worcester and the historian R.C.K. Ensor – as well as undergraduates: ‘On occasion their ignorance stood as nakedly revealed as ours.’⁴⁰ To others the sight of a college head ‘curdy commanded to fetch a book, a celebrated scholar berated for his poor “Englisch"’, made the event the more terrifying. Many prayed they would not be picked on, some were scared off altogether. Those who stayed gained: Fraenkel had the imaginative sympathy that brings literature alive. Even apathetic students found themselves infected with ‘the vitality of ideas that struck home because they were actually lived by the speaker’.⁴¹ He read poetry with a moving expressiveness and in lectures would, to the delight of his young hearers, break into song, singing Horace’s Integer Vitae to a tune presumably learnt in the Gymnasium, or rendering raucously the frog-chorus from Aristophanes’ Frogs.

Iris and Mary Midgley had to prepare Clytemnestra’s speech, lines 920–34. After a term of silent participation:

After one class Fraenkel started to invite Iris back to his rooms, but she was giggling with Mary and with Nick Crosbie, with whom Mary was in love, and he got the whole party instead. He showed them all the passage in Goethe’s Faust where Mephistopheles says, ‘ich bin der Geist der stets verneint’ – the spirit that continually negates, and spoke of its connexion with the nature of evil. Shortly after, they met him in Mildred Hartley’s room, and on somebody’s mentioning Nick, Fraenkel said, ‘Ach, he is the Cherubino of my classes.’ That implied that he saw himself as the Count.*

Reverencing her father, Iris thirsted for fatherly guidance for the intellectual she was becoming. Hence her need for gurus, for the same qualities on a more august and majestic scale. She found them in a series of learned exiles who famously influenced every aspect of British intellectual life,⁴² of whom Fraenkel might be taken as a prototype. Czechs, Austrians and elderly German Jews – ‘scholars with long hair and longer sentences’⁴³ – crowded the wartime Oxford pavements, and on the buses to North Oxford it used to be said that one needed to speak German.⁴⁴ The Central European refugees that Iris admired, pitied and collected had lost their culture, their language, their homes, sometimes their families, their money, their professions, their way of life. These were wounded patriarchs, deprived even, in many cases, of the ability to fight. The British attitude towards them was not uniformly generous:⁴⁵ ‘What are they doing, taking jobs away from our boys who are away at the front?’ was a common reaction. Small surprise if some could be difficult.

An immensely learned, formidable and astonishingly generous man – generous with his time, and with money – with a complex, intense and dominating personality, Fraenkel was without deviousness, but could be impetuous, hot-headed, easily hurt. He was born a Jew in Berlin in 1888, and came out of the greatest period of German Classical scholarship: on his desk stood a large photo of Leo (1851–1914), his stern taskmaster; on his library walls, Wilamowitz (1848–1931) and Mommsen (1817–1903). Such were his models. He had forced himself to learn to use an arm withered from osteomyelitis and a grossly deformed hand, in a gruelling daily routine that started at 8.30 a.m. and often continued through the small hours.⁴⁶

During the summer of 1933, after the Nazis had come to power, books were burnt, university classes disrupted. Fraenkel was deprived of his professorship at Freiburg-im-Breisgau, forbidden to teach, subjected to insults – a senior Professor publicly denouncing him as a ‘frecher Judenjunge’.* Another colleague and ‘close friend’ wrote to explain why he could henceforth no longer have anything to do with him.† It was not until the Röhm purges of 1934 that he and his Lutheran wife Ruth⁴⁷ left Germany and, with help from Gilbert Murray,* settled first in Cambridge, before he took the Corpus Professorship of Latin at Oxford, which he held until his retirement in 1953. A disdainful letter to the Sunday Times asking whether there was no English person who could have done the job just as well was wittily answered by A.E. Housman: there was only one English person better qualified – himself – and ‘he is not interested in the Chair’.⁴⁸

There were coolnesses and misunderstandings. Fraenkel was capable at first of treating kindness with startling rudeness. He could be tactless with colleagues, severe towards pupils, dogmatic and single-minded. Originally the very type of the unassimilated foreigner, disdaining the superficiality of British scholarship, he later became part of the fabric of college life. Some felt that his ‘inhuman’ devotion to scholarship was at the expense of his wife and family.

