Iris Murdoch: A Life

We are all willing to moralise about them at the drop of a hat … We have scarcely begun to establish the facts before we begin to mix them up with our own moralising additives: scandalised, or apologetic, or admiring or condescending. What we make of her is already mixed up with what we have made of ourselves; it is something different from her own taut, unrelenting self-making …

… [She] needs no one’s condescension. She was poor in nothing. She was never beaten. And the final evidence lies in that part of her which remained ‘a child to the end of the chapter’. For that part of her – the refusal to become careful and ‘knowing’, the resilient assent to new experience – is exactly that part which most of us are careful to cauterise, and then to protect with the callouses of our worldly-wise complicities.

This is E.P. Thompson on Mary Wollstonecraft;¹ but the fact that his remarks seem as true of Iris Murdoch points to something radical, pioneering and uncompromising in both, in their different ages. ‘Like Socrates, perhaps, love is the only subject on which I am really expert?’ Iris later wondered;² love and power the matters in which she was well-versed.

Iris’s love for the Frank who remained, with others of pre-war Oxford, a figure on a Grecian urn, forever young and forever loved, makes for a noble, simplified tale. The truth is more complex. An angry letter of Michael Foot’s to Frank on 25 May 1943 warned him against taking suicidal risks in his longing to finish either Fascism or himself: ‘Neither a true choice nor a true opposition.’ Leo Pliatzky, too, feared that Frank took foolhardy risks at the end. Iris objected: ‘He would have found the tensions unbearable later, it’s true, but he … so much knew how to enjoy living. I cannot regard him as a suicide, however noble-minded.’³If Frank’s avowal a few weeks before his death that ‘I can honestly say I’ve never been in love’ was partly self-protection, then any carelessness of his own survival – especially in the fateful decision to enter Bulgaria⁴ – could also be read as peevish, reckless, even vengeful. Michael Kullman, an intensely self-destructive âme damnée and prize student of Isaiah Berlin, reminded Iris of Frank in May 1953, with his torrent of restless talk;⁵ six weeks later, at an Oxford party, a friend of Frank’s since Winchester⁶ spoke of him. Iris noted that ‘a strong far off thing’ touched her in the middle of the froth of cleverness and flirtation. Had Frank survived, his impact might have been shorter-lived. By dying so young he marked Iris indelibly, lived always within her imagination, an emblem of gentle strength, courage, truth. She wrote in 1967: ‘I miss him … more and more. It almost seems as if wanting to see him & talk to him were something real and possible.’⁷

During 1944–45 Iris read much Henry James and identified strongly with his heroines – ‘the rather splendid but definitely unsound character whom the author slowly & ruthlessly crushes in the second volume’.⁸ Like the story of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, Iris’s younger life abounds – to borrow James’s idiom – in a degree of headstrong foolishness that must gratify the severest of judges, and constitute an appeal to the understanding of others. It may cheer the hostile or puzzle admirers that she claimed what some men assume as a birthright, the right to run close friendships and even love-affairs concurrently.⁹ ‘What she felt about each … was totally genuine and without guile,’ John Bayley later commented.¹⁰ If this was (in her) a symptom of largeness of soul, it did not always make for happiness. ‘Amoureuse/heureuse are contradictions in my universe of discourse,’¹¹ she wrote. The period of 1938–56, containing especially the ‘lucid abnormality'* of the war years and their aftermath, resembles James Joyce’s years in Dublin. The adventures of their youth, meditated upon and inwardly digested for the next forty years, provided both with the experience that their fiction shares with us.

There are, as in much modern narrative, problems of perspective. Many a Murdoch novel ends with a sudden and vertiginous shift in point-of-view, where we unexpectedly discover that one character has obsessively for years loved a highly improbable other.¹² Frank, Franz Steiner, Elias Canetti and John Bayley possess the imaginative foreground. But a 1946 interlude conveys the arbitrariness of the time. What happens, Iris’s novels show, owes much to chance – because the heart is giddy, its desires ‘crooked as corkscrews’. Backtracking is necessary.

Iris was all her life a prolific correspondent. To Philippa Foot she wrote in 1968, ‘I can live in letters'; a recurrent idea, too, in her journals. Face-to-face communication, except with remarkably few close friends, could be shy and inhibited. On paper, being a writer, she experienced freedom. The epistolary habit had started while she was still at school in the 1930s, as her romance, sight unseen, with James Henderson Scott makes clear.¹³ In October 1945 she wrote, ‘When I was younger, I remember, I loved writing long letters to all sorts of people – a kind of exhibitionism I daresay'; and that December, ‘I’m very talkative on paper.’¹⁴ The war was the last great age of letter-writing.¹⁵ Like visits to the mothers of soldier-friends posted overseas,¹⁶ letter-writing was morale-building. Iris describes her wartime letters as ‘talk’, or direct address. It was conversation by other means, ‘living on paper’.¹⁷ That letter-writing is also a matter of the invention of personae or masks she is half-aware: ‘one persists in considering the other person as something quite separate from his letters’.¹⁸

On 28 February 1946 Iris wrote to Hal Lidderdale from Austria, listening to the warm Italian wind roaring about the house and causing melted snow to fall from the roof in a series of shattering crashes. She wrote to convey une histoire de fous (a ‘madcap tale'). Ten days before, their mutual friend David Hicks had written to jilt her, after a rapid engagement two months earlier. She wanted to render some account of herself.

One Oxford contemporary believed Iris’s reserve in 1938 a function ‘not of shyness but of self-confidence’.¹⁹ It was both. Despite the appearance of assurance, she had often felt as a student ‘tongue-tied & unsure of myself & frightened of everyone’,²⁰ admiring the confidence that took so many older Somervillians both into the Party and into same-sex love-affairs. She found particularly glamorous the quiet but ‘wild’ and ‘adorable’²¹ Lucy Klatschko (later Sister Marian) and the ‘very dashing’ Carol Stewart (later Graham-Harrison) for ‘having much more of the jungle animal than my own contemporaries & successors’. Unlike that fully pre-war Oxford generation, hers, because of the war, had ‘not had enough decent men around to develop the fighting instincts,.²²

These stalwarts came up to Oxford in 1936, two years before Iris. David Hicks pursued both – Lucy ‘relentlessly’.²³ She thought him a conventional enough chap whose wild and carefree persona was assumed.²⁴ Hal Lidderdale described David as a ‘lissom gallant’ with a shock of dark hair and formidable physical strength.²⁵

Good-looking, saturnine, talented, penniless, very attractive and, like Iris, a frustrated writer and poet, he also had the reputation of a Don Juan. He had a dry wit and did not suffer fools gladly. He had been spoiled by his teacher-mother, and his sisters were in awe of him.

