Iris Murdoch: A Life

Two weeks after her arrival in London in July 1942,¹ Iris wrote to Philippa Bosanquet that she now lived

She sat at a ‘desk 8 feet square amid heaps of blue files tied up with tape’ devising new regulations ‘with names like 1437/63538 90m. (14) &tc’,³ sharing a ‘lofty airy office on the 3rd floor’ working in ‘Establishments’, in what was then called the New Public Offices on the corner of Great George Street and Whitehall, looking straight onto the north front of Westminster Abbey.⁴ Her room-mate at one point was ‘a charming but excessively talkative staff-officer in whose company work is virtually impossible’.⁵ Iris sometimes fled to the Treasury library. Haughty pre-war Treasury tradition meant Lords Commissioners issuing Letters of Permission. Wartime procedure was more informal, and letters coming into the department went first, to their surprise, to the new, young ‘Assistant Principals’ (AP’s) such as Pat Shaw (later Lady Trend), Peggy Stebbing (later Pyke-Lees) and Iris. They had considerable power, looking up precedents and drafting official letters, which they passed on up to one of the two Principals ‘to’ whom they worked.⁶

In Iris’s second novel, The Right from the Enchanter (1956), a small army of energetic, ambitious and effective young women alone understand the workings of the fictional ‘sELIB‘,* to the terror of at least one male colleague. This may reflect Iris’s war work. In September 1939 there was one notable woman in the Treasury – Evelyn (later Baroness) Sharp, an Assistant Secretary,⁷ and by 1941 the then thirteen women were still regarded as odd creatures. By 1943, following Iris’s arrival, their number had gone up to twenty-three. They acted on their own initiative, did not always consult their seniors or let things go via committee. Because they were Treasury APs, they dealt directly with heads of other Civil Service divisions.⁸

Was Iris ‘Treasury material'? Senior Treasury ‘top brass’ are famously statesmen in disguise, carrying with them a mass of interrelated exact knowledge, extreme day-to-day precision, intellectual detachment and realpolitik. While generally the Treasury was loosening up, and in measurable ways, Iris had landed in its stuffiest and narrowest division. Other departments looked outwards towards the wider world. ‘Establishments’⁹ looked inward, dealing with the internal workings of the civil service itself – discipline, pay, emoluments, rooms, complaints, requests to move.¹⁰ Iris spent much time on what she called ‘certain pay questions’¹¹ – calculating what increments those civil servants who had been seconded for war work should be entitled to receive at the end of hostilities; otherwise known – a standing Bayley joke, this – as Notional Promotion in Absentia. She was also secretary to three committees, one designated to ‘investigate causes of delay’. She wrote to Frank:

I still lose more files & overlook more important letters than anyone else in the Treasury … I’m learning a hell of a lot of new things about how our curious country is governed – & I’m even beginning to think that Administration is a serious & interesting activity.¹²

Her colleagues were ‘decent and endowed with senses of humour’,¹³ and Michael Foot reassured Frank that August that Iris was ‘in good heart, but grown very quiet’.¹⁴ She was none the less frustrated. Frank had written from Cairo in June 1942 inviting her to ‘Join the WAAF, get a job as a cipher operator, and come out here. I’d love to see you again. I’d love to see anyone who makes sense.’¹⁵ Iris’s was not a ‘bad’ war, though, being Iris, she chafed at her ‘cushy job’ when the rest of Europe was ‘taking it on the chin’. She voiced her disaffection to Frank on 24 November:

Lord, lord. I get so damnably restless … I would volunteer for anything that would be certain to take me abroad. Unfortunately there is no guarantee given one when one joins the women’s forces & anyway the Treasury would never let me go; for, inefficient as I am, I am filling a very necessary post in a semi-skilled sort of way. Sometimes I think it’s quite bloody being a woman. So much of one’s life has to consist in having an attitude (I hope you follow this, which is a little condensed.) …

I should of course like you to be a hero – but I doubt if I could accept the risk – & I am quite certain you have all the qualities of a stout fella, without the necessity of a vulgar display … I miss that unanxious society in which we trusted each other & were gentle as well as gay … The Treasury yields a number of pleasant men and women who, besides being very intelligent (& some of them very beautiful) are good company over a beer or whiskey. But they lack a certain redness of the blood – a certain human gentleness and sensitiveness. On the other hand, my Soho, Bloomsbury & Chelsea acquaintanceship is widening also. ‘The Swiss’ in Old Compton Street, ‘The Wellington’ in Wardour Street* & ‘The Lord Nelson’ in King’s Road are the clubs [sic] which I frequent in search of the Ultimate Human Beings – and knowledge & experience & freedom. A strange society – composed of restless incomplete ambitious people who live in a chaotic and random way, never caring about the next five minutes, drunk every night without exception from 6 o’clock onwards, homeless & unfamilied, living in pubs & copulating upon the floors of other people’s flats. Poetry is perhaps the only thing taken seriously by them all – & the only name they all respect is T.S. Eliot. Politics they do not understand or care about [my emphasis]. Their thought & their poetry is concerned with subtleties of personal relations – with the creation of the unexpected in words – ‘dredging the horrible from unseen places behind cloaks and mirrors’.

Perhaps it is a betrayal to make friends with these people while our armies are fighting in North Africa. But I cannot help finding these off-scourings of Horizon a goodly company in some ways – they seem, indefinably, to be better human beings than these smiling Treasury people who drink, but never too much, & who never in any sense give themselves away. They are queer & unreliable, many of them – but they meet you in a level human sort of way, without the miles & miles of frigid protective atmosphere between. They have a sort of freedom, too, which I envy. I think it arises from a complete lack of any sense of responsibility – (so of course my envy is not whole-hearted. I may be flying blind at present, but I would not cast all the instruments overboard …) … I write a bit. I read a lot – am having an orgy of Edmund Wilson at the moment —(good on literature, superficial on history) …

… I feel in a peculiar sort of way that I mustn’t let you down – yet don’t quite know how to set about it. I don’t think I believe any more in clean hands & a pure heart … I am on First Aid Duty tonight at the Treasury – an oasis of peace in a far too full life. I must go down to bed pretty soon (We had one casualty tonight. Great excitement. A man with a cut finger. Christ.)

I think of you often. May the gods guard you. Goodnight, my gentle Frank – Much love to you. Iris.