Fraenkel’s admiration for Iris is clear. David Pears attended the seminar for one week only in 1941, and though he did not speak to or properly meet Iris for another decade, he found her the most riveting, noticeable person in the room, ‘with her lioness’s face, very square, very strong, but very gentle’. To Pears, Fraenkel called her the only truly educated person of her generation, using the Greek word ‘mousikee’ meaning inspired by the muses, hence genuinely cultivated. Fraenkel, whom Pears admired, recalled to him nonetheless the vain and dictatorial Professor Unrat in the film Blue Angel.

Fraenkel haunts Iris’s novels. The dedicatee of The Time of the Angels, he lies behind the magisterial and dying Levquist in The Book and the Brotherhood, and behind Max Lejour in the earlier The Unicorn, who movingly sings to a ‘plain-song lilt of his own’ a chorus from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, while his old pupil listens to the ‘healing familiar lines':

Here Aeschylus’ crucial Hymn to Zeus is a key to the novel’s gainsaying of the liberal-humanist illusion that life can (or should) have to do only with the pursuits of happiness and ‘freedom’. On the contrary, only those who are positively wounded⁵¹ –if not corrupted by the experience – have the chance of learning wisdom ('suffering teaches,’ Iris wrote in 1945⁵²). Moreover, in her Platonic dialogue Art and Eros Callistos tries to recite a different translation of the same hymn throughout, succeeding in being heard only in the play’s culminating moments. Here Callistos is putting on show a high-point of literary art, and disturbing, moving and infuriating Plato – who is ‘anti-art’ – with the ‘terrible beauty’ of the Hymn to Zeus.

In the commentary to the Agamemnon he finally published, the fruit of twenty-five years’ labour disrupted by exile, the most detailed commentary ever devoted to a Greek classic, Fraenkel writes that in the Hymn to Zeus ‘ [Aeschylus] endeavours in a sublime effort to unriddle the ultimate cause of the fate and suffering of man.’⁵³ He identifies the views of the chorus with those of Aeschylus, being obsessed by the theology of Agamemnon’s guilt. It is noteworthy that Iris wrote of the lines as ‘healing’. Not all suffering was amenable to Socialist ‘correction’. Much is built into the very conditions of life, and the Party offered ‘too obtuse and partial an explanation of the world’s evil and of human goodness’.⁵⁴

Probably Fraenkel also found in the play a grand key to the general drama being acted out in Europe at that time, a magisterial exploration of the themes of evil and implacable divine justice, a commentary on the bitter roots of all suffering, including his own.* Perhaps he saw human affairs as simpler and more dramatic than they actually were – seeing his friends, for example, as endowed with vices or virtues,⁵⁵ seeing Agamemnon as a ‘gentleman’. If Fraenkel gives, either here or in his work on Horace, a sentimental or false picture of the relationship between poetry and politics,⁵⁶ this was a simplicity Iris shared, to the enrichment of her own work.

Iris’s later poem about Fraenkel’s seminar, ‘The Agamemnon Class, 1939’ (1977), is remarkable for its deliberate conflation of different kinds of dread: of the war; of being unable correctly to identify the tenses of some familiar verb; and what might be termed moral dread, the deep fears that can accompany the awakening of an acute adult moral consciousness. She also conflates two kinds of heroism, ancient and modern, Greek and twentieth-century British. The long poem, dedicated to Frank Thompson’s memory, starts thus:

Mary Warnock, who joined Fraenkel’s seminar in 1942, pleased Iris by commenting on the poem: ‘that atmosphere of dread and apprehension brought it all back to me. One dread merging into another. How amazing.’⁵⁷ Frank, too, who may have attended the seminar in the summer of 1939,* believed Agamemnon the greatest drama yet written,⁵⁸ and wrote an Aeschylean chorus comparing the Trojan to the Second World War, in both of which ‘boys died bravely, in a war of others’ making’.⁵⁹ To his brother E.P. he refers, albeit within a joke, to ‘suffering as stark and Aeschylean as any I have known in this war’.⁶⁰

In the third winter of the war Iris wrote twice to Frank about Donald MacKinnon, her and Mary’s philosophy tutor for Greats.

