Iris received David Hicks’s letter breaking their engagement on Monday, 18 February 1946. Two days before, on Saturday the sixteenth, she met Raymond Queneau. She recorded, years later, the first moment of seeing him in the snow outside the UNRRA office, turning away in the wind. He had arrived in Innsbruck, capital of the French Zone – ‘a sad city’ hard hit by the war – from Vienna the previous day, and was staying with the French Surrealist writer Maxime Alexandre. He met Iris, ‘une fille épatante’, at four in the afternoon. Iris in turn told Hal Lidderdale she had met ‘a charming ex-Surrealist’ whom she wrongly thought ‘in the French Army’.1
Queneau had been demobbed in 1940, but the conference about ‘The Crisis in French Literature’ he was addressing was organised by the French army of occupation. He had quarrelled with the Surrealist André Breton, briefly married to his wife’s sister, more than a decade before, probably objecting to Breton’s aesthetic indiscipline as much as his defection from the family. Surrealism had nonetheless touched him deeply, and was to influence Iris too.
It was a meeting with the ‘very avant-garde man’ that Iris had long hoped for: ‘Part of me wants to be Raymond Queneau, another wants to be Thomas Mann.’2 She had introduced Philippa to Queneau’s novel Pierrot mon ami (1943) – presumably one of the books brought back for her from liberated Paris in 19443 – which both read with enthusiasm. The previous December Ernest Collet, back in Brussels from a trip to Paris, had been helping secure her translation rights for Queneau’s novels, and she noted with excitement that Queneau ‘wants to see me’. She was planning to translate him first and secure permission later, though ‘I’m not sure my obscene vocabulary is large enough in English.’ Iris’s ‘not wholly successful’ translation of Pierrot mon ami would be rejected by the publisher John Lehmann in November that year.4 The playful iconoclasm and audacious linguistic fireworks of Queneau’s brilliant comic writing must have posed problems. Nonetheless he influenced her first published novel Under the Net (1954), whose narrator-hero treasures Pierrot mon ami, and is translating a French novelist called Breteuil just as Iris was translating Queneau.
One of Iris’s roles at Innsbruck was liaising with the French, which included interpreting, and she and Queneau always spoke French together,5 her only approximately fluent second spoken language, though she had some reading knowledge in German, Italian and Russian. Iris understood French very well, writing it in fluent idiom, and spoke it badly, with a strong accent.6 She and Queneau had a long conversation, and ‘understood each another perfectly’. He felt wholly won over and charmed. He was deeply read in English, knew his Sterne, Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare well, and translated from English too.7 He introduced Iris to Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner; she later held that it was he who had invented the term ‘franglais’.8 He had a magpie passion for learning, puzzles and lists. They drove together, watching the snow moving on the windscreen, ‘comme un petit bateau’, Iris recorded. The friendship had importance for both for a decade.
The afternoon of their meeting they climbed up to Igls at 2,900 feet, and drank ‘fine’ until late at night. Queneau noted Iris’s sadness. The following day they climbed a higher peak, the Patscher Kofel (7,264 feet), watched a snow-storm from a hut full of French Alpine troops, and Queneau felt their understanding growing in strength. He spoke to her of his psychoanalysis. Iris left Queneau at six in the evening and he sought her out the following Thursday, the day following his forty-third birthday, in the Club Franco-Allié, but the unspecified public talks both were engaged in left them little chance to speak, and they made ‘tender’ adieux. Queneau describes her thus: ‘Irishwoman. Big. Blonde. Common-sensical. A little bun. A peaked cap. A decided walk, somewhat heavy, military. Beautiful eyes, charming smile …'; and summarises her career: ‘4 years in the CP, nowadays Labour’. He mentions Oxford, the Treasury, her acquaintances with Belgian Surrealists,9 her knowledge of recent French literature, the fact that she was reading L’Etre et le néant, her completion of two novels, and Faber’s rejection of the second. The novel she was writing in 1946 – not yet Under the Net – has already taken thrust from her reading of Pierrot mon ami. His dossier continues: ‘She loves Kierkegaard. Is interested in the problems of blacks. Likes [Henry Miller’s] Colossus of Maroussi.’ He plans to send her Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.
Iris, suppliant, asks him whether it vexed him to talk about his work, at which he succinctly comments: ‘Yes, in other circumstances. Now, why not? And above all with her …’ She wished to know whether he had precise political opinions. Indeed he, too, had twice been close to the CP and had left it. The entry concludes: ‘She is weary. Her work interests her sufficiently. She skis.’ For her part Iris would later say of this complex writer born in Le Havre, of Norman petit bourgeois origins, that he had a tremendous presence, was both bear-like and sphinx-like, and that when questioned would ponder carefully before replying. She found something monumental about him, yet something absolutely ‘funny and humorous’ too. He had a ‘very beautiful head’.10
Queneau had other girlfriends: one Marianne Hillblom; Janine, whom he later married; and a mysterious ‘X’, with whom he makes love in a taxi in a scene reminiscent of Henry Miller, involving his reaching a sexual climax while willing himself (successfully) not to ejaculate, an effort of hygiene that ‘exhausted [him] all morning’. Given such outspokenness, his chaste descriptions of meetings with Iris are to be taken at face value.11 They met again in Paris when Iris visited in 1948, after which she wrote to him that, though loving him a lot, ‘I am after all a sensible person! For I am indeed en fin de compte so sensible and calm and full of the English virtues.’ She gave his address as a poste restante to her parents during a 1950 visit. To the scholar Walter Redfern, working on Queneau soon after his death in 1976, she wrote, ‘I knew RQ well, he was a friend … I think he (especially Pierrot) influenced U[nder the] N[et].l2 He was a natural, absolute, philosopher … a very reflective man,&in many ways, I think, a melancholy, unhappy man. What joie de vivre in his work, though!’13 Among the first of the 114 surviving letters she wrote him, many in English, is one in which she refers to the ‘important and dangerous’ question of finding a literary ‘master’.14 He was her first. When she came to dedicate Under the Net to Queneau, she wrote to him that ‘it has certain affinities with Pierrot’.15
At the end of January 1946 Iris wrote a furious and upset letter under the influence of Sliwowitz: ‘How irrevocably broken so many lives have been in this war … Nothing, nothing nothing ahead for these people.’16 A twenty-four-year-old DP Yugoslav driver, having smashed up an UNRRA truck and therefore afraid to return to HQ had made a dash to the Italian frontier with a loaded pistol. Iris helped bring him back, he crying all the way, in a jeep. ‘Put him in the cooler,’ said the ‘hard cynical swine’ at HQ with a laugh, eager for the maximum penalty in revenge for the loss of one wretched truck. Iris railed at the stupidity of the man being committed to trial on a charge of carrying firearms, but noted realistically, ‘DPs are either apathetic or inclined to be thugs or crooks – they’ve had to be, to survive.’ In the event, the French repatriated him: ‘All a bloody business.’ She predicted that he (as a King Peter partisan*) would probably end up being shot willy-nilly by Tito’s men. The prediction was almost certainly accurate. Before the war the Communist Party in Yugoslavia had two thousand members: its domination of the post-war country, helped by Allied wartime support, was not achieved without terror. Between 700,000 and 800,000 Yugoslav lives had been lost between 1941 and 1945, many in brutal civil war.