One of the first things Iris did when she got to London was to start learning Russian, with Malvina Steen, a White Russian émigrée living behind Peter Jones department store in Sloane Square. While she found Steen ‘learned without being intelligent’, the Treasury intellectuals were ‘intelligent without being learned’.¹⁶ Yet there were compensations. She was pleased to discover, on greeting Peggy Stebbing’s arrival – Iris had a strong handshake – that Peggy was the niece of Susan Stebbing, philosopher-author of the recent Pelican Thinking to Some Purpose.* Peggy later married the poet Walter Pyke-Lees, also in the Treasury, and his war diaries show that, alone among women PAs, the Pyke-Lees called Iris by her first name, without any stuffy ‘Miss Murdoch’. Three or four Treasury personnel had died in the air raids of May 1941, but Iris’s time was quieter, as her ironical comment about the cut finger makes clear. On one of the regular fire-watch duty nights she donned her tin helmet, went up to the roof of the Treasury, and found herself in the company of A.W. Gomme, annotator of Thucydides.

Few of Iris’s Treasury colleagues seem to have been invited to her flat.¹⁷ The ‘frigid protective atmosphere’ she ascribed to Treasury mores was possibly also created by her shyness, giving an unconscious personal edge to her complaint. Peggy Stebbing, by contrast, was delighted by the relative informality of the wartime Treasury: although the department had a name as a ‘heavy hand’, Peggy thought the Treasury essentially enablers, and found the atmosphere so informal and unstuffy that when the bombing was bad she went into the country with her Principal Assistant Secretary, Edward Hayle.

Iris’s hair was still shoulder-length, fairish, pinned up in something that was never quite a bun. She hoped that this created an effect ‘less arty and juvenile’.¹⁸ At tea-time each day she would stretch out her arms and yawn, then her hands would come down and pluck out two hairpins, sending her hair cascading down onto her shoulders. Some of the Treasury’s young men, stimulated by this very mild bohemianism, would come by to witness the spectacle – one which recurs at the end of The Right from the Enchanter. Iris was in more than one sense learning to let her hair down, as well as noting that some colleagues found this harder to do.

Above all there was London. One autumn morning after another night of fire-watching¹⁹ with Pat Shaw, the pair went out to breakfast together. Most Treasury staff crossed the road to the ABC, but Iris instead proposed they walk up to Leicester Square, where she threw back her shoulders, breathed in ‘a deep gallon of air’ and declared, ‘The heart of London! The smell of London!’ She staggered Shaw on another occasion by saying that she was going to be a don after the war. That made her seem both more grown-up than any of her colleagues, and more serious. Untidy hair apart, Iris had an inner beauty, was one of a kind, very alive and somehow fey. She was thought politically aware, very private, intently watchful, empathetic, never casual, always friendly. She dressed neatly rather than smartly, and sometimes her stockings had holes which, by the codes of the day ‘could be the result of an accident. A darn was a sign of poverty.’²⁰ She gave herself no airs, was ‘who she was’. Her voice was Oxford, with a slight but distinct brogue. It is possible that she provided a shoulder for secretaries to weep on.²¹

Iris and her colleagues worked a six-day week, until at least 6 p.m. on weekdays, 4 p.m. Saturdays, fixing, for example, ‘new pay scales for Civil Service nurses’. They got very hungry: it was necessary to queue even for a penny bun. Some Treasury staff ate at the National Gallery where, for those with civil service passes, a meal cost one shilling and tuppence. There were only twelve days off per year, and no Bank Holidays. If you lingered over lunch, you had to stay until perhaps 7 p.m.²² Many were exhausted when they got home and could think of nothing except supper and sleep. Iris later wrote, ‘I was the slave of circumstance at 23.‘²³ Yet she had two advantages over her peers. One was the super-abundance of energy noted at Somerville, an energy that enabled her to write one letter to Frank at 3 a.m.,* and sometimes to write poetry and fiction through the night, until the Tube trains started again in the small hours.† She had wanted, after Finals, to ‘learn jujitso, German, translate Sophocles, learn to draw decently, buy expensive & crazy presents for my friends – really go into the subject of comparative mythology – read many very basic books about politics – learn about America, psychology, animals, my God I could go on for ever’.

Her other advantage was that she had found for herself a most unusual, magical and much discussed flat, only half a mile from work. Many of her peers had long journeys to the Treasury, or shared tiny rooms with a landlady on the premises, on their very small salaries (Iris earned £5 per week in 1942, which went up to £5.105 in 1944, plus a £40 a year war bonus ‘kindly withheld for her until after hostilities’²⁴). Home in Chiswick had been bombed, probably in the winter of 1941; her parents had by then in any case already moved to Blackpool with the Ministry of Health, where she visited them.²⁵ By mid-August Iris had discovered a studio flat to let for £60 a year unfurnished, on a three-year protected tenancy.²⁶ It would give her a base: ‘London swarms with acquaintances whom individually I like but who collectively are making hay of my life!’ she told Frank. The new flat, Iris’s first, was owned by a Mrs Royalton-Kisch, aged about ninety-four and probably in a nursing-home. Iris was independent. She was also in a place and a time where she would live out, if not (like a character in The Red and the Green) ‘the true and entire history of her heart’, at least some critical chapters of that curious history.

In July 1942 Iris wrote to Philippa: ‘Best prospect for a flat is probably a single room in Gerrard Place – with a wonderful view of the blitz & practically no plumbing.’ But she did considerably better, and by mid-August²⁷ found the flat which, a year later, would accommodate Philippa too, and which fifty-eight years later was still ‘in the family’, tenanted by Philippa’s sister Marion. Iris called it a ‘studio-flat … of quite indescribable charm … of utterly irresistible personality … with some 6 square miles of window to guard, in blitz & blackout’.²⁸

A few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace is a sliver of land called Brewer’s Green, in what was once an area of breweries – Stagg’s, Green’s, Elliott’s and the Artillery – all now long gone. Number 5 Seaforth Place nearby was always known to Iris and Philippa simply as ‘Seaforth’. The tiny alley off Buckingham Gate was marked by a narrow cleft with a white post in the middle of it, and has no other front door. The flat belonged to the stables servicing a curious chain of pubs serving only non-alcoholic drinks, which provided rest-places for the poor.²⁹ Even today ‘Seaforth’ is a tiny, ancient white cube curiously beached in an era strange to it, an ensemble so closed off and secret that it seems, like the mysterious enclosures of Iris’s Gothic fictions, a little lost world on its own.³⁰