Vera Hoar, who was tutored by MacKinnon at about the same time,⁶² wrote: ‘If I think of the two people who have most influenced me, they would be Donald MacKinnon and Iris – I think of them together.’ He gave his tutorials in one of the towers of Victorian-Gothic Keble in a room utterly bare, save for a table – no desk – in the middle cluttered high with books and papers, and Iris and Vera sometimes exchanged greetings in the dark passage there. To Vera Iris said that MacKinnon inspired the sort of love one would have for Christ – quite unconditional. He was a passionate High Anglo-Catholic married to a Scots-Norwegian girl at odds with his High Church connexions. ‘The vitality of ideas that struck home because they were actually lived by the speaker’ was one description of Fraenkel. It works for MacKinnon, too. Iris worshipped both.

His philosophy tutorials, given from his battered armchair, or to some male students from his bath, or while lying on his back under his table, sucking a razor-blade which, when not cutting the table, he sometimes turned over and over in his lips or hands, were notably dramatic (Iris when later an Oxford don herself would sometimes imitate the supine tutorial, not the razor-blade). Or he would sharpen up to a dozen pencils. If he had been fire-watching the night before, he stayed proudly in the boilersuit worn for that purpose. He was skilful at making you feel something very important was happening.⁶³ When he got to something impossible to explain, he would protrude his tongue with his upper denture balanced on the end. Nervous tutees had been known to edge backwards, so as not to have to catch the denture if it fell. Sometimes he talked out of one of his room’s two windows. To hear him, you put your head out of the other, like another gargoyle. Once he rolled himself up in the carpet, like Beatrix Potter’s Tom Kitten caught in the pastry. Such gimmicks developed the logic of an argument. However bizarre they are to read about, they did not feel false. Certainly not, in any case, to Iris. Like many Oxford characters of the day MacKinnon was profoundly eccentric. When David Pears suggested that he consciously overdid it, Iris, who reverenced him, was exasperated by the imputation. Tom Stoppard drew heavily on MacKinnon stories when creating ‘George’, the Professor of Moral Philosophy in his play Jumpers (1972).⁶⁴

MacKinnon had been a legend even while a schoolboy at Winchester,⁶⁵ and to a cold eye he could appear comical. One such saw him as absolutely devoted to philosophy and dedicated to his students, deeply religious, yet rather absurd, a joke Wykehamistscholar in the way he talked – a mixture of pedantry and madness – and not in the first rank of philosophers. But his writings do less than justice to his true impact, which was face-to-face. Iris wrote of his resonant voice-type as ‘the slightly alcoholic crafty coyness of a well-marked Wykehamist’.⁶⁶ Some felt an undercurrent of menace.⁶⁷ His native Argyllshire featured, and he liked to speak of leaving the tea he brewed to ‘infuse’. Huge, shambling, broad-shouldered, very powerful, dark-suited, ham-fisted and maladroit – he once crushed a glass at a Balliol dinner – he told one wartime student that he had so terrible a conscience about not being in the forces that he lived in his college rooms, and left his newly-married wife living twenty or thirty yards away, working far too hard in order to justify himself.⁶⁸ During public lectures, as the outward expression of inward mental travail, he would famously stab himself with his pen with remarkable vigour, and grasp his shaggy, beetling brow. Detractors saw him as a cut-price English version of Simone Weil: tortured, but on terms with a large intelligentsia-following, which included unbelievers.

One day he said to Dennis Nineham, future Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, ‘The only time I can fit you in is Sunday morning at 11 o’clock. Will you guarantee that you go to church first?’ Nineham rightly replied that whether or not he went to church first was his own business.* This sense, however importunate, that everyone’s soul hung in the balance points to some legacies in Iris’s thinking. MacKinnon was at the tail end of the Oxford Idealist tradition, refusing to believe in the demise of metaphysics, a Kantian and post-Kantian idealist.⁶⁹ His dominant interest was the philosophy of religion, and in 1960 he was to be appointed to the Norris-Hulse Chair of Divinity at Cambridge. The tide of his inaugural lecture – ‘Borderlands of Theology’ – is evocative. Philosophy and theology are somehow to be brought back together.