The imaginative appeal of Frank, a year younger than Iris, lay in his heroic idealism. David’s was earthbound. He was the first man to kiss her, one evening in her first term in autumn 1938 at 124 Walton Street, probably in his flat, the first to awaken in her physical passion, ‘in addition to a great tenderness … [and] the absolute romantic devotion of … extreme youth’. She was fresh from school; he, three years her senior, must have seemed mature and sophisticated. She spent the snowy Boxing Day evening of 1938 with David’s family in Palmer’s Green, North London.²⁶ Early in January 1939, nettled by the directness with which she tried to sympathise with a momentary sense of inadequacy, and vexed, she believed, by her ‘quaint virginity cult’, he rejected her, making ‘a few unpleasant remarks’. She was proud. This stung. David had graduated from Worcester College in 1938 and was taking a Diploma of Education before departing England in the summer of 1939. He spent the war teaching English for the British Council in Egypt and Persia. Iris and he did not meet again until November 1945, nearly seven years later. ‘Time. Funny substance. I feel differently about it these days,’ she wrote to Leo. ‘So much of one’s life is in a state of suspension.’²⁷

The laws of love – of ‘Oh, qu’ils sont pittoresques, les trains manqués’* – determined that she brooded about him: ‘You must have met me at an impressionable age.’²⁸ A much-loved only child whose parents, by her own admission, had brought her up too leniently, head girl and a ‘star’ at both her schools, Iris resembled – as David wrote to her in 1939 – a ‘fairy-tale princess’.²⁹ ‘It must be the way I do my hair – I shall have to change it.’ Fairy-tale princesses, following some statutory ordeal, are generally granted their secret wish. A ‘golden girl for whom the waters parted’,³⁰ she had grown used to conquest. Gaining an outstanding first in 1942 further helped: ‘You dreary Firsts, with your built-in-for-life sense of superiority!’ as one of her novel characters puts it.³¹ David, the ‘twisted satyr of Palmer’s Green’, had dared to turn her down, with a youthful, casual brutality that rankled. His witticisms bruised her, and she rallied pugnaciously, a Beatrice to his Benedick, though she records that she tended towards sounding ‘earnest’ and silly, he to being smart and sounding slick. He had accurately predicted that she would get only a second in Mods. She minded the prediction.

She wrote him (but did not send) many poems, one subtitled ‘DH (may he rot)';³² and a single yearly letter from 1940 to 1943, waiting a year to answer his first reply. In 1941 she enquires with rehearsed casualness whether he happens now to be married to Alastine Bell, with whom he had been obsessively in love, ‘or not’. By 1943, in answer to his second reply, she brings him news of Alastine’s marriage to George Lehmann. She comments in her fifth, in January 1944, ‘your memory is accurate. We met remarkably little. I suppose I have a myth-making mind – I certainly invented a character for you … I should be happy to start again from scratch.’ After Frank’s death she wrote to David frequently. She closely tied her two writing-habits together – letters, novels – when she wrote from Brussels in 1945. They had then not met for nearly seven years:

Indeed she requests ‘an up-to-date photograph … I find I’ve entirely forgotten what you look like. And I hate not to know what my friends look like.’ From Brussels in the autumn of 1945, Boxing Day 1938 now seemed ‘the essence of a dream’.³³

‘When this war is over,’ wrote Frank in August 1942, ‘there will have to be an enormous deal of kindness to atone for all the senseless hate & suffering of these years.’ He wrote of the need for a ‘new communal ethic’. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA),* the first agency to operate in the name of the United Nations, was designed to address the predicament of the entire populations of liberated countries,³⁴ including the enormous and unprecedented problems of housing, clothing, feeding and finally – with luck – rehabilitating the more than eight million refugees who even in 1944 found themselves homeless, stateless and adrift (in post-war Europe a year later, the figure was very much larger). Torn from their homes, battered into despair, many had been treated as ‘animals or slaves’.³⁵

Iris wrote to Hicks in January 1944, ‘I am not at all built to be a civil servant. I am inefficient & administration depresses me.’ She wished to escape out of ‘this half-baked intellectualism into UNRRA’s Europe & do some thoroughly menial & absorbing job … then come back to England at the age of 29 and play the experienced woman round what’s left of Bloomsbury’. In addition to writing novels, she wished to teach philosophy at a university, but sought wider experience first. In May 1944 the thought of spending the post-war years in England appalled her ‘to the point of suicidal mania’, partly because she wanted to escape an emotional tangle. She separated painfully in the early summer of 1944 from ‘utterly adorable but wicked’ Balogh, and claimed by September no longer to be ‘bleeding at every artery’^{36 –} but was having a ‘rather decorous affaire [sic] with a French diplomat, which is at any rate good for my French’.³⁷ (Since this diplomat, Olivier Wormser, was, like another wartime lover, an acquaintance of Balogh’s, these affaires may have been partly revenge for Balogh’s infidelities).³⁸

The day after D-Day, Wednesday, 7 June, when Frank was waiting to be shot,³⁹ Iris listened, much moved, to the live radio reporting of the Normandy landings, feeling ‘a sensation of wanting to cry & cheer at the same time that I can’t remember having before except at certain moments in the Spanish War … it’s good to see the bloody English people getting really thrilled about something’. She applied to join UNRRA the same month, giving Nickie Kaldor, Eduard Frankel (sic), Isobel Henderson, Donald MacKinnon and BMB as referees. She wanted to work on the ‘relief’ side – it might mean going abroad and attaining first-hand experience. Throughout the war she had complained: ‘I feel very bitterly about the second-handness of most of my knowledge of life,’⁴⁰ and felt ‘savage jealousy’ of those – mainly men – who had escaped England for the duration.⁴¹ Her application form records that she wanted ‘to serve the liberated peoples … whether in a refugee camp or at a desk, being as near as possible to the actual scene’, and expresses particular interest in France.

Alas, she got ‘rehabilitation’ instead: ‘Who is going to listen to UNRRA on rehabilitation?’ It meant staying in London, and she started work at the European Regional Office of UNRRA at 11 Portland Place by Monday, 12 June 1944.⁴² Her plans to use ‘disgraceful string-pulling’ to get abroad – ‘the number of people I know in influential positions who are devoted to my cause has increased in the last year’ – came to nothing. That September she was refused a job on a flying-squad through inability to ride a motorbike.⁴³ She was stuck with UNRRA in London for a further vexing fifteen months.

Though in later life she was to speak of her two years with UNRRA as ‘one of the most wonderful things I ever did’,⁴⁴ the London period was full of frustrations. The outfit was run,

Iris became fond of some of them, notwithstanding their tendency to mistake her for a clerk or girl messenger, but judged it a pretty unstable show. At her level a jungle life prevailed. As well as go-getting Americans and Canadians UNRRA in London was ‘rather too full of inept British civil servants (… me, for instance), uncoordinated foreigners with Special Ideas & an imperfect command of English. Pretty fair chaos. V. many noble-hearted good-intentioned people – [who] drown in the general flood of mediocrity & muddle.’ So it amounted to ‘a very mad show, full of extremely nice people with no esprit de corps & no glimmering of an idea how to make an Administration go’.⁴⁵ To Leo she wrote: ‘All is chaos as usual at UNRRA … At the moment I am working a ten hour day, getting supplies out to Displaced Persons, and that is good. But next week?’⁴⁶ She especially liked the Czechs her work brought her into contact with, and – though feeling lost, disaffected and depressed – quipped dispassionately that a little social success ‘relieves & rehabilitates’ her vanity. In November 1944 she visited the Rehabilitation Centre in Egham, Surrey.⁴⁷ It was sometimes hard to see how any of her work was helping Europe’s eight million displaced people.