At street level was an empty garage or warehouse where the brewers once stabled their horses; their loose-boxes survived the war. The places on the wall where the halters were attached are visible today. Inside, a little bit of brown linoleum in the hall and a steep, uncovered stairway (with a very narrow, windowless bathroom fuelled by a geyser tucked under the stairs to the left – you could not stand up in the bath) led to the spacious first floor above the stalls. When you reached the top you were in the roughly converted old brewer’s granary, twenty-five feet square and interrupted only by the staircase slicing up the middle, which Iris grandly termed ‘the atrium’.³¹ To the left of this was a corridor where she soon placed an ancient gas-stove, to make a kitchen³²

twenty-five feet long by eight feet wide, with a small dark window looking out onto a mews containing first-floor drawing offices over garages, and interrupted by an approach just wide enough for a coach and horses to enter the coach-houses on Spencer Street. This kitchen had an ill-fitting greenhouse roof of overlapping glass panes, and so was boiling hot in summer, freezing in winter and dripping when it rained. It contained a primitive improvised stand, pitcher and ewer, and water could be scooped up with a jug from the zinc-lined water-tank nesting under a ringed, wooden-hinged hatch-door at the top of the stairs. There was no water, hot or cold, in the kitchen, so washing-up was done downstairs in the bathroom.

To the right of the atrium, beyond what resembled a proscenium arch from which hung simple blue curtains, was the living-room, once the brewer’s hayloft, similar in size to the granary/atrium. A large skylight on the left looked towards the St James’s Court Hotel; two windows on the other side fronted – only a few feet away, like an alley in Palermo – the Territorial Army drill-halls, one for Artillery, one for Scottish conscripts.³³ Iris put in bookshelves on either side of an old-fashioned Edwardian gas-fire in the living-room, with an elegantly curved chimney-breast. This gas-fire, its perforated porcelain columns giving a Tew pale inches of war-time gas’,³⁴ was the only heating – useful for making toast, too – though the ancient gas-oven could also be turned on, on a bitter winter night. Earlier groom-tenants had had some sort of pied-à-terre in the flat. Into what had probably been their bread-oven set into the wall, Iris put extra bookshelves, still there today. In January 1943 she wrote to Frank: ‘I have a pleasant flat near St james’s Park… which … is rapidly becoming so full of volumes of poetry of all eras & languages that I shall have to go & camp on the railway line (or feed ‘em to the mice, after they’ve finished their present strict diet of airgraphs*).’³⁵ The mice had been eating Frank’s letters.

Lacking any inner doors, the flat effectively constituted one huge ‘modern’ open-plan space, seventy feet long. Being in so old a building, it also lacks straight lines or true right-angles. There is a gentle swept-back angle between atrium and kitchen, probably to ease the passage of hay. A delightful old coachman survived and was a source of lore about the place, until the coachhouses were demolished, and the character of the whole area changed, by the building of the new Westminster City Hall in 1960.³⁶

Not that the wider world, especially in wartime, left Seaforth Place untouched. It was near enough to Whitehall to hear Big Ben, and to Westminster Cathedral to hear the angelus. For some friends living out of London, this very central flat was ‘a convenient hotel’. Close friends believe that, on CP advice, Iris nominally left the Party just before joining the Treasury in order to disarm suspicion, while remaining for much of the war what the Party called an ‘underground’ (i.e. clandestine) member, one of those who paid no dues but could be expected to attend some branch meetings.³⁷ Leonie Marsh indeed reported Iris in July 1943 ‘unchanged in the slightest particular of manner, voice, dress or Weltanschauung [world-view]’.³⁸ Three scrupulous letters from Seaforth – undated but probably early in 1943 – to Marjorie Boulton, still up at Somerville until 1944, and seeking Iris’s advice about joining the CP, support this view. Iris is anxious to proffer only Objective’ advice to the then impressionable Boulton. ‘Oxford is not typical of the Party,’ she wrote in one, implying that she knew the London CP also. In another:

CP members were required to feed information about their war work to the Party, which Iris, out of an idealism she would later see as misplaced, duly did. The CP explicitly trained its members to a habit of systematic dissimulation, which caused some to quit. The moral pressure to accept the resulting isolation from most of those around one was undoubtedly extreme: one’s reaction to that pressure might largely depend on one’s personal relations with the people who were calling on one to accept it. Iris later spoke of the role of an army captain, her immediate superior, who stole and copied documents, largely at night, for her to hand on either directly or to hide by dead-letter drop, probably in a tree in Kensington Gardens. We cannot know what she passed on. While it may, as John Bayley believed, have been unimportant information about colleagues and Treasury doings, she would probably not have hesitated to pass on information of greater moment too.³⁹

The capacity to operate clandestinely resembles the capacity to run love relationships concurrently: both evidence that warm-yet-cool ability to enter into, and operate within, many other people’s worlds that Keats, in a famous letter, admired in Shakespeare (now read by certain critics as a spy in the Catholic cause). Training in dissimulation also throws some light on, even if it cannot altogether explain, the co-existence within Iris of a striking outward stillness or serenity with an equally turbulent inner world. But it is extraordinary that she attempted to be a loyal ‘cadre’ for so long: she had too much sense and heart to be loyal to that kind of political clique, and detested, once she properly understood it, Stalinist tyranny.⁴⁰

Her Treasury colleague Walter Pyke-Lees mentioned Iris’s Communism casually and tolerantly to his future wife and co-colleague Peggy Stebbing, who recalled it as being, with some exceptions, ‘understood, in a civilised spirit’, Russia being at that time Britain’s newest ally. There is little direct evidence about when or why she severed her links with the Party. CPGB archives up to 1942 are now in Moscow, and the absence of the name ‘Iris Murdoch’ from the 1943 CP list of members⁴¹ proves nothing: ‘underground’ members, by definition, were not listed. In the spring of 1943 Iris proselytised (unsuccessfully) the ex-Magpie Ruth Kingsbury (later Mills), who, though unconvinced, nonetheless bought at Iris’s suggestion a Russian grammar and a Tolstoy short story in Russian. Iris’s poet friend Paul Potts, recalled as sympathetic to the CP,⁴² was also a friend of George Orwell, who had bravely unmasked the USSR, notably in ‘Inside the Whale’. If it is true that the CP held meetings in Iris’s flat with her agreement, but in her absence,⁴³ they were probably of some dull, perhaps ‘bureaucratic’ committee in whose doings she took no interest.⁴⁴ No such events are recalled after Philippa moved in in October 1943, and a reasonable guess is that Iris had started a withdrawal, probably painfully, by 1944, under the influence of the politically clearer-sighted Thomas Balogh, sufficiently anti-Communist as a thirteen-year-old schoolboy in Budapest after its ‘Socialist revolution’ of 1919 to take potshots with a rifle at Bela Kun’s troops.⁴⁵ Frank Thompson’s future sister-in-law Dorothy⁴⁶ was from September 1944 attending what would have been Iris’s local Victoria/Pimlico branch of the CP, but never met Iris at the Dolphin Square meetings.