UNRRA was due to take over fully from the military in Austria by 1 March 1946, and Iris’s arrival in December 1945 made her part of the advance-guard. Once there her opinion of UNRRA personnel generally went up. Liberation from the German Reich had meant for many Austrians only a decrease in rations to subsistence level, and a doubtful future under military occupation. The UNRRA Chief of Mission noted that the Austrian nation owed its survival to UNRRA aid.17 The daily ration in Austria was the lowest of any UNRRA-assisted country, the diet in Vienna mostly bread and potatoes, and there had been an increase in deaths from tuberculosis. There were temptations – a few UNRRA recruits got involved in the black market, which was mainly run by Yugoslavs. Iris observed Red Cross parcels changing hands fast in exchange for anything from motor cars to women.18 But most UNRRA personnel were prepared to do difficult or dull jobs. The Americans showed up well, particularly their efficient women, often trained in welfare and willing, like nurses, to turn their hand to anything.
Iris noted later of her UNRRA years how instructive it was to witness a ‘complete breakdown of society’,19 and recalled four separate postings. Innsbruck, at a distance from the DP camps, involved office-work in setting up and financing them, and making pacts with the local authorities to be of mutual use. Since there were hardly any shops, very little to eat, and transport had broken down, semi-official bartering was necessary to obtain food, medicine, blankets, fuel and transport. Cigarettes counted as international currency. Iris wrote to Frank’s brother Palmer20 that she was leading a curious desert-island life with a few people and a few books and very many mountains,
dealing with the touchy French and the sullen but courteous Austrians, and the thousands of tragic displaced persons who are collected in this pocket between Italy and Switzerland – bad hats many of them by now, after so much survival of the fittest discipline, and hard to do anything for.21
She later called Innsbruck a desolate hole.
On arrival at Puch22 in the American zone,* she was brusquely asked why, if she could not type, she had been sent? Soon she was involved in setting up a telephone exchange instead. Here was a disorderly camp, with frequent fights. She met Serbs who were ‘wild & handsome & dramatic & frightfully nice’, and as late as 1990 there are roll-calls of Serbian names in her journals – ‘A note I made, in memory of the UNRRA camps. Branislav Djekic, Radovan …, Dragomir Pardanjac. Handsome Serbs. Also: Boris Leontic … (Draga and Djekic, with help from me and Mrs Lewis, came to England, I saw something of Draga. Then lost touch.) March 14. Thinking of Branislav Djekic and Dragomir Pardanjac – should they have gone home? Draga cd have had hopes for his boy. What happened to Draga?’
The Serbs had nowhere to go because they had been in the army, pro-Mihailovic (and thus – though this is unmentioned by Iris – belonging to one of the factions complicit in Frank’s death). Everyone wanted to go to America, the dream country far from the bitter racial and political conflicts of Europe,23 or, failing that, England or possibly France. Iris helped one or two to get to England. One – probably Draga – got a job as a butler in some grand house, but was not happy there. He had a wife and child, little English, and no skills. Iris later wrote to David Hicks to solicit his help over Draga, and, after losing touch, advertised unsuccessfully in The Times in an attempt to find him.
Food was so scarce that the Burgomaster of Vienna faced riots.24 There was an astronomically priced black market, ‘corrupt as hell’, with one pound of butter quoted at £2.10S, and fifty kilos exchanged against a good fur coat. Mismanagements in high places between UNRRA and the French military authorities resulted in particularly bad food shortages for the DPs that March, and UNRRA was reduced, Iris wrote, to scrounging in Italy and even ‘buying up old French cavalry horses’.25 As the official his torian put it, methods combined ‘the devious, the bold and the opportunistic’,26 but the end was the same: to look after the welfare of DPs. Iris helped send a wagon round to the British Army camp to beg for left-over food. Her work also involved identifying newcomers, finding out what they were up to and where they wanted to go, finding them somewhere to sleep and procuring blankets. The camps became overcrowded, and there was ill-feeling between the nationalities, but also ‘just general misery & crossness & so forth’. The worst tragedies often involved the elderly: ‘Nobody wanted them.’ Youngsters with skills could live on the hope that they would one day find a new home, and a new country.
Iris arrived at UNRRA HQ in Klagenfurt by late March.27 She travelled via divided Vienna, memorably depicted in Graham Greene’s The Third Man, in which ‘one still climbs over mountains of debris in the streets’.28 Amongst the rubble blocking the once fashionable Kaernter Strasse was the carcase of a burnt-out tank, while the opera company bravely went on playing in the Teater an der Wien to an audience wrapped in blankets.29 She visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum and communed long, identifying with ‘the long middle-period [self-portrait] of the gazing romantic Rembrandt’. It was important to her that she was born on the anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth, and she was later fond of claiming an affinity with him. The mystery of the portrait appealed, and she later put its ‘enormous Socratic head’ into The Sandcastle, where the painter is described as seeking the truth.30 She wrote in low spirits to Philippa:
Dearest, your Christmas letter did eventually reach me, two months late … I was in Vienna and dancing one evening in the gorgeous Kinsky palace – the British officers club, for once we British have done ourselves well in Wien. And the GHQ is at Schönbrunn! which is intact down to the last shimmering pinnacle on the chandeliers … Vienna was extraordinary. Mountains of masonry and bricks in every street, ruins all golden in an intense sun – the Opera is a magnificent shell, and the cathedral has lost its roof & is horribly blasted but looks beautiful. The general effect, under this blue sky and mad sun, was of a very touching beauty and dignity. Life too – music, plays, exhibitions – & they are already rebuilding the main buildings. But oh the streets – 7 maids with 7 mops … Yet as one walks the Ringstrasse, between trees, one feels in a great city. Lots of Russians, picturesque and well-armed. UNRRA rife with anti-Soviet stories I fear – but one progressive typist did say to me ‘I’d be bored to tears in Vienna if it wasn’t for the Red Army.’
Since the Vienna interlude I have come to work at Klagenfurt HQ British Zone Austria … Here we are living … on the shores of an exquisite lake, the Worthersee, 10 km out of Klagenfurt. Intensely blue, still, mountain and forest surround, castle reflecting, altogether precious. I gaze at it in perpetual amazement. The work here is as futile as ever and I am more cut off from the camps and the DPs than I was at Innsbruck, which is a pity.