In December 1944 she wrote to David Hicks recounting the death of ‘my old friend Frank Thompson’. She had over the years commended Frank to Hicks – ‘a pleasant chap in case you ever run into him in Cairo’ – fearing simultaneously that he might be too young and also too simple and warm-hearted for David’s tastes. Now, in successive letters, she candidly mourns him. ‘He was a brilliant & full-blooded creature’, and ‘one of the best men I ever knew’. She also reports Noel Eldridge’s death – ‘one of those “hopeless” characters that contrive to be terribly lovable’.⁴⁸ She questions the urge to praise people when there’s no longer any point in it – ‘A sort of conscience-money perhaps.’ The war no longer seems a peculiar interval after which one would simply pick up where pre-war existence left off. The ‘golden lads & lasses period … all very golden & beautiful & pure-hearted’ had gone, and for good. Paris was liberated on 25 August 1944. By that December, though the war in Europe still had half a year to run and there were pockets of German resistance to the north, it had become ‘a city one’s friends go off to for a week and come back from. Even books are coming across the Channel … very refreshing & exciting.’⁴⁹ Iris could now ‘sniff the post-war political atmosphere’.

Winter 1945 was real, with snow and cold, and that ‘absolute failure of the imagination to conceive of ever being warm & human again’.⁵⁰ She read the German philosopher and social scientist Wilhelm Dilthey.⁵¹ UNRRA frustrated her intensely: ‘Nothing practical is ever decided’, they were ‘stooges to the military’, and she felt ‘sick & degraded and incompetent’. In March she was back after a long bout of ‘flu in the familiar atmosphere of ‘inactivity & gossip & intrigue for better jobs’. Her ‘incompetence & dreamy unpracticalness … prevent[ed her] landing a real job’. She had been rereading Dostoevsky’s The Possessed and found it the ‘greatest novel in the world’. She liked the way it

The complex Austrian poet Rilke, too, with his lyrical ability to make abstract ideas tangible, for whom poetry was a religious vocation, makes her excited, bewildered and ‘melted’, causing ‘that liquefaction of the inner organs which fine poetry produces’. She drew solace from him over the following year, especially from his Letters to a Young Poet.

In late February Michael Foot cast up as a result of a prisoner-of-war exchange the previous November: the Germans demanded and got four of their men with Iron Crosses in exchange for a prisoner who had ‘given them so much trouble’. It turned out that in the late summer of 1944 his party had run into a German patrol in the tiny occupied enclave of Saint-Nazaire. Of about a hundred SAS men taken prisoner that year, Michael was one of only six who returned alive, repatriated on a stretcher after months in a hospital in Rennes, shaven-headed, with a broken skull, standing and walking with difficulty. His top vertebra had been cracked by a collaborator’s pitchfork and his left side – face included – paralysed during his fourth brave attempt to escape. Philippa soon moved out of Seaforth, first to Michael’s flat in Rochester Row, where a fieldmouse with tufted ears sometimes lodged in the gas-oven. (Always hospitable, they named the fieldmouse ‘Nova’ after the film-star Nova Pilbeam; her residence sometimes necessitated a cold supper.) They were married that June. Philippa soon returned to Somerville to study philosophy on the grant she had been promised when she went down.⁵² Iris, though a little envious, still wished to wander before settling down, and noted: ‘Philippa is much the better philosopher than me.’⁵³ Michael resumed his studies at New College.

Iris, left to her own devices, spent the March days in a ‘slightly irritated dream’. She lost her temper with an anti-Yalta Pole for whom she none the less felt sorry.⁵⁴ She walked up and down her long and spacious attic and brewed tea at hourly intervals and wrote and read poetry and stood at the window watching the trains go by.* She visited the tufted ducks in St James’s Park and felt lonely. The ‘affaire’ with Balogh was over: he had married an ‘extroverted … hunting and shooting woman with lots of money’.⁵⁵ Her French diplomat had returned to liberated Paris. Frank was no more. Sometimes, especially after a French film, she felt ‘desperate again for human intimacy & a man & the insanities of being in love’.⁵⁶ VE-Day, 8 May, found her thanking God in Westminster Cathedral, then at a party at Treasury Principal Hilary Sinclair’s flat just off the Strand, with something villainous to drink (he was teetotal), then joining the crowds milling in St James’s Park and finally doing ‘all the right things … such as dancing in Piccadilly at 2am’.⁵⁷ The return to the National Gallery in early June of about fifty pictures from a disused slate mine in north Wales – ‘Sir Kenneth Clark’s favourites, I suppose’ – filled her with ‘heavenly bliss': ‘The Van Eyck man and pregnant wife. Bellini & Mantegna agonies. Titian Noli me Tangere. Rubens’s Bacchus & Ariadne … Rembrandt’s portraits of self & of an old lady. His small Woman Bathing (Lovely!). A delicious Claude fading into blue blue blue …’ She was delirious with the first shock. During the war there had commonly been one single picture on display each month. The new abundance by contrast felt ‘really’, she wrote emphatically, like peace.⁵⁸

By now the UNRRA wheels were fully turning at last and she had far too much to do. Although a year in UNRRA had shown her that universal brotherhood is not a condition that comes naturally to people,⁵⁹ she could sometimes see that what one did in one’s office had some remote connexion with someone or other over there being fed, clothed, calmed, who wouldn’t otherwise be.

She wished from late 1944 that she felt more confidence in the Labour Party, with whose politics she actively engaged, by the following May sitting on the interviewing board to look at the chaps who had ‘the effrontery’ to offer themselves as possible Labour candidates for Westminster – she found them ‘uniformly frightful (ignorant, opinionated, careerist, insensitive)’.* Iris also underwent a change in her view of the USSR at some undisclosed point,⁶⁰ and became disillusioned with the CP. In late May 1945 she was also reading Koestler’s brilliant, complex, prophetic The Yogi and the Commissar – demythologising sequel to his savagely anti-Communist Darkness at Noon – with its bleak survey of the Soviet experiment ('The End of an Illusion'), and called it ‘nasty, clever’.⁶¹ Possibly what was ‘nasty’ was Koestler’s unmasking of the wilful self-duping of the European left, of the irrational surrender of their critical faculties when confronted by the naked horror of USSR state terrorism, of deportations and atrocities, labour camps and systematic lying. He called, without turning his back on the political, for a recovery of the spiritual and contemplative, analysing the difficulties of that recovery. Neither the saint nor the revolutionary could save us, argued Koestler, only some synthesis of the two. Since his schooldays he had never ‘ceased to marvel each year at the fool [he] had been the year before’.⁶² It may be inferred that Iris felt similarly: only Koestler saw, she wrote, ‘what are the real moral problems of now’.⁶³