There was much in wartime London to worry a tender social conscience: one and a half million homeless alone by May 1941. There were many air raids, and people from the devastated East End were sleeping in bunks on the platforms of Tube stations such as St James’s Park, more or less underneath the Seaforth flat. They ‘trekked into central London each night and out to work in the mornings. Strangers sheltering in doorways would sometimes accompany each other home,’ Philippa recalled. The constant rumble and vibration of the District and Circle Line trains beneath the flat Iris was later to use in The Time of the Angels. She relished ‘both the noise and the shaking’.⁴⁷ On nights when the bombs fell heavily, Iris or Philippa if alone in the flat would on occasion shelter in the bathtub under the stairs, Iris having carefully reasoned that a tin hat protected against shrapnel, and the closest item they had to a tin hat (albeit upside-down) was a bath.⁴⁸ When a V2 took out three largish houses on the other side of the St James’s Court Hotel – which must have protected them – they lost windows and frames; these were soon repaired.

Visitors were surprised by how big the flat looked. It had very little furniture, some of it at orange-box level. In those days of rationing and coupons, everything was rather bare – food, clothing, furnishing alike. Iris’s bohemianism also tended to make her avoid any hint of luxury, even if she could have afforded it. The aesthetic minimalism was impressive. There were two armchairs by the gas-fire, one of them Mary Midgley’s,⁴⁹ a table and chairs. Having found the flat in August 1942, she moved in by September.⁵⁰ In October she wrote to Frank that she was settled more or less into both her flat and her job.

In March 1941 Frank, having transferred the previous August from the Royal Artillery to ‘Phantom’, a small communications and intelligence unit, was posted to the Middle East. He and Iris met before this at least once in London, and visited Westminster Cathedral together, Frank lighting a candle to the Madonna. He left behind with Iris a ring-bound folder of his typed poems predating this departure, including a handwritten ‘To Irushka’ in heroic mode, later damned by him as ‘Hooey’. He sailed, from Clydeside via Cape Town, to Cairo, disgusted by the disparity between the slum-like conditions and diet of the men and the six-course meals and menu-cards taken for granted by the officers. In November 1941, after two months with septicaemia in the Australian Hospital in Damascus, but now back in Cairo, he wrote to his parents that he had just heard from Iris, ‘gloomy and as always when she hasn’t seen me for a long time, full of affection’. For over three years they continued their correspondence, and many of their letters survive.⁵¹ Iris was in 1991 to judge her wartime letters Very affectionate but a bit stilted, young person’s letters’.⁵² Of this ‘stilted’ tone, one early instance was sent to Frank around December 1939: ‘I am particularly distressed that you are worried about the world. I was, but am much less so now – remember, your environment is probably less likely to induce clear thought than mine is.’ Here is Iris-as-perpetual-Head-Girl, a role she did not easily outgrow.⁵³

But generally these gifted, energetic letters, which Iris refers to as a ‘flow of talk’,⁵⁴ are alive even now. Frank repeatedly makes clear how good they were to receive: ‘It seems strange to compare your gentle letters with flint but the simile has this much aptness. They strike fire immediately. And when one arrives, as has yours … I am impelled forthwith to answer it.’⁵⁵ Iris made clear how intensely lonely she felt in busy London, and how ‘much in need of intellectual intimacy’. Frank’s was, uniquely, ‘the patient mind which is prepared to comprehend my own & toss me back the ball of my thought’.⁵⁶

Iris’s habitually intense reserve inspired awe throughout her life. To the absent Frank she now started to reveal the ‘inward’ unconfident soul who suffered ambition and insecurity, was lost and confused in the ordinary way of young mortals. Instead of Iris always consoling Frank, Frank now increasingly ‘plays the man’ and cheers Iris up when she is despondent. With few other friends does she ever reveal herself thus.

Of Frank’s growing importance to Iris there is plenty of evidence, from letters, from friends and from Iris herself, who in 1996 was distressed to recall the terrible waiting which went on and on, week by week, more than half a century before, through much of 1944, to find out where Frank was and what had happened to him. By demonstrating his independence in joining up, he had significantly shifted the balance of power between them. Moreover, as he wrote to his parents, ‘an Englishman of our class seems to change more between 20 and 23 than at any other time’.⁵⁷ He, one year younger, was in some ways growing up faster than she. He had less choice. He was known in North Africa by his men as ‘the gaffer’, and to play the officer at twenty-one and twenty-two required him to act ten years older than he was. He now wrote to his brother: ‘The OULC looked needlessly bohemian to outside observers. The men (I was a very bad offender) were often unwashed and wore the most ridiculous clothes. Many of the women did the same and both conducted the most tangled and nauseating love affairs in public, while the rest of the university kept its sex life fairly decorous behind closed doors.’⁵⁸ He could measure the distance between the callow youth he once had been and the young man he was becoming. When Iris wrote to Frank that ‘the more letters I get from you, the more I admire you’, she was expressing no more and no less than the truth.

