Iris Murdoch: A Life

Cambridge in 1947 was full of women, ‘unsettled, impatient, restless’, not yet permitted to graduate,¹ whom the writer Elizabeth Sewell tried to enfranchise by starting a ‘Union of Women Graduates’. Iris, ‘really a stranger’, did not join, and never seemed to fit in.² Sewell was impressed that Iris had written several unpublished novels, including one about a Greek statue that comes to life.

Through Sewell, Iris met the Italian-speaking Jewish Alexandrian Pierre Riches. They travelled to Italy together in 1948. His later conversion to Catholicism, his further becoming a Catholic priest, and his exotic background and patrician friends all fascinated her. He was the first of a long series of gay or bisexual men friends, all of whom remained important to her, and one of his yellow sapphires, she assured him, made an appearance in The Flight from the Enchanter. Six years after his becoming a priest, Iris remarked, ‘But you don’t seem to have changed at all!’ He was as world-loving as ever, not an Alexandrian for nothing. For his part he watched her ‘going overboard’ for new people with enormous warmth, her enthusiasm properly Irish, while her intelligence kept things somewhat in proportion. He saw in her a remarkable combination of great warm-heartedness together with shyness and reserve.

Although her official Cambridge lodgings were on Newnham Walk, Iris spent most of her time at Trinity – ‘almost living there’, she would say – in the spacious set of rooms occupied by Wasfi Hijab, a Palestinian postgraduate from Nablus, anxious about the coming war over the partition of Palestine, after which he was uprooted,³ and with Kanti Shah, from south India, whose grace and beauty she admired.⁴ Both had studied with Wittgenstein, and Shah’s notes on Wittgenstein’s lectures on Philosophical Psychology in 1946–47 later formed part of the book of that name.⁵ Iris found ‘the beauty of the place and the cool slow tempo of [their] endless discussions … healing’.⁶ She at once changed her supervisor ‘very politely’ from CD. Broad to John Wisdom,⁷ whom she described to Queneau as a ‘disciple of Wittgenstein (the great master of logical positivism, who alas is retiring)’. She wondered whether Wisdom would ‘come to meet’ her or would ‘amuse himself cutting me up’.⁸

Shah and Hijab wished to save money by getting Iris to cook for them. Moslem Hijab ate meat, while the Hindu Shah was vegetarian. Should Iris mix the meat fat and the vegetable fat, or keep them scrupulously separate? ‘Such things are much more important than philosophy.’⁹ Fifty years later Hijab recalled a particularly good apple stew.¹⁰ The eminent mathematical-logician-to-be Georg Kreisel, always known by his surname alone, whom Wittgenstein greatly respected and admired,¹¹ was a research student at Trinity. Hijab’s recollection that Kreisel was an occasional visitor to Hijab’s rooms in Trinity¹² seems more accurate than Iris’s, that the four of them always ‘went around together, we ate together, we argued together, and we talked all night together, and so on, and this was a very important year of my life';¹³ Kreisel thought Iris’s friendship with Shah and Hijab owed something to her weird propensity ‘for finding stray dogs noble’. (She found all her friends noble.) Kreisel, sponsored as a refugee by Stanley Baldwin, half-Jewish and very Austrian, schooled at Rugby, described himself wittily as ‘the kind of alien England could afford’.

Certainly Iris found all three ‘touching’ – a key word. The words ‘moved’, and ‘deeply moved’, ‘touched’ and ‘profoundly touched’ recur often in her journals, constituting their background music. With Shah and Hijab she discussed philosophy, talking and asking ‘incessantly’ about Wittgenstein.* She had arrived too late, to her bitter regret, to listen to him lecture: in the summer just prior to her going up, Wittgenstein had resigned his chair as from 31 December, keeping his rooms for one last Sabbatical term. That Christmas he would decamp to Ireland. Since Iris could not sit at the feet of the Master, she listened carefully to those who had been close to him:¹⁴ Hijab even dreamed of Wittgenstein at night.¹⁵ They had a single topic: ‘Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein’.¹⁶ On New Year’s Day 1978 Iris pondered, ‘How far has the fact that I have known very well certain people (Eliz [Anscombe], Yorick [Smythies], Kreisel, Hijab) who were imprinted by Wittgenstein affected my work as a writer?’

Her first two novels are structured round a court or cabal with a charismatic Master at its centre, who, unwittingly (Under the Net) or deliberately (The Flight from the Enchanter), ‘imprints’ all his disciples deeply. Hugo in Under the Net is a portrait of Wittgenstein’s star pupil Yorick Smythies, after 1937 often the only person permitted to take notes in Wittgenstein’s lectures.¹⁷ But many of her novels interrogate the ‘anxiety of influence’ itself. Iris saw Wittgenstein as both numinous and later as demonic. She dreamt of him all her life (never of Sartre), gave Tractatus aphorisms to the mystical Nigel in Bruno ‘s Dream, and started Nuns and Soldiers teasingly: ‘"Wittgenstein —". “Yes?” said the Count.’ Part of what doubtless fascinated her was the way he commandeered his students’ lives, humiliated and sometimes excommunicated them. She wrote to Queneau that the atmosphere around Wittgenstein was ‘emotional and esoteric';¹⁸ and later spoke of him as evil: he had abandoned old friends, ‘harshly criticized Jewish refugee-philosophers’ – probably his combative ex-disciple Friedrich Waissman – ruined careers by telling promising students to give up philosophy – including Smythies.¹⁹ Wittgenstein, she later noted, could, like Kreisel, ‘destroy the very inward part of someone’s self-respect’.²⁰ He was ferocious and destructive. Yet, if she continued to admire him, it was probably his obstinate and at times difficult lucidity which influenced Oxford analytical philosophy generally, and is observable in her own best work.