Tommy Balogh strongly felt that the Labour Party approach was the right one.⁶⁴ His Hungarian origins and wartime contacts might also have helped sensitise Iris to Soviet intentions vis-à-vis smaller neighbouring countries, having watched how they had eaten up the Baltic states. If this chronology is accurate, Iris had been in the Party for between five and six years. Her recorded nostalgia for it lasted until 1953, when she wrote of Sartre’s novels that ‘all who felt the Spanish War as a personal wound, and all disappointed and vainly passionate lovers of Communism will hear these novels speak to them’.⁶⁵ She had greeted the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944 with the hope that something in post-war Europe would be neither Americanised nor Russianised.⁶⁶ Late in 1945 she recorded ‘shifts of opinion about the USSR';⁶⁷ and by February 1946 Raymond Queneau observed that she had left the CP for the Labour Party. On 27 July 1945, after Attlee’s landslide election victory, she wrote ecstatically: ‘Oh wonderful people of Britain! After all the ballyhoo and eyewash, they’ve had the guts to vote against Winston! … I can’t help feeling that to be young is very heaven!’⁶⁸

That month she expects shortly to leave to work either on a ‘welfare’ supply programme for DPs or to be sent to Frankfurt. In early August she visits Westminster Cathedral, watches a boy fall impetuously to his knees with bowed head and listens to the faint chink and rattle of his rosary. She finds it ‘inexpressibly moving’ and is reminded of a young Guards officer she once met on a railway station in Scotland, with a kestrel on his wrist which had been with him all through the war. ‘The sudden rush of feeling, blinding, darkening.’ The candles flickering before the saints also bring to mind ‘how Frank once lit a candle to the Virgin Mary. I am glad he was here with me … Coming out, I see a high bank of pure white cloud with the sun upon it. It seems to be the light which fills the world. Blinded with joy I sing in my heart.’⁶⁹ On 11 August – VJ-Day – Londoners were showering torn paper, in imitation of New York.

Finally, after another month of waiting, UNRRA sent Iris abroad for ten months; not to Frankfurt as she expected, but to Austria, via a spell in Brussels.⁷⁰ On Tuesday, 4 September she witnessed Brussels’s Fête de la Liberation. It was her first real time abroad since Geneva and the League of Nations ten years before. Ostend reminded her less of Belfast than she expected, more of a Cornish fishing village. Bruges’s beauty was ‘unbearable’ and its Memlings exquisite. In Antwerp, after seeing the cathedral by moonlight and following a brass band about at eleven at night, she ended up in a café drinking cognac by herself, ‘still stunned with admiration of this wonderful continental habit of having no licensing hours’. Brussels was glorious. The cobbled streets, the soft twitter of French and harsher music of Flemish, the indefinitely open thousand and one cafés for talking the new ideas in for hours on end were sources of intoxication. The ridiculous little dogs, the way everyone rode on the running boards of the little clanging trams and never paid their fare, were others.⁷¹ She wrote to Marjorie Boulton:

In her office in Brussels she hung an expensive reproduction of Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus – ‘one of the most poetic of great pictures’.

As for Seaforth, Philippa’s sister Marion Bosanquet had moved in, Iris helping to sustain the fiction that they shared the protected tenancy of sixty guineas per year. There Marion stayed for the following fifty and more years. Iris still spoke nostalgically of the flat as late as 1994.⁷³

Iris was glad to be away from London and from the remains of old entanglements and bitternesses, though she was ‘desolated & furious’ not to have been there when David Hicks finally returned. After nearly seven years apart, and with home leave for David withdrawn at the last moment, they missed each other by a week, and counted themselves ‘star-crossed’. The war, and now its aftermath, meant that ‘everyone’s lives are being mucked up’, as she had earlier noted: it ‘disturbed all one’s feelings of the future very profoundly’.⁷⁴

If to Marjorie Boulton she emphasised café-talk, to David she dilated on loneliness. Twenty minutes with a highbrow Brussels bookseller – almost certainly Ernest Collet, who, when feeling low, would announce from time to time, ‘Demain je vais partir pour le Congo Belge’ – was, she now claimed, her only real conversation in Brussels. (In fact she ran into Noel Martin who was driving a jeep in the Place du Nord and they had dinner, during which she talked of Balogh; she also met Hal Lidderdale.⁷⁵ In The Sea, The Sea she called this ‘that rather moving time of the reunion of survivors’.⁷⁶) The bookseller and she discussed the Woman existentialist’, and he used the term with a casualness that showed it – to her excitement – to be ‘an accepted usage!’ That she is in a partly French-speaking city is a matter for joy and consolation. She reads Julien Gracq’s Un Beau tenebreux. The desire of the ‘modern French school’ philosophically to denude life in their novels fascinates her.

Iris’s love-affair – she spells it ‘affaire’ – with France and all things French was of its epoch, an intoxication of the British intelligentsia which Koestler had lampooned as ‘French ‘flu’.*

Doris Lessing would write fifty years later: ‘there is no way now of telling how powerful a dream France was then … now that our cooking and our coffee and our clothes are good, it is hard to remember how people yearned for France, as for civilization itself’.⁷⁷ In 1944 Iris longed to travel and meet ‘above all French people! How far, I wonder, will one be able to – with no money, & with a nagging useless irresolute sort of conscience?’ She noted after the liberation of Paris that ‘London has shown considerable restrained enthusiasm … & one sees tricolours about'; and ‘if France lives, Europe will live’. Her letters are full of cries of enthusiasm about French people, French films, French songs, Baudelaire and Mauriac ‘& the dangerous intellects of the Church & Giraudoux & Aragon & Jeanne d’Arc and what have you’. She quipped that ‘the French are the real Master-race’,⁷⁸ while French Existentialists induce an ‘intellectual exaltation’ that recalls for her an ecstatic phrase she loved from Valery – ‘pluie/Ou on se jette à genoux’.⁷⁹ While cooling her heels in London throughout 1945 she was getting ‘fascinating stuff’ over from France:

In Brussels she discovers ‘a wonderful novelist … and … Sartre’s mistress’ – Simone de Beauvoir⁸¹ – ‘her first play now running magnificently in Paris’, and dreams that she meets her.⁸² ‘I propose to hang around a lot in Paris in the next ten years or so,’ she warns David. Two features of the new Existentialist climate compel her; both connect with novel-writing. Firstly, ‘what excites me more than the philosophy itself is the extraordinary bunch of good novelists it is inspiring’.⁸³ Secondly, ‘the fact that the Church is very much with them still’ makes them, for Iris ‘far more exciting than the English novelists … it is still the eternal Good & Evil which is in question’.⁸⁴ (Not all her pleasures were highbrow: she bought a paperback of Gabriel Chevallier’s satirical 1934 novel Clochemerle that September too.) She typifies Existentialism, acclaimed as the ‘new philosophy of France & the philosophy of this age’ thus:

In early November, moreover, she met Sartre in person. He was in Brussels to lecture on Existentialism, being mobbed by larger crowds than Chico Marx (whom, probably because David was a Marx Brothers fan, Iris telephoned⁸⁶). Iris was introduced to Sartre at a select gathering after the lecture, and met him again at an interminable café-séance the following day. These were their only meetings.⁸⁷ To Hal Lidderdale she described Sartre as

His talk is ruthlessly gorgeously lucid – & I begin to like his ideas more & more. He’s accused by many of being a corruptor of the youth (philosophe pernicieux, mauvais maitre as an article that I read this morning started) – he’s certainly excessively obsessed, in his novels, with the more horrid aspects of sex. But his writing and talking on morals – will, liberty, choice – is hard & lucid & invigorating. It’s the real thing – so exciting, & so sobering, to meet at last – after turning away in despair from the shallow stupid milk & water ‘ethics’ of English ‘moralists’ like Ross & Prichard … Nietzsche’s and Schopenhauer’s great big mistakes are worth infinitely more than the colourless finicky liberalism of our Rosses & Cook Wilsons.*

Yesterday, another joy, I heard Charles Trenet sing … There’s something magical about almost any tolerable song … It was wonderful.⁸⁹

Sartre wrote ‘philosophy, novels, plays, cinema, journalism!’⁹⁰ No wonder the stuffy English were suspicious of such versatility. Iris thought his moral philosophy was exactly what Oxford philosophy needed to have injected in its veins to rejuvenate it. By December 1945 she is reading Being and Nothingness. Sartre had signed her copy. It gave her the feeling that it was possible, after nearly four years of war work, to get back to philosophy again.

By December 1945 something else momentous had happened. She and David met again. Iris arranged to leave Brussels on Thursday, 16 November, after both phoning and writing to him to finalise their arrangements. She returned to Brussels two weeks later. During the visit to London she re-read Frank’s letters and felt ‘very unhappy and very proud’.⁹¹ The intervening days were, she told Hal, ‘a tornado … ten days that positively shook the world’. On the second day she and David decided to marry, and would have completed the business at once, ‘only there wasn’t enough time’. Iris was alarmed that his parents evidently doubted whether she had a strong sense of humour. She also felt tongue-tied and overwhelmed by shyness in front of his friends. Nonetheless they were now officially engaged. Immediately on her return to Brussels she wrote to him: ‘It would have been so dreadful if we had not fallen in love, after that build-up.’

The build-up had indeed been extraordinary. As a student Iris had written apologetically to Paddy O’Regan: ‘my physical affections come & go like the wind, and enjoy, like a butterfly, the blossom nearest to them’.⁹² There were exceptions, and she was later able to write about obsessional love in, for example, The Sea, The Sea, because she inhabited it from inside. Over nearly seven years of separation, but especially during 1945, she had written to David, tried to picture his life, to interest him in her separate existence and history, pursued him long and with ingenuity. She was, at least until their November meeting, making most of the running. He was more casual about his movements, about giving her his address, indeed about replying.

While Frank loved Iris’s ‘lofty’ vein, and mirrored it, David, four years older than Frank, scorns and questions it. While her letters to Frank show her idealism and fastidiousness, those to David on occasion affect a tone of cool and disenchanted worldliness, sometimes of sexual frankness, as if vying with him to sound emancipated. His letters to her before 1946 have not survived, but hers show that he is puzzled by her attempt to demonstrate how grown-up she has become, how remote from the adolescent ‘fairy-tale princess’ of 1938. In 1941, in comparing him to Alcibiades, she implies that he too has ‘all the qualities of greatness except character’, and recalls how at Oxford ‘I loved you, & hated you’. ‘There are remarkably few men who have ever stirred me to any passion,’ she wrote in 1943. ‘You, for reasons which I can’t conceive of, were one of the few.’ He would be a nice bloke, she adds, if he could get over his tendency to ‘sneer at people & hurt them unnecessarily’. In 1944: ‘You were always a casual, cynical chap.’ In March 1945 she testifies: ‘You’ve always had a fairly electrical effect.’ And, a few weeks before their re-meeting, she writes to him that he has two faces, ‘a dark one & a bright one’: You used to be rather a cruel & insolent young brute, David. Sometimes the only adequate reply would have been a slap in the face … you are a wild, bad character & … I am a more sober goody-goody character … [Yet] you know without my telling you, how much everything that is wild in you is bound up with the things I love most in you …

Iris tried to interest David in the strange story of Seaforth, and in her novel-writing. She suffers ‘many extremities for love’. A letter started on 20 May 1944 ran:

Complaints about loneliness led to what she termed an ‘eagle-eyed searching for a different sort of relationship’. During 1945 she wrote him thirty letters. His interest was actively ignited. She told him about Fitzrovia; he was frequenting its pubs. It was a world she just

So volatile were Tambimuttu and his ‘set’ that one had to ‘develop a sort of shockproof relationship to cope’. The month before their meeting was a time for candour. David had evidently blazed a trail through some of the girls frequenting Fitzrovia, and found them disappointing; Iris declared herself (in a letter she later disavowed as trying falsely to mirror his cynicism) simultaneously jealous and available. In September she feels ‘despair & loneliness & self-hatred’ yet writes in her ‘old lofty vein’. The tone of her letters leading up to their meeting that November is penitent, not about taking lovers, but about the hurt which can be entailed. Her discovery that she can cold-bloodedly hurt others as well as brood on her own hurt leads to a discussion of the religious sense. She promises soon to tell him ‘the Story of my Life … Not so eventful, but dismal & bitter the way lives tend to become. One wants to be pitied? One wants, more, to be judged … I have done things I could weep with shame about … You should be wary too … I have far more of the bitch about me than you’ve probably ever realised.’ It is perfectly feasible, she notes, to be both a ‘bitch’ and a prude.

there are certain subtle treasons that are hard to describe. In general, I notice a tendency to want to be loved, & not engage myself in return – that, plus a really dangerous lack of decision & will power where other people’s feelings are concerned. A sort of paralysis, maybe, before the picture of myself which I see in someone who loves me. Mortal sin; hell, not purgatory … The real crash as far as my self-esteem & general psychological security was concerned was this Hungarian story … The whole process took about 18 months & left me in a state of utter despair & self-hatred.

It had been a quadrilateral tale that would make ‘rather a good psychological novel’, and began, she recounts, when she took Michael Foot – ‘terribly tense & tangled emotionally, very intelligent, honest & good’ – as a lover from misguided generosity. He was in love with her; she was sorry for him; like so many Wykehamists, Frank for a while included, he left school unsure of his sexuality; and he was likely to be sent abroad at any moment. In the midst of this, the ‘brilliant & darling Pip Bosanquet, very tender & adorable, yet morally tough & subtle, & with lots of will & self-control’ came to lodge at Seaforth. Philippa was then breaking off her relations with Balogh, ‘a horribly clever Hungarian Jew … age 38, very brilliant & attractive & (without really realizing it himself) quite unscrupulous. Self-deception to infinity.’ Iris and Balogh fell terribly in love, were at first ‘insanely happy’. Having hitherto ‘shunned the unrestrained in human relations’, she discovered in herself ‘extravagant cravings for affection’.⁹³ Balogh, though promiscuous, did not tolerate rivals. Somehow Iris ‘managed to avert my eyes’ to the ‘rather hideous’ sufferings they visited on Michael.