(Thirty years later, on a return visit to Klagenfurt, she saw ‘the Marietta, where I lived in 1946, just the same only enlarged. I recall the golden-eyed goat who danced on his hind legs in the courtyard, and the martins’ nests along the open gallery.’31)
Klagenfurt was a short interlude before her final posting at Graz, probably from late April until late June, in a front-line camp, Hochsteingasse, once a Hitler Youth camp, now a dormitory – set up by British Allied Military Government authority – for students who had contrived to be accepted at the University of Graz.32 Hochsteingasse was run by a Scots director, Miss Margaret Jaboor, ‘the most wonderful woman … tremendously practical … & an absolutely perfect colleague’, with help from a Mrs Lewis. Here there was a kind of hope. On 7 March 1946 there were 208 students from twelve national groupings, of which the seventy-six Slovenes were by far the largest, followed by forty Ukrainians, twenty-five White Russians and Croats, nine Albanians – who nonetheless got together a football team before departing for Vienna – and eight bleakly described as ‘stateless’. German was the lingua franca of the camps, and the more fluently it was spoken, the less grammatically. The leader of the Slovene group, a moving spirit behind the whole enterprise, was a strikingly red-haired medical student, Jože Jancar. Iris stayed in touch over the following fifty years with Jože and his wife Marija (née Hribar), daughter of a successful farmer, and also then a medical student. ‘I got the head boy into medical school,’ Iris later misremembered: a large and unexpected cheque from her in 1950, when despair at his poverty nearly forced Jože to abandon his studies, enabled him to complete them instead.
Refugees play a significant role in Iris’s imaginative universe and fiction alike, displacement hereafter a spiritual as well as a political condition. At Cambridge in 1947 her four closest friends were to be an Indian, a Palestinian, an Italian-speaking Jewish Egyptian and an Austrian half-Jew; the philosophy scene at Cambridge was dominated by another expatriate, Ludwig Wittgenstein. On being criticised in 1957 for portraying characters in her first two published novels who are misfits, oddities, exiles or displaced, all with something of the refugee about them, Iris replied that ‘we are not so comfortable in society as our grandfathers were. Society itself has become problematic and unreliable. So it is that the person who is literally an exile, the refugee, seems an appropriate symbol for the man of the present time.’ Modern man is not at home, in his society, in his world. But, she added, she also ‘likes and approves of eccentric and unsettled people’.33 In 1982 Iris remarked to Susan Hill, about refugees in her novels: ‘These are images of human suffering, kinds of people that one has met. Such persons are windows through which one looks into terrible worlds.’34
The Jančars’ story bears recounting, and can stand for others Iris encountered.
Jože, son of a village organist, spent a year in the notorious Gonars concentration camp in Italy in 1942, where the partisans tried to kill him, followed by a week in the death cell at Ljubljana. After 1943 he was working with the Yugoslav underground, helping in hospitals and treating those who were fighting Nazis and Communists alike.
The Jančars were typical victims of post-war chaos. By early 1945 the Yugoslav Communists were murdering, as if in a frenzy, such large numbers of their opponents near the Austrian-Slovene border that for years afterward peasants there would find corpses thrown to the surface by underground rivers.35 As leader of an organisation for young Catholic workers Jože was an obvious target. He and Marija fled their homes in the greatest possible haste, without passports, for what they hoped would be at most a two-week absence, after which they believed the British 8th Army would sort out Slovenia. They were to stay in Austria for three years, and never went back.
Nigel Nicolson, then with the British 5th Corps in Carinthia – and just about to be summoned back to London to work on regimental history with his fellow-Grenadier Second Lieutenant John Bayley – spent the first weeks of peace in southern Austria, which he described as ‘the sump of Europe’, into which soldiers of many nationalities, and thousands of refugee civilians, had flooded to escape captivity or oppression by the Russians or Tito’s partisans, seeking British protection.36 On 12 May 1945 Nicolson observed a ten-mile column of 30,000 Germans, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats and White Russians marching out of Yugoslavia towards a very makeshift camp at Viktring,*37 south of Klagenfurt, where there was nothing to eat and no amenities.
Most had opposed and feared Tito, whom Churchill had been persuaded to back against the Royalist Chetniks. The Croats had accepted German command and committed atrocities, but the majority, like the Jancars, never accepted German leadership. They simply did not wish to live under Communism, and their only crime was a terror of being returned, against their will, to a regime ready and willing, after civil war, to butcher them. After emerging at the border from a long, wet, frightening tunnel, full of refugees shouting in all languages, the Jancars sighted English Tommies – who promptly stripped Marija of her watch. She had been an instinctive anglophile. The shock of this theft was one of the great disappointments of her life. Jancar became Sanitary Inspector at the camp, digging ditches and latrines. Sulphonamide and DDT helped keep epidemics at bay.
The simultaneous and brutal British repatriation of 40,000 Cossacks to certain death in Stalin’s Russia has since been much publicised – there were dozens of suicides; the soldiers used rifle butts, pick handles, bayonets and finally flame-throwers to force people onto the trucks and trains38 – but that of the dissident Yugoslavs is less well-known.39 Ordered in writing on 17 May 1945, probably as part of a secret deal with Tito, it lasted from 19 May until the end of that month, at the rate of two trains per day, consisting of old padlocked cattle-trucks, each carrying 1,500 people. Soldiers of the Welsh Guards battalion, in charge at the station and on the verge of mutiny, were instructed to assure the Yugoslavs that the trains were headed for Italy. This lie was at once exposed by the last-minute boarding of Tito’s partisans, who had been hiding in nearby bushes and in the station buildings. After some hours the prisoners were unloaded at Kocevje, ninety miles to the south-east, stripped, wired in pairs, shot in the neck and their bodies flung into a pit. Nigel Nicolson later wrote: ‘It was the most horrible experience of my life'; and Anthony Crosland, on the Intelligence staff of the 6th Armoured Division, said: ‘It was the most nauseating and cold-blooded act of war I have ever taken part in.’40 Marija’s twenty-two-year-old brother Anton was among those the British repatriated to certain death. Following a protest to General Alexander on 4 June, six thousand refugees, some from the Viktring monastery, were at the very last moment spared repatriation. They included the Jancars. There is an echo of all this in Right from the Enchanter, where an arbitrary line determines which refugees in England are sent home.
The survivors were very afraid of the British. Those who trusted them had, after all, been sent back and killed, while some who mistrusted them had survived; and fear made them good observers. As John Corsellis has described in Slovenian Phoenix, the Slovenes picked themselves up after the double tragedy and, with astonishing courage, resisting many pressures to accept Voluntary repatriation’, gradually made new lives for themselves. Their Catholicism, nationalism, and the fact that there were children in nearly all the camps,41 meant that they had to keep going.
Jože played a key role in the opening of the camp for university students at Graz. He hiked across the Italian border in August 1945 to try to get Slovene students accepted at Padua University, and soon after, with the intervention and active help of John Corsellis in the Friends Ambulance Unit, and the backing of the UNRRA Area Director Mr Cornwell, contrived after many exertions, and despite the chauvinism of the authorities, to have them accepted at Graz University. They studied in German. Hochsteingasse was the dormitory camp for those DPs enrolled at Graz, a student camp to be run by UNRRA. They moved in at the beginning of February 1946,* and Iris joined them in April.