Iris, Shah and Hijab went on the river Cam²¹ – they were impressed that she could punt – visited Suffolk, and in July 1948 she cycled with Shah in the Cotswolds and in Dorset²² before a visit to Paris. With Kreisel, discussion of moral philosophy floundered. On 31 May 1948 Hijab explained to Kreisel ‘what are moral problems’ – a powerful induction, Iris noted, ‘like when one begins to distinguish virgins from non-virgins … Kreisel now classifies people according to whether they have moral problems – (Stage 1!). A feat.’ Over dinner with Kreisel a year later Iris wished to determine the moral meaning and ownership of acts, as if – as she put her own sense of the urgency of this issue – ‘on the Day of Judgement’. Kreisel, by contrast, diminished the notion of moral responsibility by reducing it to a symptom of neurotic ‘guilt’ or anxiety. He cited how the typists at the Admiralty, where he had worked during the war, felt ashamed of their sex lives ‘until they found that everyone else’s was the same! … He said he often didn’t feel acts, moral or mathematical, as his. They just occurred, and to regard them as his was self importance!’ The exclamation marks measure Iris’s amused interest in their difference of outlook.

Iris transcribed Kreisel’s letters – he referred to them as ‘soliloquies’ – into her journals over the succeeding fifty years, more by far than those of any other correspondent. Wittgenstein was ‘our eternal topic’.²³ Kreisel’s views on how unoriginal Wittgenstein was, and how scrappy his knowledge of other philosophers, are given to Guy in Nuns and Soldiers. It was for her a defining characteristic of friendship that one does not catalogue one’s friends’ qualities: ‘When I get to know someone well … I don’t index them – they are for me.’²⁴ For half a century she nonetheless records variously Kreisel’s brilliance, wit and sheer ‘dotty’ solipsistic strangeness, his amoralism, cruelty, ambiguous vanity and obscenity; though not his taste for a fashionable world, nor the boastfulness noted in the unusual Festschrift dedicated to him.²⁵ Kreisel and Elizabeth Anscombe are the unnamed pair who, as John Bayley later and furiously learnt, went into Iris’s room in Park Town in her absence in 1951 and made fish soup there, ruining a blue silk-chiffon scarf given her by Rene by straining the soup through it.²⁶ The mess and stink left behind resulted in Iris being thrown out of her lodgings. ‘Forgiveness’ was not in question: Iris’s friendship came unconditionally. A.J. Ayer delighted Kreisel by saying that he was a juvenile delinquent, ‘but only on the surface’.

Iris told Kreisel she sometimes found his casualness disturbing. His apartness and moral solipsism fascinated her. She understood why she should wish to write to him, but not why he should like to write to her. In 1971 she dedicated An Accidental Man to him. In January 1994 she noted him ‘as beautiful & charming & unique as ever’. When a third party suggested to Kreisel that he was one model for the Satanic Julius King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat,²⁷ Iris characteristically protested that he was ‘too noble’. Possibly he was insufficiently interested in others to have been the main prototype for the unsettlingly perceptive and coolly detached Julius, for whom there was in any case a more disturbing model; while Hijab recalled Kreisel vividly,²⁸ to Kreisel both Hijab and Shah were ‘wholly without interest’.²⁹ Kreisel, however, was one model for Marcus Vallar in The Message to the Planet,³⁰ who is brilliant and solitary to the point of near-autism, and given to bouts of random cruelty that devastate its victims.

Within three weeks of arriving in Cambridge Iris met Wittgenstein. Trinity, where she so frequently was, had been Wittgenstein’s college, more off than on, since 1912. Elizabeth Anscombe, Wittgenstein’s premier pupil, would translate and give Iris a copy of his Investigations, the revolutionary handbook of the second phase of his thinking, only in May 1953. Meanwhile his Brown and Blue Books were circulating in typewritten form, like samizdat literature behind the Iron Curtain, and generating a comparable excitement. Iris had mentioned Wittgenstein to Frank in a letter of 5 July 1943, and had talked about him with Anscombe in 1944. After some preliminary ‘devastating’ skirmishing with Anscombe, who, like John Wisdom, might effect an entree to Wittgenstein, Iris met him on Thursday, 23 October 1947. He had two narrow, empty, barracks-like rooms, K.10 in Whewell’s Court, at the top of a Gothic tower, with no books or bathroom,³¹ only two deckchairs and a camp bed. She thought him very good-looking, rather small, with a sharpish, intent, alert face and ‘those very piercing eyes. He had a trampish sort of appearance.’ He said to her, ‘It’s as if I have an apple tree in my garden & everyone is carting away the apples & sending them all over the world. And you ask: may I have an apple from your tree.’ She remarked, ‘Yes, but I’m never sure when I’m given an apple whether it really is from your tree.’ ‘True. I should say though they are not good apples …’. He also said, ‘What’s the good of having one philosophical discussion? It’s like having one piano lesson.’ Wittgenstein famously did not think women, in any case, could do philosophy: ‘men are foul, but women are viler’ he would remark.³² Elizabeth Anscombe was an honorary male.