Iris depicts herself to David, in her infatuation, as ‘utterly devoid of will-power’, and Balogh, as one might when transferring responsibility to another, as the ‘devil incarnate’. It was, she argues, love for Balogh that prompted her casual cruelty.

Finally, she recounts that Philippa fell in love with Michael, ‘most successfully salvaged what was left after my behaviour, & married him & they are now living happily in Oxford’.

There are two other men she wants David to know about, ‘not because they come into the story directly, but because I rather loved them,&lost them, about the same time, when I was looking round for support’. One is Frank, whose bravery and death she again evokes; the other Donald MacKinnon.

Donald is rather like Bernanos’s country priest⁹⁴ – he carries his love for people & his mistrust of himself almost to the edge of insanity. Yet he is lucid and unsentimental & tough & really good in the strong brave way which is real goodness, & not self-love with a twist. He’s also, incidentally, a philosopher of the first quality. I think I’ll always be a bit in love with Donald, in a Mary Magdalen-Christ sort of way. After meeting him one really understands how the impact of one personality could change one’s view of the universe, & how these people at Galilee got up & followed without any hesitation. I learnt all sorts of things from Donald. Then a moment came when his wife began to imagine (wrongly I am sure) that he was falling in love with me.

As a result Donald broke off their friendship,⁹⁵ which, she says, ‘must have needed a great strength and courage for which I admire & love him. Not I mean because he’s in love with me – he isn’t – but because he must have known his intervention could have been decisive.’ The reference to herself as Mary Magdalene, to Donald as Christ, the demonising of Balogh, relate also to the dramatic underside of Iris’s religious nature. In two contemporary letters she refers to Arthur Koestler, à propos his Yogi and Commissar, as ‘Satan’, noting that ‘the best moralists are satanic’. Heidegger later was ‘possibly Lucifer in person’.⁹⁶ The cases are distinct but the tendency similar. Her imagination lent itself to allegory. And Balogh was not her only demonic male lover. David came (for her) from the same stable. Nor were these her last.

‘These people & these events are part of me,’ she ended her account to David. ‘There are lots of other people, of course, & lots of other men, before & since, & some of them important, but not so much …’ Twenty-three years later, she remarked to Laura Cecil that ‘there were friendships which influenced me deeply when I was younger, and something to do with them is in my books because it is within me’.⁹⁷ The ‘dragon-eating-its-own-tail’ aspect of her plotting, as she put it, her love of symmetrical pairings, her sense of a group of people living through some unconscious myth, of dark irrational forces: all of these have one origin in Seaforth. Another aspect is a recurring constellation of a hesitant lover, a bold warrior and an absent sage.⁹⁸

The 1943–44 reversals marked an epoch, a charged memory always. For Iris, Seaforth and sexual love meant loss of Eden. For Michael and Philippa Foot, Seaforth meant only the place they first met. Thomas Balogh, who often had other women around when she was seeing him – ‘Peggy Joseph and Margaret Stewart. Probably others as well’⁹⁹ – meant little to Philippa. Michael (who declined years later, on being formally introduced, to shake Balogh by the hand) noted in passing that Iris ‘made a formidable enemy’, but recovered well and was otherwise untouched. Iris and he met, though not often, despite a lasting coolness, in later years. For Iris the scale of events was different. She had hurt her own better self, lost a ‘family’. Some lines from ‘Agamemnon Class, 1939’ gain in significance: the assertions that members of Fraenkel’s class ‘ruled a chaste soul’ and knew nothing yet either of pain, sin, guilt or death, or of ‘betrayal of lover and friend’. It is no accident that her ‘saint’ Stuart in The Good Apprentice wants to retain innocence by never entering the ‘machine’ of sexual love;* nor that Ducane in The Nice and the Good finds the origins of war, slavery and ‘all man’s inhumanity to man’ in the ‘cool, self-Justifying selfishness of quite ordinary people’.

War produced tales stranger than Seaforth; while many peacetime marriages involved less allowable, and daily, cruelties. Nonetheless if Seaforth was Iris’s first home-made family, the predatory face of love – Racine’s ‘Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée’ – destroyed it. By 1945 her adoptive father MacKinnon was incommunicado, one ‘brother’ dead, another married and estranged, and Philippa was thoroughly attached to Michael. This stood between them, as Iris wrote to David: ‘There are some things no friendship can survive. I still feel sick when I think of her & Michael – & they must feel the same when they think of me.’¹⁰⁰ ‘Losing you, & losing you in that way,’ she later wrote to Philippa, ‘was one of the worst things that ever happened to me.’

Twenty years later Iris recalled this as a time when she felt ‘rejected by D[onald] & P[hilippa]’ but saved by someone Donald had introduced her to: ‘J[esus] C[hrist]’. It is not surprising that from 1945 on she refused entirely to separate religion and philosophy, or that their willingness to engage with religion is precisely what commends certain Existentialist writers to her. In her letters after the madcap London days, she declares hers precipitately to be an ‘essentially religious nature … These germs in the blood must be confessed to.’ How is such a nature to be defined? ‘A certain sense of sin combined with a certain sense of beauty? Something like that …’ David, by contrast, thinks religion is only faith in dogma. This, for Iris, is not a necessary part of it, ‘though I daresay a sort of humility & submission is’. She accepts that she has it, he hasn’t, and she will have to go to mass in the cathedral all by herself.¹⁰¹

‘Disasters I’ve met with lately make me mistrust relationships which go on from writing to meeting … though there may be bombs I give up expecting angels through the roof.’¹⁰² Iris’s expectations of ‘angels through the roof, and her propensity for disasters alike, were not in fact so easily exhausted. Her letters to David after their London idyll show that extreme mixture of hope and fear that accompanies falling in love.

Immediately on her return to Brussels following their engagement she has the ‘general idea of what a curious sort of bastard you are, but … I do want to marry you (fully realizing how often we should annoy each other)’. She also wished to bear his children.¹⁰³ Away from him she feels ‘such a dipsomaniac for affection & tendresse’, and is conscious of him constantly, even in dreams. He wrote gloomily about the prospect of marriage, feeling ‘doubts & terrors’.¹⁰⁴ Iris rallies on 7 December: ‘You may have sown what you consider to be a decent crop of wild oats, but I certainly haven’t finished sowing mine.’ Their partnership represents not bourgeois respectability, she further reassures him – though she does plan to send their sons to Winchester – but ‘the great wide sea & peril & a high wind’. A ‘modern’, open marriage is assumed by Iris, partly, one senses, because such are the only terms on which David is willing to commit himself. So on 3 December: ‘I’ve no desire just yet to be unfaithful to you! I’ll let you know when that happens. You too please … I wonder will you often want other women when we’re married?’