The students ‘created a community life of outstanding quality, educationally, culturally, and socially’.42 Morale was high. There was a camp newspaper, a volunteer fire service which adopted fancy-dress on occasion, and, above all, a sense of the future. Jože was student spokesman and leader. They wore for a while white overalls purloined from some army store which made them resemble – in Jože’s eyes – Sunday painters like Churchill. Iris noted the sense of comradeship.43 The closeness to the Yugoslav border was dangerous – the Yugoslavs fomented trouble, particularly persecuting the ‘intelligentsia’. UNRRA may rarely and involuntarily have been involved in forcible repatriation, through CP infiltration or through concern to see DPs return to their country of origin,44 but after the Cold War began in earnest, resettlement as much as repatriation became official alternative policies. Iris watched while a Tito man in full rig, with his big boots and his Rolls-Royce, appeared at the camp to attempt to persuade his fellow countrymen to come home. They nearly lynched him. In mid-April, her view of Tito appears cool, distanced, inquisitive and politically naive:
Another shadow that falls here (or ray of light, whichever you prefer) is that of Tito, who is the local ogre for half the population, & Joan of Arc for the other. Up in the hills the other day … I heard the peasants talking a Slav tongue. This is the territory which Tito claims … Violent contradictory stories about Yugoslavia circulate all the time & now & then the factions shoot off a few rounds of ammunition. I would love to get into Yugoslavia to find out what is happening, but I gather entry is impossible at present.45
The main problem in Graz, after repatriation, was lack of food, a leitmotiv of Iris’s stay. The DPs were on six hundred calories per day (under the military they had had 850), compared to a normal 2,500 or more, a diet so close to starvation that girls were missing their periods: ‘in the morning unsweetened black slush, presumably coffee, even for children. At midday watery soup made from Army Supply surplus with a few morsels of macaroni, beans or potato or meat fibres in it … having 380 calories … For supper unsweetened blackish coffee again.’ Bread was poor, and one day a loaf would be shared between five people, the next between ten or even more. The diarist Franc Pernišek feared that starvation of the ‘serf’ refugees – who fared worse than native Austrians – was an UNRRA ruse to get as many possible to go home.
When Indian rice arrived at Hochsteingasse, a play about Indians was improvised. When potatoes arrived, Iris held the key to the warehouse and Jože persuaded her to allow the refugees to take them out while she turned a blind eye. He found a packet of sweets in his pocket immediately afterwards. Iris later told him they were for Marija.
Iris wore a British officer’s uniform – khaki jacket with pink shoulder-tabs carrying red-and-white flashes reading UNRRA, over a khaki skirt – but was generally ‘improperly dressed’, never donning the peaked cap which Margaret Jaboor wore for official visits. Her hair, too, invited comment: fringed, dishevelled, overhanging her eyes. The students in the philosophy barracks, the most bohemian and cheeky, would wolf-whistle at her approach, and nicknamed her ‘Copka’ (from chopka, a kind of little hen whose wattles hang over its eyes): ‘Here comes Čopka!’
The Jančars thought Iris ‘a shy young girl, introverted, non-communicative’, thoughtful and kind in dealing with the students’ problems, but too naive and convoluted. Although nearly twenty-seven, she reminded them of a student. Miss Jaboor was more effective. In her forties, aggressive, she fought for them and, in private, would condemn the repatriations as both a tragedy and a ‘nonsense’. The students honoured her – and it was a singular honour – by calling her ‘Mutti’ ('Mummy'). Her continuing work for refugees was to be rewarded by an OBE. She was remembered for her love of her fellow human beings, and for forgiving their failings – ‘And at times there [was] a lot to forgive.’46 Iris, by contrast with Miss Jaboor, offered no direct criticism of Communism. The Jancars wrongly recalled Iris as Deputy Director of the camp, although UNRRA personnel had no military rank but a civilian grade determining their salary. Iris called herself the ‘lowest Commissioned Officer … at the scene’, and Miss Jaboor later confirmed that her position was in fact very junior.47 Her scope for independent manoeuvre was accordingly circumscribed.
Late in 1947, a year after Iris’s departure, Jože, now seriously ill with TB, was again arrested, under the Steele-Tito agreement, according to which refugees alleged by Tito to be guilty of a war crime might be returned to Yugoslavia. John Corsellis and Margaret Jaboor, among others, did all they could to get him released. Marija thought this arrest was caused by Jože’s work as the first Chairman of the Slovene Students’ Group. He could at that time have qualified as a doctor within a few months but, fearing kidnap by the Yugoslavs after their failure to have him extradited, he did not dare remain in Graz and set about trying to emigrate instead, thus delaying his qualification by many years. As for Marija, she gave up her prospective career as a doctor for good.
By early 1948 Jože and Marija were on their way to Britain as European Voluntary Workers, nominally to work either in the mines or in agriculture. To their distress, since only single volunteers were eligible they were split up, he to a camp near Cambridge, where Iris was then studying, she to Preston.
Iris resigned from UNRRA with effect from 1 July 194648 and went home via Paris, where she bought a second hardback copy of Sartre’s l’Etre et la néant three days later, and met up with Queneau. The pain of David Hicks’s rejection was soon absorbed, it may be conjectured, within the larger one of Balogh’s, of which a later friend wrote in 1952, ‘This affair, more than anything else, tore her life apart. She never got completely over it.’49 Iris spoke of Balogh to Noel Martin in Brussels in September 1945, to Leo Pliatzky in the late summer of 1946, to Franz Steiner in 1952, and to Nickie Kaldor in November 1954.
Frank, too, was evidently on her mind. In his last letter he had gently reproached her, addressing her various painful love-complications, that he, by contrast, felt able to win a continence contest with Hippolytus. The previous June Iris had translated Euripides’ Hippolytus ‘into rather harsh verse – long lines & syllable [sic] sticking out in all directions. Soothing, but hardly successful.’50 She was now also in contact with Frank’s brother Edward (Palmer), whom she helped collect material for the commemorative There is a Spirit in Europe.
By March 1946 she had applied to Newnham College, Cambridge, to do a Ph.D., and she also put in for a lectureship in philosophy at Sheffield University. Although UNRRA was due to fold anyway by June 1947 (succeeded by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), Leo recalled this as one of the few times Hughes was cross with her, as she was giving up a not inconsiderable salary of £550: junior academics earned considerably less. She also contrived to get a reference from Donald MacKinnon for an application to study, with the help of a Commonwealth Scholarship, at Vassar College in New York State. This was ‘a last gesture which I do want to make toward the academic life! After this I shall chuck my academic ambitions!’51 Vassar was the college Frank’s mother Theo had attended.