Wittgenstein’s extraordinary directness of approach, the absence of any paraphernalia or conventional framework, his denuded setting, all unnerved Iris. There was a naked confrontation of personalities. She met him once more, never got to know him well, always thought of him with awe and alarm. He and the differently alarming and influential John Austin, she later said, were ‘the most extraordinary men among us’.³³ Since she was too late to hear Wittgenstein lecture, his influence reached her mainly through disciples such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Yorick Smythies, whose personal style ('authenticity') and philosophic style were seen to coincide:

One week after meeting him, while reading the Brown Book, Iris asked: ‘What are the main points of the Wittgenstein revolution? … What’s happening? The solidity seems to go. “We act like automatons much of the time” True in a way.’ Her focus was not on the discontinuities between early and later Wittgenstein but on the effect of his philosophy generally on our conception of ourselves. He had an excessive suspicion of the inner life.³⁵ Two days later, she asked herself, ‘Will I admit I acted like automaton? I might.’³⁶ This message she found also in Freud: that we, and our motives, are dark to ourselves. ‘I am obscure to myself. I don’t coincide with my life. (This is basis of metaphysics)’, she wrote on 4 November,³⁷ noting on the same day that ‘Julian of Norwich* is just as self-certifying as Wittgenstein’. And she criticised Wittgenstein’s as ‘a world without magic’, objecting from the first to the divorce he pressed between fact and value: ‘Our imagination is immediately & continuously at work on our experience. There are no “brute data".’³⁸

The idea that important aspects of human behaviour are mechanical she had also noted that 21 June, after listening to a talk on Kafka’s importance at the Anglo-French Art Centre. ‘Four themes …: guilt, the loneliness of man, a certain mechanism in action (one irrevocable act sets off a whole train of apparently necessary actions … An automatism of the individual versus an automatism of the Order – & no real contact) and the instability of the universe (its disintegration).’ The speaker had part of a concentration camp journal read out to show its Kafkaesque quality. Kafka, Iris notes, was one who sees the forces at work in the world more clearly than we, and so can ‘prophesy’. He always mattered greatly: she hoped to be influenced by him.³⁹ Roquentin’s plight in Sartre’s Nausea, she noted, was that of a philosopher, while K’s in The Castle was ‘that of everyman’. Kafka’s model, not Sartre’s, she strongly implies, is the one she wishes to follow.⁴⁰

There is an amiable counterpoint of philosophic discussion and everyday observation in Iris’s journals of this period, as if philosophy and quotidian life might be connected, not kept apart. In the middle of recording a discussion, in Trinity College Gardens, of – as it might be – ‘logical space’, or why it should happen to be that we do not remember backwards (i.e. like the backtracking of a film), she will note the luminous blueness of Shah’s shirt glowing immensely in the evening light. 12 June 1948: ‘Back from Oxford. A world of women. I reflected, talking with Mary [Midgley], Pip [Philippa Foot] & Elizabeth [Anscombe], how much I love them.’ Or on phenomenology in action: ‘Walking this afternoon toward Kings – I wanted the crocuses (mauve & white) to enter into me – they would not – until the chapel bell began to toll – then I was penetrated by the colour.’⁴¹

Iris never adopted the tone of detailed casuistry that long marked official British philosophy. Kreisel recalled that, by contrast, when she gave papers at the Moral Sciences Club she was noted for ‘saying it with roses’. ‘There simply isn’t very much to be said about your ideas,’ he wrote in 1968, and Iris commented, ‘This is fairly devastating, but is the kind of thing I can take from Kreisel!’ It brought to her mind the awful occasion on 3 June 1948 when Hijab walked out of the Moral Sciences Club after her paper on ‘Objectivity and Description’ in Richard Braithwaite’s rooms because he felt there was nothing to be said about it.⁴² It was not that Iris was casual or lacked discipline. What put her at odds with ‘dried-up’ orthodox philosophy was that she was simply interested, as philosophers once in the golden age all were, in everything on earth. She refused, ever, to honour contemporary proscriptions which might limit her intellectual curiosity or reduce her to a blue-stocking.