Already in the 1940s, when he had published only two books of basic theology, MacKinnon’s thinking points towards attitudes Iris would later adopt wholesale. That those thinkers especially are to be commended who ‘live out … the consequences of [their own] attitude of mind’, moral philosophy being the study of ‘what in the last resort can only be lived’, a central tenet of her The Sovereignty of Good. If life must bear witness to philosophy, then enquiry into the ‘good life’ still matters; those who call ethics a ‘bogus subject’ are usually posturing, and ‘the kind of mystery which tends to gather round … notions of good and evil’ cannot easily be dispelled. That it is a pious superstition to believe that pain necessarily ennobles: like Iris, MacKinnon was fascinated by pain. That those whose experience is deepest may be inarticulate. That intellectual integrity is something at least partly moral in character. That the fundamental sin is pride. That it is dangerous to seek the good of one’s fellows ‘in blind oblivion of the poor stuff of which one is oneself made’. That the field of personal experience must be taken into account; that the individual should be approached with a sense of his or her ‘unconditional worth’.⁷⁰ That ‘only a suffering Christ could help’, who might teach how to ‘displace the self from the centre’.⁷¹

George Steiner has written of MacKinnon as ‘that most searching of modern British moral philosophers’.⁷² His absolute dedication to and impact on his students is remarkable. Many speak of feeling uniquely and accurately apprehended by him; Iris among them. Mary Midgley remembered: ‘He was capable of giving one a full two hours tutorial and saying “We need more time, you’d better come back on Thursday.” ‘ Seeing how busy he was – he was rumoured to teach eighty hours a week, the number of students swollen by army and naval cadets on short courses, as well as his Oxford undergraduates now coming up termly, not annually – that kind of attention, and his meticulous courtesy also, were staggering.⁷³ David Pears, disenchanted with his course, owed his becoming a professional philosopher mainly to MacKinnon’s patient encouragement and inspiration. Philippa Bosanquet, not given to hyperbole, described him as ‘holy’ – ‘No one has influenced me more … He created me’ – while tellingly defining holiness as ‘an absolute lack of sense of proportion’. He taught both Philippa and Iris how to care for the afflicted: lovingly, imaginatively, with limitless patience. He showed them how to look after people. When Vera Hoar was ill with depression, MacKinnon alone dealt with her with skill as well as sympathy. Nor were such recollections restricted to his wartime students. A much later pupil has described how the profundity and moral passion of MacKinnon’s thinking, and his obsessive preoccupation with the difficulty and the danger of truthful speech, created in most of those who knew him ‘a sense of deep affection, puzzlement, a kind of awe’.⁷⁴ His legacy in Iris and Philippa’s thought was that philosophy is central to how you live your life.

Philippa Bosanquet came up to Somerville to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) in 1939. Her chief memory of Iris before 1942 was of herself nominating an alternative candidate to Iris as President of Somerville Junior Common Room Committee. She feared both that Communists were generally a nuisance, and also that Iris might convene too many meetings. Since Philippa’s nominee won – unlike Iris, she was someone not at all prominent – others must have shared her fears. There were limits to Iris’s popularity, constituencies immune to her charm. Enid Stoye, reading history, felt Iris despised her group of friends for their political conservatism and Christianity, and that Iris within herself stood apart from all groups. She and Iris disliked each other. Stoye felt Iris had a covering of ice.

In the summer of 1942, MacKinnon mentioned to Iris that Philippa was ill – she had suffered, partly under the stress of studying with her august tutors, a suspected recrudescence of childhood abdominal tuberculosis and was corseted in plaster-of-Paris, stuck at home, struggling with Finals. The mother of Philippa’s flatmate Anne Cobbe saw to it that MacKinnon and Thomas Balogh – a brilliant but abrasive teacher – gave Philippa tutorials in her lodgings. It is typical of MacKinnon’s skill at involving others in practical solicitude that he told Iris, ‘Philippa might appreciate a friendly visit.’ Iris, hitherto a somewhat distant and glamorous figure, one year senior, arrived at Philippa’s lodgings at 2 Bradmore Road with a bunch of wildflowers. ‘I recall the joy with which I found her,’ wrote Iris later, her ‘life-long best friend’.⁷⁵ Iris chronicled the ups and downs of this friendship, over nearly sixty years, more than any other.⁷⁶ Philippa’s mother had been born in the White House, her grandfather Grover Cleveland twice President of the United States, and she had been mainly brought up with her sister Marion by governesses in the North of England. Like Iris she was self-possessed, strong-willed, intelligent. Also attractive, and in those days unconfident, she was for Iris the ‘good sister’ Iris had never had. MacKinnon greatly influenced both. He ‘cared about goodness’, was the keeper of Iris and Philippa’s goodness, saw himself as a steadying influence against (in his view) their wartime bohemianism. They were in awe of him. Around 1990 Iris and Philippa were staggered to discover MacKinnon’s true age. He was born in 1912. They had thought him much older, an ancient prophet-figure, a holy man whom they revered.