Iris won the place at Vassar and a Commonwealth Scholarship, but in the space on the US visa application form where the prospective visitor is asked whether they have ever been a member of the CP – where more worldly contemporaries would wisely write ‘no’ – puritanical and literal-minded Iris wrote ‘yes’. She was thus prevented by the McCarran-Walter Act from entering the United States. Iris had been longing to go to America, and wrote succinctly to Leo that September: ‘US visa refused; reason: ex-member of CP! My view of the US now hits an altogether new low!’52 Bertrand Russell, the government Minister Hugh Gaitskell, the Thompson family’s neighbour and friend Gilbert Murray53 and Justice Felix Frankfurter became involved on her behalf, ‘but the act is made of iron’.* For the rest of her life, any visit she planned to America would necessitate a separate waiver.54 To Hal Lidderdale that September, who had railed against the Cold War in an ‘anti-weather tirade’, she wrote: ‘Can one rely on 100 aspirins, or is a tube train safer?’55 Eight gloomy months later she hoped that reading André Maurois, Martin Buber and T.H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose would drive away ‘gloomy forebodings & suicide plans’.56
Here — despite public disavowal57 – was one source of Iris’s disaffection with the United States. Although America in real life contained much that fascinated both Bayleys (including such friends as Al and Nay Lebowitz, she an academic, he a lawyer, in St Louis), it is in her fiction the land to which, like Henry James in The Golden Bowl, she exiles characters at the end of two novels;58 or the place where neurotically stiff English intellectuals go to liberate themselves, arriving back home in a state of unacceptable exuberance.59 The good Vietnam draft-resister Ludwig in An Accidental Man and Maisie Tether in The Message to the Planet are American exceptions to the rule that her major characters be British. ‘I never feel at home there,’ she later confessed; it was ‘so raw & unworked, I hate not walking, & absence of urban life’.60 Unlike most visitors, she was permitted, after each ‘waiver’, only one visit every twelve months. In 1963 she was for this reason vexingly obliged to remain in Canada while John visited New York State. The help of Katharine Graham, owner and editor of the Washington Post, was called upon – unsuccessfully – to try to get Iris in.
Iris, who came from a family of ‘wanderers’ cut off from their Irish roots, and, having worked with displaced persons, identified with the condition of exile, later recording a dramatic ‘1946 fear that I would get nowhere, would hang around and ultimately become a DP myself’.61 The failure of her attempt to get to Vassar left her depressed, lost, lacking the sense of a future. She was unemployed from July 1946 until she went up to Cambridge in October 1947, and her financial situation was dire.62 Under a photograph of herself taken that bitter winter of 1946–47, in a cold and snowy London, she wrote in her photograph album a single, expressive word: ‘Nadir’.
Despite ‘nostalgia for the extreme Left’,63 Iris felt positively drawn towards Anglo-Catholicism.64 Between 3 and 9 October 1946 she made her first visit to Mailing Abbey in Kent, and to Dame Magdalene Mary Euan-Smith, its notable Abbess. Mailing is an Anglican Benedictine community and abbey together, originally founded in 1090, refounded after 1916. Iris had written to Queneau a fortnight earlier that this was a time of ‘particular desolation and difficulty’.65 The visit was the first of three.* Donald MacKinnon suggested that Iris visit Mailing after asking for advice from a Pusey House† priest.66 The Abbess had a reputation of ‘being good with difficult cases’.67 In 1940 MacKinnon had been one of a group of young theologians who, under Dom Gregory Dix’s lead, wrote shilling booklets for the Dacre Press, associated with Mailing, and he sent the Abbess his BBC radio scripts. MacKinnon was that year (as all her life‡) much on Iris’s mind.
Iris’s upbringing was not exclusively free-thinking. Many years later she wrote to Philippa: ‘I got [religion] in childhood which I think you didn’t.’68 Both her mother’s and her father’s relatives had the habit of giving her the Gospels as a gift, with bright pointers towards helpful quotations, and she kept many of these.§ During the pre-war summer holidays when Iris stayed with her paternal Chapman cousins in Portrush,69 one friend remembers family prayers after dinner, Uncle Willy, treasurer to the Apsley Gospel Hall Brethren in Donegall Pass, reading from the Bible and praying.70 With her maternal ‘cousin’ Eva Lee, moreover, the family attended revivalist meetings, Eva’s family being involved with the evangelical ‘Crusaders’. In 1985 Iris would record that the verse ‘Wide, wide as the ocean, high as the heavens above, deep, deep as the deepest sea is my saviour’s love’ brought back ‘memories of evangelical meetings in Ireland’.71 Of Ireland’s evangelical Christianity she wrote, ‘singing was the best part of the thing where some light shone’.72 Cousin Sybil recalled Iris taking her grandmother to a Chiswick church that was ‘high’. Louisa, affronted, refused to put any money into the collecting-dish; Iris went off and wept.73 Sybil believes Iris may simply have been trying to oblige in taking Louisa to church, and was affronted when she failed, Louisa smelling Papism. Cousin Muriel gritted her teeth through another such service with Iris in the late 1940s.
Even at the height of her CP involvement in 1940–41 Iris had written to Paddy O’Regan, after an account of watching Liverpudlians picking furniture out of the ruins of their bombed houses:
You are worried that I may, in a rush of external activities, forget about my soul … My trouble is that I am obsessed with my soul … I was not made for action, I hate action, I loathe political activity of any sort beyond reading Engels & enjoying the intellectual refinements of Marxism. I have to force myself to be active – my spirit is forever returning to the still centre, & I have to drive it out again into the world of movement & change … my journey is just beginning. One cannot have a harmony that does not contain the universe … and that … means changing the social system.74
Conversion was not then uncommon among philosophers – Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach and Michael Dummett all converted to Catholicism. Novelists too – Muriel Spark, William Golding, perhaps later Doris Lessing – had conversion experiences. The rationalist culture of the 1920s and 1930s was thought to have led to Dachau, Hiroshima and the Second World War. A sense of ‘there must be something more’ was prevalent, and there were mass conversions under Bishop Stephen Neill’s mission to Oxford University in February 1947, the Sheldonian packed to overflowing for five nights in succession. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Iris may have attended. Father Martin Jarrett-Kerr, normally posted in South Africa, claimed to have received her first confession:75 she catechised him sternly about the South African political scene, alarming him with her moral passion and vehemence. He was assistant missioner to Bishop Neill on that occasion. At the point after the war where Iris engages with Existentialism, with its doctrine of self-liberation, she also engages with Christianity, with its investment in self-purgation.
Guests to Mailing Abbey live in a separate building within the grounds, have their own rooms, keep silence after Compline at 9 p.m. until 10.30 the following morning, attend the Mass and office, with whose Latin Iris had no problems. They have their own fourteenth-century pilgrim chapel in the gatehouse for prayers, readings or talk, and they help in the spacious gardens. The guest chapel abutted the transept where the nuns prayed, at a right angle, so that the nuns could be heard but not seen. Much of this was borrowed wholesale for The Bell
Iris was greeted by the guest sister, Sister Elizabeth, who gave readings during the otherwise silent meal-times. With one or two other younger sisters, Sister Perpetua saw Iris in the parlour which still in those days had wooden grilles through which nuns and guests conversed. She recalled talking about Iris’s work in the DP camps in Austria, and was struck by the frank, open expression of her face, her short fair hair, general simplicity, warmth and ability to enter sympathetically into the problems of others.76 Iris also spoke to the Abbess through the widely separated wooden bars. She wrote to Philippa: ‘When I see you I will tell you about the Abbess, tho’ I daresay you know about her already.’ Dame Mary, daughter of a doctor, was the fifth child of a typical Victorian upper-middle-class family. She was warm, outgoing and had the gift of concentrating entirely on the concerns of the person she was addressing. Her spiritual influence ranged far beyond the community at Mailing. Though an atheist herself, Philippa was sufficiently touched by how helped Iris had been to send the Abbess a small donation: ‘So peaceful & moving that place,’ wrote Iris. ‘What a sick world.’