Being half-artist and half-intellectual, Iris felt entirely at home nowhere. Talking with Dylan Thomas at a party given by the writer and editor Kay Dick in December 1948, she decided that she best liked the company of ‘artists, or rather Bohemians, not intellectuals’. Among intellectuals, by contrast, she felt herself ‘all warmth & solidity’. Yet, once having come to this conclusion, meeting the ‘brutishness and emotional opaqueness’ of bohemian Tambimuttu’s world, or even of Ernest Collet’s world, made her feel that she must be an intellectual again, after all.

It was precisely their trespass over the frontier between philosophy and psychology that enabled rarely noticed aspects of our being – such as ‘Angst, nausée, & all the bag of tricks’⁴⁴ – to be at last categorised by Existentialist philosophers. This excited her. ‘Do please explain Existentialism to me,’ John Willett’s mother would say to Iris during the war. On 31 July 1947 Iris returned to Badminton, and felt ‘BOGUS’⁴⁵ explaining Existentialism there. Broadcasting twice about Existentialism in March 1950, and writing the first monograph on Sartre,⁴⁶ she was now explaining matters to a wider audience. Excitingly, ‘The war was over, Europe was in ruins, we had emerged from a long captivity’, and Sartre’s philosophy was an inspiration to many who felt ‘they must, and could, make out of all that misery and chaos a better world for it had now been revealed that anything was possible’.⁴⁷ ‘Anything was possible’ is ironic.

Iris’s quarrel with Sartre goes back to her first encounter with him, and extends into her first novel. It was, she wrote to Queneau, as if Sartre were ‘repeating a spell: Be like me, be like me. Almost ready to say: yes dammit, I am.’ But she was not quite spellbound.⁴⁸ In October 1947: ‘There is something demonic about Sartre which is part of his fascination.’ Like Wittgenstein, Sartre, by diminishing the inner life, over-privileged the first person. Neither thinker sufficiently respected – or allowed themselves to be touched by – the Other.⁴⁹ Although Sartre explored consciousness and value, topics then outlawed from British philosophy, and of equal interest to Iris as would-be novelist and philosopher, Being and Nothingness recognised no value ‘except a Luciferian private will which in effect exalted unprincipled “sincerity", bizarre originality, and irresponsible courage’.⁵⁰ This will was attached to a heroic consciousness, inalienably and ineluctably free, belonging nowhere, confronting the ‘given’ in the form of existing society, history, tradition, other people. The enemy was dead bourgeois conventionality.

Iris felt equivocal about this isolated 'Outsider'-hero for whom ‘rational awareness was in inverse proportion to social integration’. Existentialism’s promise of freedom was bogus. When one ‘leapt’ in the moment, repetitive patterns emerged:⁵¹ one’s behaviour in fact looked mechanical. Later she thought she had begun as ‘a kind of Existentialist believing in freedom, before coming to understand that love – and goodness – were paramount; and in 1970 she opposed the Existentialist hero (in the novels of Sartre, Camus, Lawrence, Hemingway, Kingsley Amis) to what she termed the ‘mystical’ hero (in those of Muriel Spark, Patrick White, Saul Bellow, Greene, Golding and – in one draft for this essay – herself).⁵² Here she argued that humility is a more apt response to our world than egoism. But the urge to find an accurate description of our condition drove both her philosophy and her fiction from the start. Jake in Under the Net is a solipsist, and the novel comically charts his awakening out of solipsism towards a better understanding of the nature and needs of others. Hugo, the novel’s saint or mystic, is Jake’s awakener. Iris’s notes for Under the Net pose the question: ‘How to bring religion in?’

She gave two evening talks on Sartre and Existentialism that October – probably at partly bombed-out St Anne’s church in Old Compton Street, Soho.⁵³ Her notes on Sartre at this point owe something to Gabriel Marcel’s objections to Sartre – she introduced Marcel at the same venue. Echoing Marcel, she noted that Sartre’s heroes are heroic not in terms of self-mastery, but merely as bandits. Existentialism, ‘an anguished, tortured liberalism’,was excessively individualistic. Sartre ‘does not give value to the other as such. Hence he does not conceive of [the] fact of love,’ a subject on which she judged him ‘affreusement détraqué’⁵⁴ and simplistic. Sartre reduced love to a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.⁵⁵ Though she attacked her own formulation ('pretty tepid effort'), she charged Sartre with ‘a drunken, luciferian, refusal of those calls of which love would make man conscious – love, & not that phantom of it which arises when it reflects itself, instead of accomplishing itself.

Indeed, Sartre’s admission of the importance of the Other was relative, not absolute, ‘authorised by us’. ‘Sartre is dangerous … [and] Sartrian man merely a sex maniac with an incomprehensible liberty, alone in the world.’ Most damagingly, his philosophy, with its emphasis on morality as action, and its deep distrust of Freud, did not allow for any real core to personality. In this, as in other ways, her mature philosophy would argue, Existentialism increasingly resembled the British tradition; and she levels similar criticisms at Wittgenstein, ascribing the current crisis in philosophy to precisely such defaults.