What of Frank? He wrote to Iris that there were only four people in England to whom he could speak almost as clearly on paper as with his lips: ‘Three of them are my closest kin and the other one is you.’⁵⁹ He got close to other women, corresponded with a number, but did not cherish their letters as he did hers.⁶⁰ Even his family was told that, if they wished, they should make copies of their letters before sending them to him. He had acquired so many sackfuls that he could not keep them all. Iris’s letters alone, he kept.⁶¹

A relationship maintained only by letter must be precarious. How much belonged to the realm of fantasy? Iris after all had not been a body to him ‘for nearly 4 years’, he wrote in April 1944. The sinister vagaries of wartime postal delivery alone might delight a Thomas Hardy. Just as Frank may never have learnt that he had in 1944 been gazetted Major, so Iris does not understand that he had, in September 1942, been promoted Captain, until half a year later. These were frustrations to which both refer. Letters matter intensely to Frank. He gets ‘down’ when they are delayed, feeling it impossible to believe he has ‘kin’ anywhere; then, when a letter arrives, ‘feels as though home were only a five minute walk away’. In October 1942 he wrote to Iris:

Iris wrote that she had found that reciting Homeric hexameters went very well with the rhythm of the Tube train. Frank replied:

Iris and Frank’s four-year correspondence betokens the tenacity of their feeling, as does the quality of their letters. In January 1942 he translated Pushkin’s short early poem ‘I loved you once’ ('Ya vas Lyubil'), managing to convey the explosive compression, and also the calm, peace, and sheer stylishness, of the twenty-year-old Pushkin’s Russian:

He also wrote a story about a certain Gunner Perkins who wishes to express his passion by letter to his girlfriend Helen, rather than thoughts about books and politics. ‘If only he had had the courage before he left. Now it was too late, you could never break down barriers by letter.’ ‘Helen’ is an interesting nom-de-guerre for Iris: the Greeks died at Troy for another Helen. Interesting too, in the light of Frank’s wartime career, is this passage from Iris in a letter, of 24 November 1942, in which she celebrates Allied progress, but worries that it is terrible to ‘rejoice in something which totals up to such a sum of human anguish’ – especially when one is ‘snug in Whitehall’ oneself:

Iris is unusual among liberal novelists in admiring soldiers. She later recalled lying on the floor and watching the Vis ‘tottering past the window’ – a brilliantly chosen phrase for the movement of the mass-produced buzz-bomb, propelled by its unsteady ‘pulse-jet’.⁶³ While destroying many wartime writings, she saved a brief account of her reactions when bombs fell near the Hungarian economist Nickie Kaldor’s flat in Chelsea Cloisters⁶⁴ in March 1944: the thirty-second crash, the rocking of the house, the pattering fall of debris which taps the window, and the fact that ‘I cannot stop watching my own reaction even when there is no-one about before whom I want to keep up appearances.’

Iris’s obsession with T.E. Lawrence – an acquaintance of the Thompsons, whom Frank met as a child – shared by Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil, was lifelong, and the ascetic warriors in her novels – Felix in An Unofficial Rose; General James Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea; Pat Dumay in The Red and the Green; even James in The Bell, whose simple piety relates to his coming from ‘an old military family’ – owe something to this ‘world-changer who never lost his capacity to doubt’,⁶⁵ as well as something to the figure of Frank. Iris’s encouragement helped persuade another admirer, Paddy O’Regan, to join the Special Operations Executive (SOE),⁶⁶ set up by Churchill in 1940 to ‘set Europe ablaze’ by supplying arms and other support to guerrilla and sabotage groups. This was a dangerous move, to say the least; Hitler had ordered in the autumn of 1942 that any Allied soldier found involved in clandestine activities could be shot on sight, and part of the routine training involved an explanation of the extreme risks involved.⁶⁷ O’Regan would win an MC and bar. Frank had his own motives for volunteering for SOE, on 5 September 1943. The unfolding logic of his and Iris’s love-at-long-distance may also have played a role in his deciding to make this move, as his choice of the name ‘Helen’ suggests. Iris began as the ‘unmoved mover’. By 1943 she was, in some sense, increasingly in love with the absent Frank.

They felt affinity. During 1942 Iris’s forms of opening address to Frank move from ‘Greetings, my brave and beautiful buccaneer’ (January), to ‘Dearly beloved’ (April), to ‘Frank, my wild & gentle chevalier’ (October), to ‘Frank, my brave & beloved’ (November), to, on 22 January 1943, a simple ‘Darling’. Her valedictions are mostly pleas to him not to get hurt: ‘Frank, old friend, I love hearing your voice crying in the wilderness – cry often, & at great length – & oh, for Christ’s sake don’t get hurt in this business’ (April/May 1942); ‘And oh, Keep Safe. The gods protect you’ (29 July 1943). He is for his part no less inventive: ‘Irushka, flaxen-haired light of wisdom!’ (June 1942); ‘My green-haired Sybil’ (July 1942), though shyer of open displays of affection.

Both are highly intelligent, politically aware – ‘Old Campaigner’ is another of Iris’s soubriquets for Frank – both by 1942 believing the war is not only to protect a bad old world from Fascism, but to help forge a new one. Both are writers in the making. His father had some of Frank’s letters published in the New Statesman, and a story in the Manchester Guardian, and Frank thought he might be a journalist after the war. Iris reviewed for the Adelphi and began to write novels.* Both are romantics, and remind each other of this⁶⁸ – romantic idealists in their political hopes, their liking for high diction, but also in what they expect from others. On 20 March 1943 Iris writes: ‘Oh Frank, I wonder what the future holds for us all – shall we ever make out of the dreamy idealistic stuff of our lives any hard & real thing? You will perhaps. Your inconsequent romanticism has the requisite streak of realism in it – I think I am just a dreamer. Shout in my ear, please. Much love, old pirate – I.’

Frank is the more brilliant linguist – indeed at one point, in Bulgaria, he is saved by a bullet being fired into his dictionary. Both learn new languages for pleasure, and Frank their literatures too. He attributed importance to this because, in the new post-war Europe-of-the-heart in which he so passionately believed, the acquisition of languages is to help overcome misunderstanding and mutual ignorance. In learning Russian Iris was probably partly imitating Frank, who had started aged fifteen at Winchester, and now translated not only Pushkin, but also Gogol, Gusyev and Lermontov. Both were of course also intensely pro-Russian for political reasons. After he picks up Italian, she tries to do the same: ‘incredibly easy as you say’.⁶⁹ Frank also picked up Serbo-Croat, Bulgarian, Polish and modern Greek, faltering only with Arabic. She goes beyond him once, arriving at the Turkish Embassy and demanding to be taught Turkish – in order, mysteriously, to improve her post-war job prospects, about which she feels ‘cynical’. Frank, who refers to this new interest of hers on 2 June 1943, is studying a Turkish grammar by that August.