One New Year’s Eve in Oxford, perhaps 1946–47, Iris and Philippa’s sister Marion were alone with a friend of Marion’s. ‘Oh, do talk to us,’ Marion pleaded with Iris, who demurred; She was concentrating instead on making New Year’s resolutions: ‘It’s very important, to make them, and to keep them, it could alter the whole direction of life.’ Such talk of changing one’s life distantly echoes a conversation she had with her first cousin Cleaver Chapman about Christianity. Iris asked Cleaver how you became a Christian. Cleaver, who stayed for life with the Brethren, replied that you simply ‘Let Christ into your life and He will take away your sins.’ Iris scornfully, vehemently replied, ‘It can’t possibly be as easy as that.’ She evidently felt that in order to be ‘saved’ you had to do something strenuous and continuing, engage yourself in an arduous quest.
During the night of 20 January 1947 she had a dream of Christ and the Virgin Mary inaugurated by angels resembling birds of prey so vivid and brilliant it felt like ‘not a dream, but a vision’. Both Donald MacKinnon and her father figured in the dream, which she was thirty years later to give to Anne Cavidge in Nuns and Soldiers. On 2 March 1947 she heard Gervase Mathew preach a sermon at Westminster Cathedral on ‘the life of charity, the compassion of God, & the temptation to despair after sin’. He cited a medieval English churchman: ‘If all the sin in London is like a little spark of flame – the compassion of God is like the Thames.’ She was to criticise Existentialists for their ‘dramatic, solipsistic, romantic and anti-social exaltation of the individual’.77 Her journals suggest her own complicity in the dramatic.
On 5 April 1947:
Urge towards drama is fundamental. I am ‘full of representations of myself (see Ruysbrock*). Need for self-expression, to speak, may seem to conflict … I am using novels to slough off my lesser selves – instead of a means to self-knowledge and greater inwardness. Hence my ‘moral vulgarity’.
The escape from drama? (Need of not drifting away from politics.) In love. In simple relations with people, animals, things. Face to face with great art – which gives feeling of humility & admiration – or great intellectual world. (S.K[ierkegaard]. [Gabriel] Marcel). Drama besets me – when alone often, walking along road &tc. This corrupts my inner life – I must attend to that fact. In relations with people I’m not intímate with, & want to impress … What goes on in my head is 4/5 unnecessary or bad. Fantasies, self-pity, self-torture. Need for wholeness, simplicity. To hope, to see new vision of myself … ‘Nothing better’ than a good person.78
To David Hicks in September 1946 she was upbeat, painting her recovery as complete: ‘I have rarely felt more insouciante & generally more serene.’79 Writing to Philippa three weeks later, just after her return from Mailing, she is by contrast remorseful for past sins, full of hopeful gratitude about the renewal of their friendship despite all: ‘You are infinitely precious to me.’ Only since coming back from Austria, she says, has she realised the Seaforth ‘events’ fully as things that she did, as apart from things she suffered (in fact she had brooded on them continuously80). She now lived them again, seeing her own responsibility. This had been not pleasant, but it was necessary. She apologises to both Philippa and Michael ‘most humbly’. She has been ‘very deep in the pit over this affair’, her love remaining ‘as deep & as tender as ever’. Philippa evidently replied with characteristic generosity, and Iris spoke of their friendship as ‘this precious central thing in my life’, giving courage and calm of mind – something it was, through many changes, to remain. She knew she had been hateful to Michael, but what had caused that is ‘dead & cut away. Now that I am out of the despair & frenzy I feel the strength to change myself. I have learnt a lot from these horrors … most of [what is bad] has now died. My darling, please be patient … it is long way back [sic] & I have still far to go & many knots to untie. Don’t let go your hold – all shall be well. We now have a phone: Chiswick 1913.’81
In October Philippa had acquired Existentialist essays from Paris that Iris wished to read. Iris also re-read Max Brod on Kafka, and felt Brod was ‘never able to measure the great man – the talented bloke’s comments on the genius’. Baffled by Kant and Hegel, she compares herself to the German Romantic Idealist Herder, a ‘poetically-fervid, largely enthusiastic & essentially historical soul’. She had always had a ‘wicked penchant for those who make their errors in a big way’.82 On 11 November 1946 she saw Michael and Philippa and wrote with relief that ‘peace & joy [are] possible for me again’. Seeing Pip was ‘freedom & life after being entombed for so long’. She finds ‘joy in our constant love & in our whole world of thought & feeling together. There is no one who can be to me what you are. Hope Michael didn’t find it too much a strain …’
Something forced in these cries of joy meets something deeply felt. Constraint governed the friendship for some years. But living as Iris was outside the social context provided by a career, contact with Philippa, whose talent for philosophy she always rated above her own, mattered greatly:
I haven’t had a real conversation with anyone since I was last in Oxford … I just flounder about with the same old problems. I just don’t see how any intellectual institution could ever dream of employing me. Not having anyone to talk to about the stuff, or indeed about anything else that matters, is sometimes sheer agony. I lose all sense of my reality as a thinker.83
When the bad news about Vassar came, she was reading Unamuno, Heidegger, Sartre, Berdyaev. Oxford was ‘more “logical positivist” than ever, & anyone interested in psychology, history or religion is regarded as “romantic” & ergo unsound. Sartre is mentioned only with derision & no one reads Kierkegaard.’ She saw Sartre’s Huis Clos in London and judged it ‘formidable’. The critics hated it: ‘Alas my country.’84 She contemplated studying philosophy at Reading,85 wrote later, at MacKinnon’s suggestion, to Bangor for details of a post there, thought of Cardiff too.86 She was also ‘struggling with Kant & Hegel & trying to get a hard intellectual grip on certain problems which I only grasp imaginatively & emotionally. I’m still not sure whether I can really think philosophically at all. However. I shall probably push off to Paris for a while … or maybe I’ll wait till next spring. Winter in Paris would be no fun.’87
A friend (probably Philippa) sent her notice of a Sarah Smithson studentship in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge, and in spring 1947 she was accepted. She thought of studying the philosophy of Husserl,88 but claimed no one had heard of him. Money was short, and at the end of July she applied for a Ministry of Education grant for an additional £50 or £100 to eke out Newnham’s cash, giving MacKinnon as referee.