When Iris met the French writer and critic Raymond Queneau in 1946, he noted in his journal that she had formerly been a CP member for four years. So, if card-carrying, she did not tear up her card until 1942, probably on the advice of the Party itself when she entered the Treasury.⁷⁷ Iris’s disdainful comments, after going down in 1942, on the political commitments of the average student show that her world-view had not yet changed.⁷⁸ She wrote to Philippa in late 1942, ‘I feel that when anyone really thinks about [politics] there is only one conclusion! But maybe I’m prejudiced.’⁷⁹ Later, she wished she had been a bit less high-minded at Oxford, and a bit more frivolous. She thought £5 for a ticket for a Commem Ball a ‘terrible waste of money’⁸⁰ – £5 was exactly the then large sum Anne Cloake once begged off Mary Midgley for an undisclosed political cause. ‘They [CP members and sympathisers] lived a very exciting life,’ Mary commented, with irony. By 1938 the Moscow treason trials were documented. By 1940 Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon was published. Mary – uneasily – admired the courage and whole-heartedness of those who like Iris, Anne and Leonie Marsh could ‘jump’ into the Party, but she could not follow them. Yet like most of their set, Mary was politically active, and the CP was scarcely the only outlet for political passion. ‘Buy the Tuppeny Strachey,’ ‘Char’ and Susie Williams-Ellis would cry, selling their uncle John Strachey’s pamphlet Why You Should be a Socialist.

Opinions vary as to whether – Frank apart – Iris proselytised. Vera Hoar, who came up only in 1940, remembered: ‘she never thrust Marxism down one’s throat; she just waited patiently for you to see the light. Though she once told me she had her doubts about whether dialectical materialism was philosophically sound.’ ‘Char’ Williams-Ellis noted that Iris ‘was a diligent and persuasive missionary for the CP and I did even go along to one or two meetings at her urging’. Iris’s copy of A Handbook of Marxism (Left Book Club Edition, edited by Emile Burns, with ‘Not For Sale to the General Public’ clearly printed on it), though little annotated, was much-thumbed. She admired Lenin’s State and Revolution.* Iris later spoke of her CP years as having taught her from the inside how a small, ruthless group of individuals can wield destructive power, and compared a dictatorial CP branch with an IRA cell. But it is hard to see what ‘destruction’ the wartime CPGB effected. The nearest and most sensitive example is the ‘recruitment’ by Leonie and Iris of Frank in 1939. Philip Toynbee’s memoir Friends Apart makes uncomfortable reading: ‘The Oxford CP practised dishonesty almost as a principle … the Party was, of course, indelicate, authoritarian and possessive … [displaying] a crudity of judgement which … extended to a bluff insensitivity about love affairs … There was a “line” for love; there was almost a line for friendship.’⁸¹

But Frank had his own political journey. He had been a rebel even at Winchester. He was more than ready for conversion, and his own man. ‘Almost any undergraduate who wanted to stop Hitler was then easy game for the Communists,’⁸² wrote Denis Healey, and Toynbee recalls the ‘marvellous atmosphere of conspiracy and purpose’⁸³ which they generated. The Labour Party in 1935 had permitted fusion of Communist and Socialist societies at the universities,⁸⁴ and there were close Labour links with CP headquarters on Hythe Bridge Street. Since then the University Labour Federation had been under CP domination. The Labour Club at Oxford, dominated by Communists, had over a thousand members; nearly all its committee were in the CP.⁸⁵ But then all of the committees of the League of Nations Union, the Liberal Club, the Student Christian Movement, two of the five Conservative Club committee, and two even of the ten British Union of Fascists were also in the CP.⁸⁶ It helps give the atmosphere of the times to point out that Robert Conquest, later to pioneer the objective history of Stalinism, while an open Communist, was a member of the university’s conservative Carlton Club, with the approval of both bodies, and that the CP included John Biggs-Davidson, later Chairman of the right-wing Monday Club.⁸⁷ Probably there were dons also in the CP. Donald MacKinnon, who was not, certainly had instinctively radical social and political principles* – the oft-repeated tale of his climbing under the table to bite the calf of a visiting Anglican bishop has only symbolic truth: he was at odds with what would later be termed the Establishment.