They tried to share their reading, too. While still at Somerville in 1941 she was reading Proust: ‘He too teaches one to forgive⁷⁰– a point I’m learning from all quarters just now. Characteristic of all great writers? Shakespeare – Tolstoy – James Joyce – for the last of whom I’m feeling an enormous enthusiasm … and everything that survives of Tacitus – except the Germania. I tremble and adore.’⁷¹ On 24 December 1941 she mentions Mallarmé and Gorky’s Mother, which both loved, and ‘I have been reading Virginia Woolf, the darling dangerous woman, & am in a state of extreme nervous self-consciousness. The most selfish of all states to be in.’ She pledges herself on his recommendation ready to read ‘Bachtin’ (i.e. Bakhtin), ‘even if this means borrowing it from Bodley’.⁷² In November 1942 she read Pushkin (in Russian), Edmund Wilson and Pindar. The following October Proust, Joyce, de Montherlant, Woolf ('quite incapable of writing anything straight again'), Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet ('left me cold') and Celine ('What a gorgeous language – how much one is exiled from. How much more they are exiled from'). He read Penguin New Writing before her,⁷³ sending her his translations from the Russian. Both read Louis Aragon’s Crève-Coeur,⁷⁴ an iconic text enjoying cult success, banned in Britain probably because it addressed Dunkirk, but smuggled in from France, acclaimed by Cyril Connolly and Charles Morgan for its poetry and patriotism alike.* In 1943 Frank sends her Mayakovsky and she sends him poems by the ‘New Apocalyptics’, the ‘Poetry (London) gang, the sensibility boys who think with their stomach’.⁷⁵ They argue about Henry James, whom Iris likes considerably more than does Frank. Both accuse themselves of being ‘intellectual snob’. In March 1943 they discuss Antony and Cleopatra.

In October 1943, while undergoing a sabotage and parachute training course in the Lebanon, with a view to helping – as he then thought – the partisans in occupied Greece, Frank requested a photograph. Iris obliged with a visit to Polyfoto, then reciprocated the request. There is an odd sympathetic magic about the fact that both succumbed to jaundice, although this ailment (or, rather, symptom) was commoner then than it is now. Frank suffered it at the Indian hospital near Hamadan in Persia in October 1942 – whence he wrote home about Iris’s first in Greats, joking that the war had saved him from the indignity of getting a lower degree than her – Iris a year later, with her parents in Blackpool: ‘You have had this curious complaint.’⁷⁶

Frank once wrote: ‘Without going all James Barry, … the real enduring people have kept something of the child within them.’ Here lies one key to their growing affinity. His friend Gabriel Carritt always spoke of Frank’s ‘sancta simplicitas’. Iris saw this. She had her own too.

On 22 January 1943, settled alike into her flat and her job, Iris wrote Frank a ten-page letter that is by turns playful – ‘Darling, the mice have been eating your letters again,’ it starts – then serious, lyrical, informative and, in a familiar wartime mode, resolutely undramatic. She does not ‘mind how many dangers you face, so long as I don’t know at the time, & you emerge in good condition – & don’t suffer miseries en route of course’. She shares with him her writerly ambitions, pondering hopefully Aldous Huxley’s doctrine that, for a writer, ‘it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters’. She imparts news of mutual friends, reports on her reading – Wilfred Owen, Ann Ridler, the Beveridge plan ('a fine piece of work, thorough and equitable’, though she is anxious about the chances of this blueprint for the post-war Welfare State being fully realised), ‘numerous moderns’. She describes her life, the emptiness she feels in his absence, and the intellectual intimacy which she strongly implies that only he now offers her (Philippa had not yet joined her in Seaforth Place). After reporting that she is ‘hellishly lonely’, despite being in ‘great and beautiful and exciting London’, she continues:

If she had cared for him less, Iris would not have thought Frank worth this proximate candour. Her painful belated honesty is a token of love, the more so in that friends thought her loss of virginity had happened before she left Oxford.⁷⁷ The exact sequence is obscure. Noel Eldridge, whom she had met through Oxford student journalism – Oxford Forward, Cherwell and the short-lived Kingdom Come – had asked her to marry him, arguing light-heartedly that, as he was almost certain to be killed, she could at least enjoy a modest war widow’s pension. Iris later told John Bayley, ‘laughing and weeping’, that she had told Noel she would not marry him, but was willing to sleep with him instead. He was indeed shot and killed by a sniper somewhere along the Bologna-Rimini road, having rejoined the Queen’s Royal Regiment fighting the Germans in Italy, in September 1944.

Noel’s twin sister Lilian Eldridge in 1998 recognised the playfulness of Noel’s bid,⁷⁸ a playfulness Iris could express too. Noel wrote to his mother around November 1939:

Iris kept all her life many slim volumes of verse that had belonged to Eldridge: Auden’s 1930 poems, Herbert Read, David Gascoyne, Paul Eluard, Caudwell, Francis Thompson, and an Imagist anthology.

Leo Pliatzky believed, by contrast, that he was Iris’s first lover, very broadly construed, just as she was, after Leonie Marsh, his second. He spoke of the unusual parental complaisance of Rene and Hughes, who allowed him and Iris to be unchaperoned in her room in Chiswick. Iris later recalled a time when Leo tried to undress her in his rooms at Corpus, and she wept. Noel Eldridge and Leo are not the only contenders,⁷⁹ and the different stories which different friends were told reflect Iris’s intention not to cause hurt, as much as a positive desire to mystify, though she was certainly capable of mystification.⁸⁰ It is hard to know how much weight to give to her jest, delighting in her own ‘modernity’, to Margaret Stanier⁸¹ that there was perhaps only one man in Oxford she had not had an affair with:⁸² bohemianism was for her generation often part of the same revolt against bourgeois conventionality as Communism.⁸³ Walking across Westminster Bridge one midnight in 1943, Iris told Clare Campbell that she had recently lost her virginity and was sad about it (though the man ‘was very kind’, she added when they recapped this decades later). Clare had no idea how to respond. She recalls that Iris could not at this time hear without crying the theme song from a film, ‘Oh the Pity of it All’.