The year 1947 was not all gloom. In February, while reading philosophy to prepare to go up to Newnham, and rekindling her friendship with Philippa, Iris also made a foray to St Ives in Cornwall with its community of painters.89 Anne Willett – with whom Michael Foot had spent his last free evening before his capture in occupied Brittany – saw her in a Soho jazz club, dancing away from her partner, gazing into a world which was not there. In the summer Iris, Mary Scrutton and Tom Greeves took their bicycles and food to Paris on a shoestring budget, and probably at Montmartre visited an early example of the Rotor, a hollow drum inside which people stood and then discovered, as it rotated faster and faster and the floor sank away beneath them, that they were hanging vertically, stuck to the walls by sheer centrifugal force. Tom and Mary were content to watch this spectacle from above. Iris (typically, in Mary’s view) at once volunteered to go inside and have the Experience. It seemed to do her no harm. She also saw Queneau on her own.90
This was the first of a series of annual visits.91 Iris later recalled Various boites, including homosexual ones’92 and getting mixed up with a criminal whom she thought to help, who stole a lot of her belongings before vanishing. The man, later arrested, sent her begging letters from prison; what she sent included soap and was returned to her. (Later she wrote that she had ‘probably experienced everything’, which was ‘not the same as knowing everything’.93) She met Marcel Mouloudji,94 whose novel Enrico won the Prix Pléiade in 1945, and saw Edith Piaf and the Compagnons de la Chanson on stage. She and Queneau listened to Juliette Greco in a boîte; Greco was at that time singing the classic bitter-sweet golden song about the passing of youth and love that Queneau had written for her, ‘Si tu t’imagines‘. Iris watched her with a blonde woman-lover,95 and was interested when Queneau explained that Greco ‘did not like only men’.96 Anne Willett also saw her in 1947 at the Café Flore in Saint-Germain, where black marketeers were accepting money from Jews wishing to be shipped illegally into Israel. Iris would stand and listen to the café-talk amongst, for example, the actor Roger Blin, Henry Miller and the writer Jacques Prévert, whose Paroles (1946) she acquired. Simone de Beauvoir was always accompanied by a different young man, never by Sartre. Iris made it plain, despite an invitation to join in and sit down, that standing and listening were what she preferred.
When Jake in Under the Net is entranced by being cabled at the Brasserie Lipp opposite Café Flore, one can feel Iris’s excitement at her own new-found cosmopolitanism inhabiting Jake’s. Indeed she noted wistfully the message, probably from Queneau, ‘Chère Iris, je serai certainement au Flore entre 7.30 et 8';97 and received the ‘first poem to be written to me on a metro ticket’, probably also by Queneau. Paris was to be a ‘necessary’ city all her life, a Mecca. Angus Wilson sighted her there in the 1970s, happily whistling with her head in the air and her hands in her pockets, like a schoolboy.
Iris’s association with Donald MacKinnon had undergone a break in the autumn of 1943, when the friendship aroused his wife Lois’s strong resentment. MacKinnon, wise in so many ways,lacked the common sense to introduce favoured undergraduates to his wife, ‘normalising’ such friendships. Both Lois and Iris were passionate philo-Semites,98 both painted and they doubtless had other interests in common. Perhaps fearing being outnumbered, MacKinnon did not encourage meetings even between his wife and mother. On 28 February 1947 Iris recorded:
The thought came to me yesterday that my love for D[onald] will always be a source of profound joy to me, beyond all the conflicts & paradoxes, even when I can’t see him. This brought me great peace.99
During Holy Week 1947 they met again from three to seven, probably in London one Tuesday afternoon when he was on his way back to Oxford from Wells. ‘I shall never forget that week, never. There was a kind of agony,’ he wrote. The oft-repeated, unascribed quotation from Iris’s journals, ‘I would go into the dark, if it meant light for you,’ may belong to this period: she and MacKinnon shared the heady cocktail of dramatic intensity, religious and erotic passion and guilt which she satirised in The Red and the Green100 and gently mocked in her sequence of tormented gay male seekers, starting with Michael Meade in The Bell. MacKinnon spoke later of ‘foolish, fantasy-ridden efforts’ to help her, and Lois recalled that he advised Iris not to repeat her perception of herself as a mixture of the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, the philosopher Susan Stebbing and the feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir.101
MacKinnon’s feelings were now engaged. Iris had confided to him difficulties about her love-life when a student. It could not have escaped his attention that Thomas Balogh was seven years older than him, while for her part Iris always thought Donald older than he actually was. Her ethic of ‘sexual generosity’, Lois believed, could be a source of disturbance. He later told Lois, who identified Iris at this period as his ‘sacred’ love, herself as his ‘profane’, that duplicity then ruled his life: the theologian Karl Barth had just such an intense liaison with Fraülein von Kirchbaum which, though also chaste, hurt his marriage, excluding his wife and condemning her to loneliness. Lois saw Iris as formidable, promiscuous, vain; and, in collecting admirers, merciless. No doubt Iris appeared a twentieth-century Lou-Andreas Salomé. Iris noted that she saw Donald as ‘Christ’ and herself as Mary Magdalene, that model penitent out of whom, we are told, Christ had cast ‘seven devils’.102 She ‘would always be a little in love with Donald’.103 Lois was in a position dryly to note that between Christ and her husband Donald there were a few minor differences, that the role of the Magdalene entailed half-conscious flirtation – ‘He did once hold my hand,’ Iris remarked104 – and that the drama left her, a young and insecure wife, role-less.
MacKinnon confided in each about the other. Iris pilloried her own early habit of selfish idealisation in A Fairly Honourable Defeat in the character of Morgan, who invented pictures of friends before persecuting them with those pictures. That said, the episode shows Iris at her least attractive. Never short of admirers, she was willing to continue clandestine communication that she knew to be hurtful to Donald’s wife: on leaving Keble in September 1947 Lois had to suffer the indignity of receiving the ‘very tactful’ sympathy of the head porter, who could not escape witnessing such communication, whether in the form of visits, telephone calls or letters. Though neither guileless nor free from duplicity or concealment, Iris nonetheless protested her ‘innocence’. Perhaps she saw this emotional intimacy with another woman’s husband as no more than her natural right.
Lois later noted the resemblance, in The Sandcastle, between the difficult marriage of Nan and Mor troubled by the advent of Rain Carter, and Iris’s threat to her marriage. Theological differences between the MacKinnons105 become in that novel differences about Mor’s political career, and while Rain was partly modelled on one of Iris’s students, she is also given Iris’s Riley car, her interest in the problems of human portraiture – painterly rather than novelistic – her love of swimming, and her ability to cry. If Iris intended to echo the MacKinnons in The Sandcastle this was cruel, recalling Michael Foot’s observation that she made a ‘formidable enemy’: indeed Iris later lamented that she had been ‘unfair to Nan’.106 MacKinnon’s humane wisdom is displaced onto Bledyard ('Who can look reverently enough upon another human face?’107) The gambit by which Nan wins Mor back at the end is echoed in the fortunate move the MacKinnons made that year for him to take up the Regius Chair of Moral Philosophy in Aberdeen.*
In April Iris noted: ‘desperate mood today. Bitter thoughts seem to tear down … what I am trying to build.’108 In May ‘depression after letter from D[onald]’,109 whose birthday she notes on 27 August, and who, drinking heavily, was now breaking his ties with the South. He once more broke matters off, putting it thus: ‘It’s all a matter in the end of keeping to a true care for I [ris]. And that I shall achieve. One’s so overlaid by corruption.’110 In June Iris wrote in her journal, ‘Gloomy interval. Angst, nausée, & all the bag of tricks.’111 On the Feast of the Assumption in mid-August112 she thought much and peacefully of Donald, and cited his quotation from Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory ‘that loving God, like loving other people, is wanting to protect Him from oneself. She transcribed his writings, for example that modern doubt was not speculative but a state of mind, almost a state of being, while ‘integrity is to be achieved in Christ alone’,113 and bought him Kathleen Raine’s recent verse collection Living in Time.