Of the over two hundred CP student-members at Oxford, thirty were ‘open’, among them Robert Conquest, Denis Healey and Iris. She could scarcely have been more open. Her CP membership was referred to in June 1939 in Cherwell Moreover, in the first newsletter of the Old Froebelian, 1940–41, while Iris’s peers modestly vouchsafe merely that they are serving in the Air Ministry, are humbly ‘one of the people on the Home Front’, or ‘work in a canteen at Marylebone’,⁸⁸ Iris on the same page, having reported that she got a second in Mods and is now doing Greats, then heroically boasts, ‘I am a member of the Communist Party.’ Indeed a dramatic announcement. Meeting fellow-Froebelian Garth Underwood for the first time for eight years in Foyle’s bookshop in March 1940,⁸⁹ she declared her CP membership. She was until June 1941 consistently unsympathetic to the war effort.

The first Executive Committee of the Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) Iris attended was on 19 April 1940, just after ‘schools’ for Mods;⁹⁰ she soon made her mark. In summer 1940 she represents ‘culture’ on the committee and proposes a meeting on Ireland.⁹¹ (When the following year Kingsley Amis, also in the ‘student’ branch of the CP in his first year at Oxford, was co-appointed to take over ‘this sector of the front’ – culture – he interpreted the job less strenuously, as ‘gramophone recitals’ rather than, for example, working-class Oxford history. His CP membership, he later claimed, involved little more than meeting girls, ‘trying to read Marx, Lenin and Plekhanov (aargh), going to meetings, speaking at meetings …’.⁹² Some – like Lilian Eldridge – became members mainly in order to go to Saturday-night ‘hops’ at Ruskin.)

April 1940 was an interesting month in Oxford Labour politics. Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland, both nauseated by the CP rubric that the Red Army was fighting to liberate the tiny, brave Finnish people from the reactionary rule of President Mannerheim⁹³ (just as it had, in collusion with the Nazis, ‘liberated’ the Poles), broke with the OULC and set up a much bigger Democratic Socialist Club, with Crosland as Chairman and Jenkins as Treasurer. Meanwhile the tiny official rump-OULC continued to support the USSR despite its invasion of Finland, Iris remaining ‘apparently rigid on the Stalinist line’.⁹⁴ While the German armies were chasing the British Expeditionary Force across the fields of Picardy, towards Dunkirk, Jenkins spent fruitless weeks attempting to sort out the assets and liabilities of the rival groups, writing to ‘Dear Miss Murdoch’ as OULC Co-Treasurer and receiving humourless answers from her addressed to ‘Dear Comrade Jenkins’. ‘Student politics,’ Jenkins later reflected, ‘have rarely been notable for their sense of proportion.’⁹⁵ The Labour Party took no great interest: the OULC, as Crosland’s widow Susan would write, resembled ‘the sex life of the amoeba – dividing itself constantly’.⁹⁶

Mary Midgley joined Crosland on the Dem-Soc committee – where, to great acclaim, Roy Jenkins was famous for singing ‘Frankie and Johnnie’. On 1 May 1940 the Communists, trying to hold a May Day meeting, were pelted with tomatoes, oranges, rotten eggs and stink-bombs as they marched over Magdalen Bridge and up the ‘High’.⁹⁷ Mary extemporised a comic verse about the ‘Fascist’ tomato Iris was cross at having to wash out of her hair.* But that summer after the fall of France, when Britain was fighting Hitler entirely alone, the two factions were still squabbling, both sides using Marxist arguments.⁹⁸ In winter 1941 Iris is OULC Secretary, in spring Chairman. She appears a competent minute-taker – one predecessor contributed almost as many doodles as notes – and a conscientious and effective chairwoman. Life had become, in one of her expressively breathless lists, ‘one long committee meeting, with intervals in which interminable letters, articles, resolutions, protests, exhortations and minimum programmes have to be drafted’.⁹⁹

On 22 June 1941 the Germans invaded the USSR, which now made it into an anti-Fascist war of which ‘we’ did approve. Iris told Mary that the CP had again to spend a week sorting out the Party line. During this turmoil Leo Pliatzky cut his ties with the Party: Hitler’s invasion of Russia for him gave the lie to the former Party diktat. Similarly Iris told Margaret Stanier that disillusionment – not yet with Marxism, but with the Party for abandoning its opposition to the war effort – had made her consider quitting it. Even after she gave up office, the OULC nominated her to oppose a Democratic Socialist Club speaker.¹⁰⁰ By October 1941 a motion pinned into the minute book pressed for the opening of a second front for ‘the safety of the USSR, of this country, of the whole world’. Negotiations to heal the split between OULC and DSC proceeded fruitlessly until 1943.¹⁰¹