Frank knew and disliked Noel Eldridge, whom he once, probably from jealousy, called to Iris ‘that snake’, but Leo was his good friend. Indeed Leo and Frank ran into each other in a Field Army Workshop in North Africa in September 1943, and drank a can each of warm beer together. One perplexity of Frank and Iris’s friendship is that almost all the male friends to whom she refers in her letters to him – Leo, Noel Martin, David Hicks, Noel Eldridge, Michael Foot – were at some time in love with her. A number were at some point her lovers. When, in a letter dated 29 January 1942, she asks Frank for news of Leo, Hal Lidderdale and David Hicks, she is in sober fact asking him for news of three of his many potential rivals. Frank and Hal also met during the war, in Libya in July 1943; Iris heard of this meeting through Hal. The imaginative importance she accorded each man is another matter. She lost touch with Eldridge, for example, well before his death – he married after a brief courtship in 1943.* Hal and David became her lifelong friends. Frank, on the other hand, never her lover, preoccupied her all her life. And she played her cards close to her chest, one admirer rarely being told of rival-claimants.

The war, like the decade following it, was a period of sexual and emotional experimentation – something long claimed as a natural right by men, with whom Iris in some ways easily identified. The ‘wild talk’ she tells Frank about shows in an early letter to Philippa, two months after they had first properly met:

This has an air of Lawrentian bravura, indicative of the itch for emancipation. Fifty years after the war Iris recalled ‘Hammersmith Palais de Danse with Susie Williams-Ellis, and we danced with soldiers, and they were so sweet and gentle. Waltz.’⁸⁵ This was dancing for the love of it: her own range of acquaintance was large enough to provide her with a lover if she needed one. It is a paradox about Iris that she managed to run an increasingly complicated love-life, while continuing to appear to many observers chaste if not chilly. Anne Cloake and Leonie Marsh were two Somerville friends from the OULC. Anne, who thought she had taught Iris the facts of life, always referred to her as a prim blue-stocking.⁸⁶ Leonie found Iris in 1942 virginal, and as late as 1944–45 the novelist Mulk Raj Anand, later a Minister in the Indian government, remarked to Vera Hoar in a pub that ‘Iris was always virginal.’ Frank, too, in his complex reply to Iris’s confession, reports his fear that she had been wedded to ‘a cold virginity’.

The myth of a cold virginity was one Iris had difficulties in dispelling. She had written to Frank one year before: ‘Gentle gloom bloody hell. I get so sick of that myth. I’m not a Blessed Damozel you know, at least not any more. There isn’t even a trace of Burne-Jones – & the faint aroma of incense has perished in the high wind …’ The ‘Blessed Damozel’ reference amounts to a standing joke in their circle, possibly an uncomfortable one.*

Iris had also written to Frank from Oxford: ‘I haven’t a face any more. I am prepared to give up the clear contours & the cutting edge which were formerly my ideal. I feel generally iconoclastic, and the eikon I most want to smash is the pretty golden image inside myself I’ve preserved so carefully. Completeness terrifies me – I have no more pat answers – I want to hurl myself down into the melee & the mud & I dont care how filthy it is …’ It was the Blessed Damozel image of herself she wished to smash, one in which, with its pressure of intense sexual idealisation, Frank had some investment. Iris’s nostalgie de la boue is one reply.

Iris’s letter took twelve weeks to reach Frank in the Levant. He replied at comparable length on 22 April: ‘I could have no cause for anger. Nor can I, since I am not conventional after the modern fashion, be unreservedly glad without due reflection.’

Rossetti’ for the wombat, and wishes Rossetti had painted wombats instead of ‘Blessed Damozels & all that poppycock’.

He lists two ‘stumbling-blocks’ or possible problems. He understands that his is not the only tendency towards idealisation: ‘I know of course, that your men are not ordinary men but parfit gentle knights. But it will take years of sorrow to realise how violently misogynistic most men are au fond.’ His second ‘stumbling-block’ points to the impact of her news on him. He writes of ‘a theory which I’m still engaged in formulating … I, you see, have messed up my sex-life … [with] a most terrible dichotomy by which women fall into two categories – Women it would be rather nice to sleep with provided one didn’t have to talk with them for more than five minutes/women one really likes avec lesquelles il ne vaut pas s’embeter dans un lit.'* This classic dualism, he perfectly realises, insults both kinds of women. He had expressed it three years earlier to his brother:

Three years had not lowered his standards, and his biographer believes that they were never so lowered.⁸⁸ Frank goes on to refer Iris to the oft-hymned joys of a honeymoon in which both parties are virgin: ‘To medicine me from this would probably take years of psychotherapy combined with the best type of free love … But having suffered all this, I am coming to the conclusion that it is better to abstain altogether until one falls head over heels in love … I remember thinking … often … that a good love-affair would do you the devil of a lot of good.’ He feared that she was wedded to ‘a cold virginity from which it would be yearly more difficult to free yourself. So, on balance, it is obviously a subject for joy. If I’ve said anything here that is clumsy or stupid, forgive me. I’m afraid there is no finesse about me, Irushka.’ He ends, tellingly: ‘Do write me more long letters like your last. I talk a lot of baloney when I answer, but maybe I understand more than I let on.’

Frank’s reply contains an interesting polemic against introspection. He improbably claims that, unlike Iris, he has no books of poetry with him, and says that, on the one hand ‘unless you are an introvert, you have not the vision to look into other people’s minds’, on the other ‘Tolstoi & Chehov went as far into the minds of our fellow-men as it is profitable or seemly to go.’ This seems in context like a caveat against pursuing dangerous lines of enquiry. Iris, who would write to Frank when depressed that she was ‘feeling rather Chehov tonight’, saw in him someone who, like T.E. Lawrence, could rise above the mere introspection to which her desk – and pub-bound life constrained her.

He must have known that, had Iris cared for him less, she would not have thought him worth her confession. The coldness of his analysis is his only mild punishment, and means of self-protection. Before writing it, he went and sat in a Greek Orthodox church. She had earlier enquired whether his apparently inviolable good spirits were ‘stiff upper lip on your part? Give me a line on that.’ His mother Theo also complained to him that ‘You never say when you are down.’ He replied to Iris that he was ‘far too malleable’ to keep a ‘stiff upper lip’.