She had that day caught herself referring to him in conversation as ‘my fiancé’. This gave her a shock: she had her own doubts and terrors. She is worried that David in London had shown no interest in the typescript of her latest novel. She feels she knows him much better than he knows her: ‘You were so incurious! That frightened me.’ His letters are few and ‘highly unsatisfactory’, his descriptions of Prague ‘meagre’, and she showers him with questions. By 31 December ‘our days in London seem like a wonderful dream’. She looks forward to ‘struggling’ with his dark, ‘demonic’ side, and with him, and hopes he will talk to her: ‘Talk with someone I love is so essential – in fact it is the thing, & all physical things somehow merge with it.’ On his lack of curiosity about her she writes: ‘I suspect that you are more concerned about my effect on you than about me myself. You self-centred blighter.’ In January: ‘I wonder, can you manage me, with my needs & demands – my great arrogance & my great yearning to submit?’ She warns him: ‘You are going to have a wife with expensive tastes. (Kierkegaard at two guineas a volume, & so on) …’

She ponders whether she will drag him out to restaurants to eat, on the salary of a bright snappy job, or selfishly bury herself in books, dreamily emerging to make him some ghastly undercooked meal. Children are to be postponed until prosperity returns; she has seen what it is like for DPs – ‘a full-time job for these people to get enough food & clothes to go on living at all properly’. She records a deep irrational desire to be dominated, to be held – ‘together with a savage joyous disinclination to submit easily’. In early February: ‘Sometimes I’m afraid & feel that I will be a very difficult person to be married to – nervy & selfish & ambitious … I’m so frightened because I feel I don’t know you.’

On 21 January 1946 David wrote to Iris, who had arrived in Austria in mid-December, to confess that he had fallen in love with a girl both refer to as the ‘Dornford Yates heroine’, Molly Purchase. This letter did not arrive until 18 February. ‘Pig dog, another courier has come, bringing no letter from you!’ Iris wrote at the end of January. Her letters during this month-long interim have a pathos born of her ignorance of the blow that is on its way.

In mid-December she is drunk with the beauty of Salzburg, its ‘endless sunslashed mountains’ surrounding a city ‘bedraggled & poor & dirty with the war & the melting snow’. She loves its swift river, the dozens of fine arrogant ecclesiastical squares with ironwork doorways. Even Tyrolean hats are complimented. ‘My German is dreadful’, she twice reports. The opera house is an American cinema.¹⁰⁵ She learns to ski, six thousand feet up over Zell-am-See: ‘Oh David, what a sensation! … The blazing sun on the snow, the air, the sunburnt faces, the sounds that carry for miles, the sea of mountain peaks all round … Yes.’ She visits Hitler’s house at Berchtesgaden, and the enormous SS barracks that had housed two thousand troops before being ‘wrecked & blasted’ in the raids the previous February, now entirely desolate and deserted. Only the bell of a woodsleigh passing along the road interrupts the total silence.¹⁰⁶

On Wednesday, 20 December she moved to Innsbruck, headquarters of the French zone in Austria, and had an Austrian Christmas, up in the snow.¹⁰⁷ Eagerly anticipating the ‘trials & high winds’ of her and David’s life together, she is now Communications Officer, liaising with the French Army. UNRRA have requisitioned a hotel – Mariabrunn – at an altitude of a thousand feet. There are views over to Italy, and she goes to work by mountain railway. A téléphérique, leaving from the door, takes her straight up the mountain for skiing and sunbathing: ‘At weekends one walks or skis or just looks in dumb joy at the view.’

She wrote to David at once on arrival. A recent thaw meant the lower slopes of the mountains were ‘green, summits in the clouds, much nearer & higher than at Salzburg, town beautiful, medieval & twisted & condensed & full of arches & courtyards & baroque buildings & an adorable river’. Her chief is ‘a French colonel of devastating sex appeal, age 6o or so’. A car crosses the Brenner each week, bringing their wine ration over from Italy. There is wine ad lib at lunch and dinner, also cognac, and when the liquor ration arrives ‘we have orgies & drink ourselves nearly insensible’. ‘La France, les montagnes … What more could the heart desire?’ A Persian princess called Djemboulate, who knows David, and sings beautifully in Russian, appeals to Iris’s romantic heart, while her sad story ‘makes one shut up about the food & cigarette shortage’. The move soon after to US Army rations, ‘from penury to paradise’, presumably relieves both. Iris runs round the refugee camps in a jeep – ‘interesting, though sobering’.

She and David have been discussing the religious philosopher Martin Buber, whose development of what he termed ‘I-Thou’ spirituality profoundly influenced theology and ethics. She also commends Gabriel Marcel, whose Catholic Existentialism was often opposed to Sartre’s atheistical variety. Not all pleasures are cerebral. On 13 January: ‘sometimes I feel vaguely restless, point of view sex, & rather like kissing n’importe qui’. A week later she confesses that at an all-night blind, a birthday party, she fell gladly into the arms of a handsome young French driver, but ‘it wasn’t in the nature of a conscious act. Don’t worry.’ She also records ‘pure ecstatic tenderness and joy’ at watching a pair of beautiful twenty-four-year-old Parisian ex-Maquisards, escapees from PoW camps, one with the Croix-de-Guerre. They remind her of the two Arab boys from Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It was like watching squirrels or birds at play. She describes herself as dependent on tenderness to the point of making herself a victim, a noteworthy description. Within a short time she feels she had better confess that she has been to bed once with André, the more beautiful, Italianate and younger of the two Parisians: ‘A fully conscious act, which I do not regret at all, unless it upsets you, & please don’t let it.’ Not that such acts are without consequence. Shifts in the emotional balance of power, she notes, upset the office for days. It is curious that the dalliance with the handsome driver is explained on the grounds that this ‘wasn’t in the nature of a conscious act’ at all, while that with André is excused on the opposite grounds that it was ‘a fully conscious act’. Iris was later to say that the problem with Existentialism was that it ‘either made your responsibility absolute or it abolishes it’.¹⁰⁸ Probably both uncharacteristic confessions are half-conscious bribes to the nervous Hicks, whom she fears might flee at anything but an ‘open’ relationship.

She found in Innsbruck ‘no one there who has any sort of intellectual finish or even general knowledge’. When she is reading Max Brod’s book on Kafka they all ask, ‘Who is Kafka?’ The absence of soul-mates made her dependence on faraway and intelligent David all the greater. It may have added to the shock of what, to Hal, she described as his ‘long, lyrical letter’ of rejection,

It is typical both of her generosity of spirit and of her pride – in her almost identical – that when she finally receives David’s letter, Iris, who felt smashed-up for some time, sympathises with the painful suspense he must have undergone awaiting her reply: ‘Don’t fret at all about me.’ And: ‘Remember that you’ve just nearly made one mistake – don’t go & make another.’ To Leo Pliatzky she wrote that she was now cured of her infatuation – otherwise she ‘would have gone on pining for D for years’. To Hal she claimed, after the initial shock, ‘extreme relief, & amazement at this period of temporary insanity … a very narrow escape’. It left her with ‘an increased horror of all ties, especially marital’ and a fear of her propensity for ‘choosing the second-rate’.