On 17 October 1940 Iris’s signature in the Bodleian Library register sits immediately before Philip Larkin’s,¹⁰² a reminder that hard scholarly work continued too, throughout her last two years. Results came out after vivas in the Ashmolean in June 1942. Mary had a viva voce, or face-to-face examination.¹⁰³ Iris didn’t, and quite wrongly feared the worst. In the event both got firsts, Iris’s ‘unquestioned’. Isobel Henderson arranged a dinner party in a smart restaurant for Iris and Mary, her only Greats finalists at Somerville that year, and invited two distinguished sages to entertain the girls: J.B. Trend, Mozart-scholar, translator, musicologist, and the polymath A.L. Rowse. Iris and Mary were very tired, though quite willing to be interested, but Rowse showed off, ate up the available space, was conceited and self-centred, and this exhausted and confused them. ‘Did we learn something new this evening?’ Mary asked Iris, as they stumbled home through bright moonlight on St Giles.

Mary thought Iris’s diagnosis was ‘dead right’ and that it put the evening in perspective. Rowse’s showing-off battered at them. Imperfect behaviour can make the young feel inadequate, irrationally guilty. It was a great relief to Mary to have Iris’s (Manichaean) perspective.¹⁰⁵ (Iris and Rowse later got on. Despite having little or no sexual interest in women, he once took bizarre pleasure in pulling her hair in a taxi.¹⁰⁶ Monsters great and small interested her.)

In one of a series of letters expressing her impatience for Finals to be over and for war work and ‘real life’ to begin, Iris wrote to Frank, serving overseas, ‘I suppose I hanker for the dramatic & heroic – ridiculous. I can almost see myself joining the WRNS just to demonstrate my vicarious suffering for Leningrad – & my contempt of [sic] Oxford'; and, later, ‘ATS seems more and more probable. Teaching or Civil Service also conceivable';¹⁰⁷ she also thought she might nurse or fill shells.¹⁰⁸ A central register had been set up for bright women undergraduates, and dons spared from teaching, willing to carry out war work in the short-staffed civil service. Mary got the Ministry of Production, Philippa the Nuffield Social Survey under G.D.H. Cole in Oxford. Iris was interviewed,¹⁰⁹ and for some days was anxious in case her CP membership prejudiced her chances of a job. Finally the buff-coloured HM Stationery envelope arrived, inviting her to the governmental department with the greatest self-conceit, the Treasury, which favoured those who had undergone the formation professionelle of cold baths and irregular Greek verbs that shaped the English ruling class for centuries. ‘Iris Murdoch has of late been no more a roving, and her old haunts know her not,’ she wrote to the Badminton School Magazine.¹¹⁰

Recalling Oxford in wartime, she later wrote of how often one heard the announcement: ‘Extra coaches will be added to the end of this train.’¹¹¹ On one such train, in early July 1942, only ten days after having sat her Finals, Iris left Oxford for London. She sent the news that she was a temporary Assistant Principal to Frank.¹¹² ‘But do not please on this account say Irushka is dead, long live Miss Murdoch, an official in the Treasury.’ ‘Bureaucrat’ was a dirty word to them both.*

* ‘A New Non Nobis, the War-Song of the British Public’, August 1939, attacks the British for lazy pacifism. The USSR-German non-aggression pact was signed on 23 August, and she wrote ‘Dangerous Thoughts inspired by Curious Conduct on the part of the USSR’ on 1 October.

* Frank Thompson inaccurately recorded that Noel, ‘like most sane people’ depressed by the ‘stupidity of Greats’, had left Oxford for farming in the Berkshire hills, where he ‘married a rich Jewess after only a fortnight’s acquaintance’. The friends wagged their heads and said, ‘We knew he had it in him.’ The farm was in Oxfordshire; Ruth Basch, the Czech Jewess to whom Noel became semi-engaged there, was not rich; and nor did he marry her, or anyone else, until 17 February 1943, when he married Carol (also known as Grace) Nethersole. Such inaccuracies may be set down to the fact that Frank, only nineteen and a writer in the making, could have given himself ‘poetic licence’. Wartime too made it harder to check one’s facts.