This is bravado. Three weeks before, on 18 May 1943, Frank had written to his parents asking them to tear up his will,⁸⁹ together with the letter he had left to accompany it – almost certainly a letter to Iris, or making mention of her. Within a month, also, M.R.D. Foot, to whom alone of his correspondents he was willing to sound vulnerable,⁹⁰ received from him a ‘wildly melancholiac letter’ which so disturbed him that it prompted two letters in reply urging him not to despair, until Frank angrily persuaded Michael that his fears were ‘baseless’. ‘Faced with stark horror I prefer to grapple with it silently and alone,’ he said, à propos watching a companion parachute to his death. Had he just ‘roman-candled’ in love? ‘Half-man, half-boy’, he had described himself to Iris in 1939, and his growing older did not prevent him from finding tears in his eyes on leaving his unit – his father touchingly wrote that his description of this parting was worthy of Tolstoy. Nor did it prevent him from weeping the following year – in SOE, and with the end of the menace of Fascism finally in view – to think of the new Europe they were to build after the war.

Iris’s announcement of the loss of her virginity did not change the direction of Frank’s attachment. On 22 July 1943 in Libya he met their mutual friend Hal Lidderdale, ‘a small dark-eyed humanist’ and Captain in No. 2 Anti-Aircraft battery, and they agreed about the complacent and stupid ethos of their respective officers’ messes.

Iris wrote to Frank in spring 1943: ‘As a matter of interest, how have you fared with women in the East? I don’t mean from the grand passion point of view, but just from the sex experience point of view.’ Very ‘Ursula and Gudrun’, this rehearsed casualness, and that cunningly placed word ‘just’, would-be worldly, downplaying the ‘merely’ physical aspects of sexuality. It seems to betoken the hope that an equivalent confession to her own from Frank would lessen any sense of guilt on her part, although she would certainly have been jealous, too. ‘Do you spend your days lying with lovely Iranians? How do you feel about that racket now? It’s terrible, Frank, how little we know really in spite of fairly frequent letters of how the other party is developing in these fast and fatal years. Perhaps we shouldn’t pry into each other’s minds … God what a difference half an hour’s conversation would make.’

Frank had other ways of learning about Iris. Leo Pliatzky wrote to him: ‘I have continued to hear from Iris at intervals, though nothing in the last week or two and nothing at all unusual. She finds the world tragic and moving, but that is not unusual. I shall not be writing to her for some time … But when I do I shall convey your undying affection – perhaps a little more articulately than you have so far managed to do.’⁹²

On one of Iris’s visits to Oxford before June 1943,⁹³ when Vera Hoar took her Finals, she thought that Iris looked particularly radiant. ‘Go and sleep with some nice man … it’s a technique that has to be learnt,’ Iris sagely advised, a briskly matter-of-fact memory that might be set against another. There was also the emotional Iris who, as Leo noted, found the world in general ‘tragic and moving’. Iris sometimes found love so, too. A Senior Staff Officer at the Treasury, W.C. Roberts, MBE, saw her travelling home on a bus one winter evening in the 1943 blackout, the bus windows covered in scrim against bomb blast. (The war years found him writing the long – anonymous, of course – His Majesty ‘s Stationery Office Blue Book: A Digest of Pension Law, with whose rulings on Civil Service pensions and conditions of service Iris would have been familiar.) Iris was peering out into the gloom through the little rectangle which was left clear and he realised with distress that she was silently sobbing, the tears running down her face. Treasury reserve was overcome and he moved to put a comforting arm about her.

‘No thank you. I’m quite all right. It’s just this love business,’ she cried.

‘Never mind,’ he said, thinking it indiscreet to enquire further and having faith in both her common sense and her intelligence.⁹⁴ ‘I’m sure it will work out all right in the end.’⁹⁵

*Special European Labour Immigration Board. Probably based on the European Voluntary Worker scheme (EVW), through which Iris’s friends the Jancars (see Chapter 9) came to Britain.

*The Swiss and the Wellington, like the Wheatsheaf, Black Horse and Fitzroy, were well-known for their literary-bohemian ambience, and formed part of a familiar pub-crawl. See e.g. Tambimuttu, ed. Jane Williams, Bridge Between Two Worlds (Peter Owen, 1989), pp-75ff.

*Susan Stebbing had died the week before.

*A letter to Paddy O’Regan is also dated 3.30 a.m., and one of her poems was completed at 4.30 a.m.

*An airgraph was written on a single quarto sheet, then microfilmed and taken by flying-boat to its destination (Poole harbour in Dorset to Karachi took only three days), where it was developed, magnified, put into a manila envelope and delivered.

*All three letters are undated, but C1942–43. Iris also wrote: ‘I am more sorry than I can say that your dawning interest in the Party should have coincided with an era of bloodiness really unparalleled in my experience of our extremely imperfect organisation … Oxford is not typical of the Party, & this recent fracas not typical of Oxford'; ‘Serious political work (as opposed to the Labour Party) does tend to shorten tempers, fray nerves, & … produce the text brandishing dogmatist.’ Marjorie was finally deterred from joining the Party by the ten-shilling subscription.

*See Chapter 7.

*Frank to Iris, 14 August 1943: ‘Michael [Foot] has sent me Creve-Coeur. … Aragon has scored several bulls.’ Iris later sent a copy to David Hicks which had to be cleared by the censor.

*Noel married Jane Brown McNab, and then introduced his wife and mother casually on the street. Two weeks later he was sent abroad. He and his wife never saw one another again.

*The letter was dated 29 January 1942. Compare Iris to Clare Campbell, April 1941: ‘I am inebriating myself with French poetry and Malory, and becoming more romantic and unphilosophical every day. Soon I shall turn into a pre-Raphaelite bubble (Holman Hunt variety) and float away before the breeze …’. Compare also Frank to Iris, 27 July 1942, à propos the conceit that Iris has green hair: ‘a good green, mind you, none of yr ghoulish pre-Raphaelite stuff'; and on 17 October 1942 Frank thinks he has ‘written to you before about the Noble Passion of Dante Gabriel

*Roughly: ‘with whom it’s not worthwhile bothering oneself in bed’.

† Barbara Mitchell met Iris by prior arrangement at the Pillars of Hercules pub in Soho in 1943, and learnt that Iris was writing from the time the last Underground train left St James’s Park at night to the time the first one started in the morning. In 1944, by contrast, when Philippa Foot anxiously walked the City streets, Iris slept soundly.

6 This Love Business 1942–1943

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This Love Business
1942–1943