In her monograph Sartre, Romantic Rationalist Iris famously criticised British empiricism, and the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s Concept of Mind, elegantly unmasking Ryle’s pretensions to a value-free neutrality. Ryle’s world, so far from being value-free, was one where people do no more than ‘play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus’. Ryle ignored, by contrast, the worlds in which we ‘commit sins, fall in love, say prayers or join the Communist Party’.⁵⁶ Sin, love, prayer and politics: for Iris, no idle list of omissions. ‘We know,’ she memorably ends this brilliant study, ‘that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.’ Sartre’s impatience, fatal to the novelist proper, ‘with the stuff of human life’ was to blame. Although Simone Weil is absent from her monograph, Iris also rejected Sartre’s questioning of the ‘authenticity’ of suffering. She favoured Weil’s Aeschylean account of ‘affliction’ (malheur), which seemed better matched to the horrors of the time.

If her own characters’ predicament is Existentialist, their solution is not. It was not that Existentialism was wrong to remind its adherents to live in the present moment. More that it underestimated, unlike religious disciplines, the difficulties of doing so. Existentialism left out of account the daunting power of the personality and of its secret, obsessive, fantasy-ridden inner life. It praised being in the present but ignored the training necessary to the attempt. The messy incompleteness of things provoked in Sartre ‘nausea’, but might also more appropriately induce a healing reverence before the sheer alien, pointless multiplicity of the world.

Mary Warnock rightly observes that the Existentialist theory of life is intrinsically theatrical,⁵⁷ and for that reason objectionable. Iris’s picturing of Sartre became increasingly deadly;* but even in 1947 she opposes his ‘authentic’ hero to Dostoesvky’s good men – Myshkin in The Idiot, Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. 28 September 1947: ‘"Learning what goodness is” is changing oneself.’ Bertrand Russell, in a famous essay, opposed Mysticism and Logic, as if a mystic or saint were by definition an irrationalist or a dreamer. Iris’s saints, so far from inhabiting an alternative reality, are attuned to the here-and-now. Attention – that crucial concept in Simone Weil – and looking, valued above ‘will’, ‘movement’ and the ‘leap’ of choice, are the indispensable preliminaries to moral action. And attention and looking were what Sartre ignored.

‘Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture,’ wrote Iris in 1957.⁵⁸ Simone de Beauvoir’s English translator Roger Senhouse wrote to Iris that the moeurs treated in de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay were widely followed by the younger generation of Parisian café-goers.⁵⁹ The ‘Existentialist’ phase in Iris’s own self-invention illustrates this – a phase of caprices, of seeing through illusions and of Gidean gestes arbitraires and actes gratuites. Some love pursuits were, arguably, risky adventures of the will and manifested a happy bohemian disregard for convention.* The husband of one ex-Somervillian friend was startled in the 1940s when Iris, during what he had until that moment taken to be a quite different kind of conversation, concluded sagely, ‘So we’re not going to go to bed, then …’. A slightly later triangular involvement in which a different woman-friend unnerved Iris by showing her her journal record of Iris’s affair with her husband, with which she had for reasons of sex and power colluded, recalled (very broadly) She Came to Stay.⁶⁰ Later an entry in Iris’s journal: ‘Then I began to kiss her passionately and was desiring her very much. Understanding of what it would be to be a man, feeling very violent & positive, wanting to strike her body like an instrument’ immediately precedes a love-passage with the husband in question.⁶¹ And she is given to examining herself for signs of insincerity, and to praising others – e.g. Elizabeth Anscombe – for their ‘ruthless authenticity’.⁶² She, too, tried not to mind what others thought. Seated alone on the evening of 22 April 1953 in the bar of the Eastgate Hotel in Oxford, she reflects: ‘How little I care about that sort of “eccentricity". Insight into how perhaps odd old ladies in white stockings, or madmen, don’t care either. (Being “conspicuous", I mean.),’ a comment echoed the following month: ‘How I hate & despise embarrassment.’⁶³

Iris kept a journal all her life, albeit she did not write in it every day. Most journals after her marriage in 1956 read as a mixture of informal personal memoranda, observations, aphorisms, reminiscences, dreams (both hers and John Bayley’s), diaries of foreign trips, ideas for novels (marked ‘?') and for philosophy (marked ‘?'), all josding together, often in compressed form, unselfconsciously. Here was a writer’s quarry. Pre-marriage journals have on occasion an uncanny emotional intensity. Friends, sometimes appearing under their initials, are often identifiable.

13 December 1948. I need a strongbox to keep this damn diary in. Probably I ought to destroy all the entries of the last 3 weeks. Why am I unwilling to? … Must root out the weak desire for an audience (the lurking feeling eg that I write this diary for someone – Elizabeth], P[hilippa], D[onald], or X, l’inconnu, I still believe in l’inconnu—?). Way to sincerity, a long way.

30 January 1949. BS [unidentified] lectured me on politics & the old nostalgia stirred, part conscience, part guilt, part sheer romanticism and part sheer bloody hatred of the present set-up. To no end, but it stirred. It occurs to me that I entertain the idea: ‘One day I shall return to the party’, and the idea ‘One day I shall join the Roman church’ like two escape valves. It is not that I am utterly unserious about them – but they not held close, but part of some far project … Thought later: what marks one out as a confined person, with no dimension of greatness? Some lack of sweep, some surreptitious idolatry. In my case, I feel there must be some will to please which is on my face like a birthmark. Who lacks this smallness? D[onald], and Pippa [Philippa], unconfined people, and Elizabeth] too.