Thus she kept her courage up and options open, Hal still counting himself an admirer, and unmarried. Many then thought Iris beautiful or even glamorous,¹⁰⁹ some pretty, one ‘furieusement belle’¹¹⁰ and almost all attractive. But the Janžars, Slovene refugees she met that spring, recall her as ‘a plain Jane’. Rejection hit her hard, and her looks suffered. Philippa, who saw her later that summer, intuited that she had suffered a blow. Indeed Iris was still smarting. In late May David answers her ‘querulous’ letter of 16 April:

Together she and David achieved the feat of turning their erstwhile passion into friendship. She probably helped financially when he had no money. She was right about his precipitate move: his first marriage lasted only a few years. But Iris took him and his second wife Katherine Messenger out to dinner at the Randolph Hotel when they were too poor for a honeymoon on 1 June 1953, came up to Shropshire for his seventieth birthday in March 1986, and they met and wrote to each other often over the years in between. ‘Something of me is stored up with you in a way that I can never regret,’ and ‘everything to do with you still has so many echoes & resonances in all parts of me’, she wrote early in the 1950s.¹¹¹ She copied into her journal a generous and moving letter he wrote in praise of her fiction in the 1970s, and wrote twice to condole with him when his son Barney, after a long depressive illness, committed suicide in 1978, aged twenty-two; David feared his sons suffered from his undisguised contempt for traditional religion.¹¹² Katherine considered that David and Iris would have made a disastrous marriage – both living, perhaps too much, through the imagination.* David kept her letters, back to 1938, and had a recurrent dream of her about once a month in which he was always struggling to

David tried to reassure Iris, after their ‘madcap tale’ was done, that ‘you do remain a whole person, with your ability to spring intact’. This oddly echoes Frank’s final letter to her. He too had said that she had ‘springs within you that will never fail’. Indeed, in one letter to David, written in the very bad months of early 1944, Iris had written, ‘I feel, even at the lowest moment, such endless vitality inside me'; this was a time when she evidently contrived to work hard on her Russian vocabulary, draw pleasure from reading about Persian art¹¹⁴ and support Marjorie Boulton with love and strength of purpose when her father died suddenly.

Natural resilience and life-force apart, Iris also had a special means to hand by which she was able to process and sublimate her experiences. She was, after all, an apprentice writer. Five days after her return from the madcap days in London with David she wrote to him, seated on the bed with her feet on the radiator, from a cold Dutch monastery near Haaren where she was completing the latest UNRRA Field Training Course. The London visit, she wrote, had given her ‘copy’ for her current novel, which is partly concerned with a young man ‘who makes a dream picture of a woman he has known, writes her into a novel, & then meets her again after a long interval … I can use [this] even if you can’t.’

This is coolly pragmatic, distantly anticipating the plot of The Sea, The Sea. She already believed that a good novelist should be somehow absent from her work, yet knew this to be a challenge. She had told him that her second novel, completed in July 1944, was less bad than her first, which ‘was extremely bad & ought to be torn up’, but the second was ‘much harder to write since none of the characters is altogether me whereas in the other they all were’.¹¹⁵ Now she complains that ‘I’m in the middle of another novel … but it’s bad … I spend so much time cutting a figure to myself & so little time being myself.’ Her characters ‘are like children – either they’re dull & lifeless or else they give you no peace’,¹¹⁶ and presciently, ‘Trouble is, I get to love my characters too much – with the bad ones, I see so clearly just why they’re like that, & that it isn’t really their fault – & they become positively loveable & ruin all my plans’.¹¹⁷

Her January letters continue this meditation. On the thirteenth: ‘In my own work I do seek formal perfection & economy. I am not at all a raconteur.’ By the nineteenth she is ‘fed up with my novel … My efforts to “expel myself” from the characters & give them an independent life has resulted in their becoming thoroughly tiresome & unreal. For the central character … a rather charming dreamy though ineffectual youth, I am developing a passionate hatred.’ This youth was presumably Mark, based on Frank. She now wants to change the ending so he will ‘jolly well not triumph over his difficulties in the end … Yet it means a lot to have these people about me as I walk along a road & wonder what exactly they will do when the next crisis comes.’ On the twenty-seventh: ‘My characters seem to me a lot of silly spoilt nervy pseudo intellectuals without any real joy or real Angst in them.’ She quotes in German Rilke’s famous lines from Letters to a Young Poet about the overriding importance of aesthetic urgency. On 4 February, her current novel is ‘very bad’. She is accordingly depressed. Rilke still consoles her. Her skiing is improving.

* The phrase is Elizabeth Bowen’s. See Roy Foster’s introduction to The Heat of the Day (Vintage, 1998), p.6. Compare Iris to David Hicks, September 1944: ‘These distances & irrevocable partings & keepings apart & all this business of not being one’s own master … One’s life is being lived unnaturally.’

* Jules Laforgue, from an untitled late poem: ‘How picturesque do those trains later seem to us that we failed to catch.’

* The precursor of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which leads today’s humanitarian efforts for refugees worldwide.

* 21 July 1945. Jo Grimond, then UNRRA’s Director of Personnel for Europe, agreed: ‘I … watched the smothering of the British system by the American … But the American methods did not suit the British.’ Memoirs (London, 1979), p.139.

* To and from St James’s Park station; now wholly underground, at that time it had trains travelling above-ground.

* Jeremy Hutchinson (at that point married to Peggy Ashcroft), who applied from Caserta in Italy and is therefore excluded from Iris’s scorn, won; he stood against Frank’s childhood friend Gabriel Carritt for the CP.

* Tribune, 6 November 1943: the essay is included in Koestler’s The Yogi and the Commissar. Koestler attacked Aragon, Gide and the intoxication of the British intelligentsia with all things French. See D. Johnson on J. Bennett’s Aragon, Londres et la France libre in Times Literary Supplement, 10 December 1999, p.28.

* Sir W.D. Ross (1877–1971) and HA. Prichard (1871–1947) were among the major figures in Oxford moral philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. John Cook Wilson (1849–1915), a respected philosopher who published little and whose work has not stood the test of time. Iris and Mary Midgley had had to read his Statement and Inference (1926) as Greats students.

* The theme recurs. Otto in The Italian Girt ‘To be good is just never to lose [innocence]'; Theo in The Nice and the Good, longs to ‘regain at least the untempered innocence of a well-guarded child'; Lucius in Henry and Cato writes a haiku elegising lost innocence; Daisy in Nuns and Soldiers ends up seeking innocence, ‘a quest suited to human powers’.

* David Hicks was a friend of Olivia Manning’s and worked for a while with her husband Reggie Smith in the British Council in Egypt during the war. Hicks always claimed proudly to be the model for the character of ‘Dubedat’ in Manning’s Levant Trilogy, a seedy and treacherous British Council official in the CP and colleague of Guy Pringle – based on Smith – who in due course betrays him.

8 A Madcap Tale 1944–1946

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A Madcap Tale
1944–1946