Later she lamented that human frailty – ‘mine, theirs’ – lay behind the whole tangle. Meanwhile the MacKinnons were settling into a handsome eighteenth-century house and walled garden opposite St Machar’s Cathedral in Aberdeen. About this move Iris expressed ‘tormented … misery … God knows I’m in some ways an interested party.’114 She and MacKinnon met once thereafter, by chance, in the 1960s, when he, now Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity in Cambridge, declined her invitation to visit her in London. He returned home pale and, unusually for him, early for lunch.
Iris continued to demonstrate a writer’s consoling capacity to create explanatory myths. Listening to Sartre’s The Flies on the Third Programme on Tuesday, 29 July, she wondered: ‘Myths. What is it to invent a new myth?’115 Sartre had taken the Oresteia – Fraenkel’s Oresteia and indeed Frank’s Oresteia – replaying it in Paris under the very noses of the Germans to make propaganda for violent resistance. What could she do with it? During the night she lay awake and rewrote the Orestes story in her mind’s eye to make something very different and ‘highly autobiographical’. Her version resembles Peter Brook’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: all the characters are doubled. Orestes is twinned with Agamemnon and Aegisthus, Electra with Clytemnestra. Iris – as in her six novels narrated in the first person by a man – identifies with the male hero, Orestes, who has been sent into exile – Austria, but also the state of being unable to meet MacKinnon – during which time (s)he is ‘tormented by the Erinyes of selfish uncreative remorse’. Electra – The Abbess/possibly also Philippa – persuades the guilt-ridden Orestes to make the creative act of true repentance: for example, visiting Mailing. Orestes kills Aegisthus and Clytemnestra and is able to see Agamemnon/MacKinnon again, no longer blinded by self-hatred and remorse. As well as her exile from Donald, there are oblique references to Seaforth.
In August 1947 Iris was still sick at heart, unable to work: ‘Life’s been disintegrated in a nightmarish way for so long now, one almost forgets what it would be like to feel normal & secure & loved. Wrong of course to have this nostalgia & to feel in exile. One’s life just is this endless attempt to integrate & where that attempt is is home.’116 She stayed at Bledlow for two nights with Frank’s recently widowed mother Theo, just returned from a trip to Bulgaria with Palmer.117 Theo did not entirely approve of Iris.118 Born in 1892 of New England missionary stock, she probably found her bohemianism disconcerting. She would have told Iris about attending the deeply moving official ceremony in Litakovo to honour Frank and his fallen comrades,119 and she probably then gave Iris the volume of Catullus that had been found on Frank’s body after he was shot.120
Iris arrived at Cambridge in early October.121 Her rooms were in The Pightle, a small house on Newnham Walk, next to the Principal’s Lodge. She bought a kettle and admired the Renaissance buildings reflected in the Cam. Philippa sent her a gown. Iris read The Plague, which she felt was a great novel, ambiguous, mysterious, absurd; Queneau was jealous of her admiration for it. If she felt displaced, she before long found in Simone Weil’s Need for Roots and Gravity and Grace a way of thinking that put decentring and displacement at the centre.122 One of the worst evils committed by totalitarian dictators entailed the uprooting of entire peoples; yet the moral life itself was a task of unselfing, ascesis, or voluntary deracination. Weil resolves the paradox by speaking of ‘moral levels’ above which the agent cannot proceed without danger. Only for the saintly, Weil appeared to argue, can virtue have no fixed address. It was through Weil too, the only woman among Iris’s great teachers, that she encountered Plato anew.123 ‘I call Sartre “romantic” and would not call her so,’ Iris wrote in her journal,124 and noted ‘Virtue is knowledge/is attention’ in the margin of Weil’s Intuitions Pré-Chrétiennes.125
* Yugoslav resistance to Hitler was chiefly divided between Communists, following Tito, and royalists, led by Mihailovic. Churchill was persuaded by 1943 to back the former, who were enemies of the latter.
* According to the ‘UNRRA Austrian Mission Directory of Personnel’ (dated 20 May 1946, Vienna), Puch was in Area I HQ Land Salzburg in the American Zone, one of twelve camps, a large camp with eleven on its team (the average-size UNRRA team was seven and a half).
* ‘Vetrinje’ in Slovene.
* After two and a half months in the Keplerschule, Keplerstrasse, Graz.
* Jeffrey Meyers, ‘The Art of Fiction', Paris Review 115, 1990, p.210. Denis Healey also wrote ‘Yes’, but Gaitskell pleaded successfully on his behalf, mentioning the work Healey had done separating Labour from the CP. Congress decided separately, Healey recalls, on each and every case.
* Her second visit was 6–7 August 1948; her third 2–4 August 1949, during a retreat taken by ‘dogmatic’ Canon Dart. † A small Anglo-Catholic house in St Giles, Oxford, for work among students. ‡ Evidenced e.g. by journals. Comparison of the structure of her Gifford lectures, published as Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London, 1992), shows a resemblance to MacKinnon’s some years earlier – see Donald MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics (Cambridge, 1974), passim. Both Iris Murdoch and MacKinnon, for example, explore the relationship between morality, metaphysics and the tragic. § For Christmas 1929 her grandmother Louisa Murdoch gave her a Bible with the inscription ‘… with love from Grannie: Psalms 119 and 105’. One of the many copies of the New Testament she carefully kept by her in her London flat has ‘… with love from Eva. Revelation 3.20’ written in it. This was given to her by her maternal quasi-cousin Eva Lee on the occasion of her thirteenth birthday. Iris kept Daily Light on the Daily Path: A Devotional Text Book for Every Day in the Year; in the Very Words of the Bible (many editions from 1861 to 1983) from November 1934. Another New Testament arrived for Easter 1939, with the handwritten inscription, ‘I am the Way the Truth the Life, John. 14 vi’. Another (New English Bible translation) came in March 1961 from Cousin Muriel, ‘with Love and memory of another happy visit’.
* Jan van Ruysbroeck (1293–1381; sometimes spelled ‘Ruusbroec'), influential Flemish Christian mystic, whose gentleness gained him the epithet ‘the good prior’. He wrote four extensive treatises and seven lesser works; the Church declared him ‘blessed’ in 1908.
* Mor and Nan are almost certainly composite portraits, for which another Oxford couple, unrelated to the MacKinnons, also ‘sat’.