18 May 1952. Looking back in this diary. What an unstable person I seem to be … I shall be to blame if I don’t build now where I know it is strong, in the centre, through loneliness. (Aloneness) … I wrote today on the top of my lecture paper: marriage, an idea of reason!

14 June 1952. There is a lot which I don’t put into this diary, because it would be too discreditable – & maybe even more painful. (At least – no major item omitted but certain angles altered – and painful incidents omitted.)

27 October 1958. The instinct to keep a diary: to preserve certain moments for ever.

Journal-keeping, acting, letter-writing and the writing of fiction are – inter alia – all ways of inventing and expressing, and hence also of outliving and shedding, personae. Each entails communicating with, and performing in front of, an audience, real or imagined ('l’inconnu'). While the stories Iris tells in her novels are not her own, in the early journals (and letters⁶⁴) she accuses herself of exhibitionism.

After a lecture by Elizabeth Anscombe on ‘the past’ in October 1947, Iris reflects about what she might feel if presented with documentary evidence – for example, journals – about her forgotten past:⁶⁵ ‘Suppose I were given evidence about what I thought at the time. My diaries etc. I think I wd not accept that evidence. I’d still feel I didn’t know what my past really was.’ Over many pages of reflection, she reaches towards a distinction between a ‘frozen’ and an ‘unfrozen’ past. So long as one lives, one’s relationship with one’s past should keep shifting, since ‘re-thinking one’s past is a constant responsibility’, an operation of conscience in evidence, for example, when it comes to thinking about one’s enemies. Since one ‘shdnt hate “so-&-so” stuck in yr past, you can, in a way, un-hate them in your past too’. The first essay in The Sovereignty of Good (1970) would famously describe a mother-in-law learning to ‘un-despise’ her daughter-in-law.

A few weeks after Iris’s arrival in Cambridge she contacted Father Denis Marsh, a friar all his life, at the time chaplain to Cambridge’s Anglican Franciscan house, heading their successful attempt to influence those involved in higher education, a simple believer who left theological sophistication to others. She felt, and would continue to feel, divided between two authoritarian forms of belief, before rejecting both: ‘Joining the CP was at least a gesture of solidarity with sufferers. This is in a way joining their enemies … I am crying. Crocodile tears.’⁶⁶ When in April 1950 she gave a talk on Communism to a conference of clergy and youth leaders in Carmarthen she appeared still a fellow-traveller.⁶⁷ Although an unidentified CP friend criticised her paper, and quoted Browning’s ‘Lost Leader’ – ‘Never glad confident morning again’ – accusing her of desertion, she nonetheless told her audience that Marxism’s ‘terrific ethical power … and force’ could still command the allegiance of morally scrupulous and idealistic people: ‘While there is injustice or oppression anywhere, they cannot rest.’ Marxism was a moral code, a metaphysic, a religion, ‘answering the spiritual as well as the material needs of tens of millions’, and Christians must learn from Communists. She argued for a dogmatic pacifism, even against Stalinism, which was ‘not imperialistic’ – and even if it were, Christians should be willing to be ‘martyred’ (sic) for the sake of the ideal. Better Red than see the world undergo ‘an atom war’.

‘Have I ever really modified my profound choice of my style of life?’ she soon charged herself. ‘Today I was imagining a conversation (my thoughts are damnably dramatic at present – indeed usually are) in which someone taxed me with d'être devenue chrétienne, and I replied fai changé de technique, c’est tout.’* A humorous habit of addressing friends as ‘Comrades and Citizens’, as of singing the satirical CP song about the Independent Labour Party – ‘Just now there are but two of us, but soon there will be three’ – stayed with her; so did her search for believable authority. There was no moment in Iris’s career when she was not ‘touched’ – to use the recurrent word – by the plight of the Insulted and the Injured. Her untitled 1945 ‘Stuart’ novel contains a woman character who, when it’s ‘more than half the world’s population that’s so hurt and bedraggled, … doesn’t worry'; but none the less ‘when she pities … half dies with pity … If there was only one human creature in the world that was being starved & ill-treated … she’d probably weep for hours & not be happy till something had been done.’ This is one persona of that Iris who, as her novels show in some strange, surreal and even sinister ways, experienced an extreme protective anxiety about her world and all it contained; yet for whom the ability to experience pathos, to be touched, was the sign of a whole heart.