* In Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro Cherubino is page to Countess Almaviva, whose husband the Count has a wandering eye.

* Roughly, ‘uppity Jewboy’.

* Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, Chairman of the League of Nations Union and President of the Board of Governors at Badminton School, was also a neighbour and friend of the Thompsons on Boar’s Hill.

* Arnaldo Momigliano understood the Jewish aspects of Fraenkel’s thought. See his Quinto contributo all storia degli studi classici e mondo antico (Rome, 1977), pp. 1026–9.

* It is likely from her dedicating the poem to him that Iris believed Frank had attended the class. His presence is not recalled by any survivors, most of whom had other matters on their minds: Noel Martin, Leo Pliatzky, Clare Campbell, Mary Midgley, Kenneth Dover. Of these Leo was closest by far to Frank – Frank visited Leo’s parents’ home in the East End – and was most likely to remember. Probably Frank came to a few sessions in Trinity 1939 when he was most disturbed about Iris. His letters abound in references to Aeschylus.

* Nineham nonetheless turned up at Keble: there was no answer when he knocked, until a voice from behind another door said, ‘Come in.’ Nineham went in, and found MacKinnon in his bath. He motioned to Nineham to sit on the lavatory seat and read his essay. When MacKinnon had finished his bath, he rose and complained, ‘I haven’t got a towel.’ He opened the door and shouted, ‘Mabel, Mabel!’ (the scout). She didn’t come, and he complained, ‘This is always happenning: I think that girl thinks I’m queer or something.’ So Nineham volunteered to get a towel. MacKinnon dressed in the most astonishing and terrible clothes, and they adjourned to the Lamb and Flag, where he bought Nineham a whisky, himself a double, then paced up and down the crowded bar, completing the tutorial, unaware of the effect his rhetoric was having on the other drinkers: ‘You see WHEN Kant says this, he MEANS to say that, and THIS is CRUCIAL,’ in his unique Scots-Wykehamist brogue. This continued for thirty minutes, and the drinkers – all servicemen – went completely silent. When he’d finished, the entire bar broke into entranced applause at this exotic manifestation. MacKinnon was genuinely nonplussed, and blushed deeply. He was ‘not a self-conscious eccentric but a genuine one’. Nineham, like Vera Hoar, identified MacKinnon as Rozanov in The Philosopher’s Pupil, an alarming figure to his students: Rozanov, unlike MacKinnon, maltreats them.

* Iris wrote to Raymond Queneau on 27 February 1949 à propos this book: ‘how rationalistic I must have been at 19’.

* See MacKinnon’s Times obituary, 4 March 1994. In 1953 he edited Christian Faith and Communist Faith, a series of studies by members of the Anglican Communion.

* It showed her ‘in her true colours as a Red’.

* Frank always used the word pejoratively. See the ‘poisonous-looking’ bureaucrat Iris was dancing with when he first saw her, and Iris’s condescension when mentioning to Frank that of the first-year intake of Somerville ‘lasses’ in 1941, ‘half of them are bureaucrats’. Among these new students were two non-bureaucrats – Chitra Rudingerova – one of the Czech partly Jewish girls from Badminton (first name from Tagore) who came up in 1941, whom BMB asked Iris to take under her wing. Chitra thought Iris marvellous, quiet and somehow fey, not quite in the real world – her quietness hiding or exemplifying great power. Marjorie Boulton came up in 1941 too, an unconfident Lincolnshire girl reading English, who would be a lifelong friend. See also M.R.D. Foot to Frank Thompson, 28 November 1942: ‘I promise you the “charms of bureaucracy” shall not enslave me.’ This was not, averred Frank’s future sister-in-law Dorothy Thompson, who joined the Communist Party aged fifteen in 1939, an uncommon attitude: the short stories of Mikhail Zoschenko, The Woman who Couldn’t Read Stories (translated around 1945), are both pro-Party and satirical of bureaucracy.

† This colleague tried to make it up in the 1950s, sending Fraenkel a book in which he professed: ‘memor’ (I remember). Fraenkel sent him back a two-word answer: ‘et ego’ (I also).

5 Madonna Bolshevicka 1939–1942

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Madonna Bolshevicka
1939–1942