Such protective anxiety never goes away, but attaches itself, as in later Dickens and Dostoevsky, to the individual case, without hope of complete cure. Iris never took the orthodox line that no alleviation of suffering should occur lest this delay the revolution ('tinkering with the mechanism rather than replacing it'), but does what she can to help others now. On Thursday, 22 April 1948, the Jancars arrived in England, after TB and imprisonment, as ‘European Voluntary Workers’. The following day Jože appeared in Iris’s room at Newnham, having walked the fourteen miles from RAF camp West Wratting with only one pound in the world. Since EVW accepted single persons only, he was wretchedly separated from Marija in Preston, yet ‘completely intoxicated with happiness & freedom & hope! Thank God for such people … He hopes to get some humble job in a hospital, & finish his studies later.’⁶⁸ In his excitement at seeing her Jancar’s little English disappeared, and he told her happily: ‘Iris – I have become a letter from my wife.’

A week later she took him to London for the day to see the public-spirited Duchess of Atholl – in the 1930s pilloried as the ‘Red Duchess’ – in her Knightsbridge flat. Iris hoped she might help Jancar. He had never before met a Duchess. This one wore dark clothes and a splendid brooch. Things went well after, in good Hapsburg style, he elected to greet her by kissing her hand. Speaking to him in excellent French and German, she proposed that he first spend a year trying to learn English so that ‘we can get you into Oxbridge’. Duchesses apart, this was also Jancar’s first trip to London, so Iris took him, via Nelson’s Column and the Houses of Parliament, to Westminster Cathedral. ‘Do you believe in God?’ she asked him, more than once. Jancar: ‘Yes I do.’ Both knelt and prayed, Iris taking out a rosary and telling her beads. She was charmed when he referred to them both as philosophers – ‘ Wir Philosophen …’ (We philosophers …) – while she struck him as a confused seeker (spiritually, politically): ‘If Iris had a god, she could never discover its name.’

In the end the only college Jože could get into to complete his medical studies was Galway, where, on St Patrick’s Day 1950, desperate as he had no money to pay his rent, and hoping at best to be deported back to his wife in England, a cheque from Iris for £100 – no mean sum in those days, representing some months’ salary – arrived out of the blue. Iris also helped get Marija a job as nurse at Badminton, where she taught a little German too, and was intimidated by BMB. The next year Iris was godmother to their first child, Sonja,* BMB and Iris both attending the baptism. Later still, after a distinguished career, Jancar rose to be Vice-President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

The episode shows Iris as what Kipling (and later John Bayley) called ‘little-friend-to-all-the-world’, or Madonna della Misericordia. As in the famous Piero della Francesca picture of that name, she took dozens, perhaps hundreds of souls, both renowned and wholly unknown, inside the protection of her capacious cloak, often for life, writing concerned and nurturing letters to them over the decades, fretful and yet calm and wise. But this is one part only of her story. She was also seen as a vamp or flirt, albeit inordinately high-minded, which is not necessarily either the least confusing kind to deal with, or the least self-deceived sort to be. John Bayley later observed that the most successful vamps are those who appear subdued, un-showy and even uninterested in what they are up to, simply waiting for someone else to make the running, and concealing any desire for success in the field of battle. Dominic de Grunne, already cited as seeing Iris as a puritan idealist (see Chapter 1), in fact saw her half in that light, and half as a seductress, the two halves at war with each other. It was partly how she then saw herself: ‘Flirting is fine, but to be a flirt is not … Despite the impossibility of flirting by yourself, flirts are traditionally considered to be women.’ The very concept of flirtation privileges the male.⁶⁹

‘She stared at men & whistled after them,’ Iris imagined, in June 1953, of a possible novel-character never incorporated into a published work. Yet the idea of role-reversal fascinated her all her life, and to some degree she lived it. She records with no selfconsciousness both ‘homosexual’ (she does not use the word ‘lesbian') dreams, and the possibility of exchange of tendernesses, from time to time, with a loved woman-friend. One later lesbian affair was intensely important to her. In so many ways ‘emancipated’ herself, Iris’s feminism shifts in successive decades, and she was suspicious of the notion of women being separated off for ‘progressive’ reasons into new ghettos. In 1970 she recorded a fear that ‘Women’s Lib [might] mix up what makes one miserable because one is a woman with what makes one miserable because one is a human being,’ and later felt that ‘lots of present day literary criticism, feminism etc.’ were simply not worth pursuing in detail. There is no period, however, in which the cause of women’s rights is not close to her heart.

The writer Adam Phillips connects flirtation with that once fashionable philosophic concept ‘contingency’ – a word much used by Iris, meaning all that we cannot easily tame or make sense of, all that resists the desire for our story to take a particular shape, rather than stay open, undecided, unresolved. The ability to learn openness to contingency is a virtue her fiction and philosophy alike are famous for commending. Hers was in some sense a personality without frontiers. She had the gift Keats praised in Shakespeare, that of ‘negative capability': that wise passivity and receptivity which allows those so gifted to be touched by, and to enter into, the lives, thoughts and emotions – the private worlds – of many others. Rosemary Cramp was typical of many friends in finding Iris’s capacity to enter so fully into the worlds of others enthralling. Yet emotional promiscuity could be one aspect of negative capability, so that, as some observed, Iris’s life sometimes appeared to be a series of engouements, leading even Iris herself to wonder about what she, much later, termed her ‘silliness’.

To put the same point another way: loving others was her way both of knowing them, and of losing herself. And loving her world was her way of realising or imagining it. As for the willingness to allow oneself to feel touched, it led naturally to the desire, in turn, to touch. 21 February 1949: ‘Moved by a sense of his [x’s] integrity. (Has this sort of “being moved” any value? There is a sort of sexual thrill in it sometimes. But it raises a Q about what one does.)’ The question about ‘what one does’ runs through these pre-marriage journals. That she did not trouble to edit them suggests both how remote, by 1990, this earlier persona seemed to her and how innocent.

29 June 1952. Coming back, a further folly. I told F[erruccio] R[ossi-Landi]* I wd see him, & came by taxi from the station. It was very hot. We spoke of his Milan love – sitting on F’s bed, with our knees almost touching. As I was about to leave, I couldn’t resist making a gesture, & in a moment F had his arms about me. It was a kiss that I had wanted long, & he too, & we could not have resisted further at that moment. Is this wrong? … I must be in control.

11 October 1952. M[aurice] C[harlton]† was here just now; he suddenly appeared, offering to do Mods teaching … I asked him to stay. We drank coca-cola. He talked of his work. He looks much better, less small and drawn, a new beauty in his face. We were both very tense … I wanted to embrace him. I am sure he wanted the same. We avoided each other’s eyes. MC is dynamite. I ought to avoid him.

6 May 1953. Just back from a principal election meeting. G[eoffrey de Ste] Cfroix]* offered me a lift in his car. I accepted it, remembering the last time. When we got to K[ing] E[dward] S[treet], we sat in the car talking – then as I was about to get out he seized my hand & kissed it, & then kissed me on the lips … How strangely moving these momentary meetings are. Earlier in the day [xx] was here, with his tender cynicism. It is foolish to invite such tendernesses, however slender. But I find them irresistible. There has never been a moment when I have trembled on the brink of such an exchange & drawn back.

6 October 1953. Found myself thinking of Hans Motz^† last night … I can see his strong hard face, more purely man than most of the men I know. Last night I was desiring him, or wanting, at any rate, a first kiss. The metaphysics of the first kiss … The impossibility of marriage, of having only one man.

She was young, very attractive, built for happiness. ‘The impossibility of marriage, of having only one man’ is not the dictum of one lacking in confidence, and though she sometimes felt ‘that these casual friendly liaisons are wrong’,⁷⁰ in her they seem blameless. Nickie Kaldor, for a while much taken with her, said, ‘It’s like something she gives out.’ Olivier Todd, who knew her from Cambridge in 1947,⁷¹ found her, despite her quietness and ethereal quality – neither here nor there but elsewhere during conversations – ‘une personalité frappante’, and noted the asymmetrical quality to her affairs, Iris being less involved than the other. To what extent should the attractive feel responsible for the sufferings of their admirers? Her journals hint at her care in avoiding Feydeau-like collisions (and render the night in The Red and the Green when four suitors independently visit Lady Millie exaggerated realism rather than, as some have criticised, fantasy). She enjoyed admiration and was also susceptible, rarely, at any point in her life, out of love, indeed frequently in love with more than one person at a time. She had the courage required to be vulnerable together with the prudence to keep options open. E.M. Forster once wrote that love drives novel characters more than it does people in real life: if so, Iris may be an exception. She noted humorously, ‘I am a hand and wrist fetishist. Only some men wear gloves so one never knows,’ but it was the intellectual and moral qualities of her male lovers, rather than their beauty (the latter sometimes apparent only to Iris), that usually appealed, and the drama of an affair was as important as its passion. Power and vanity apart, she wanted to learn and was, despite all, shy. To all she was remorselessly kind.

On 16 November 1968, on discovering and rereading her diaries from 1945 onwards she wrote: ‘That business of falling in love with A, then with B, then with C (all madly) seems a bit sickening,’ and noted what an ‘ass’ she then appeared. ‘I mustn’t live in this torment of emotion (Empty words – I shall always live so.),’ she by contrast wrote on 15 August 1952. It is no accident that in her May 1952 diary she associated two apparently opposed desirables: loneliness and marriage. John Bayley would, in the very best sense, provide both. Meanwhile there were adventures. She did not identify with Queneau’s picaresque Pierrot for nothing.

The combination of susceptibility and unwillingness to make final commitments – of a soft heart and a strong will – was powerful; many were enchanted, some confused. The novelist and critic Rachel Trickett, who returned to Oxford in 1950, aptly observed that, so intensely magnetic was Iris, it was small wonder if she should also be ‘all over the place’, emotionally speaking. There was a distinction between the idle dalliances of youth and ‘the real thing’ – yet the distinction was not always clear. The advent of John Bayley helped bring proportion.

Admirers may be disturbed by the notion of Iris, like King Lear, not being ague-proof. But part of her intellectual legacy is a revival of the idea of the soul, an entity divided and at war between low, half-conscious motives, and higher ideals. Without having pondered her own frailties, she could not have argued this with clarity or force; and her writings would lack their charge of truth. She had noted to David Hicks in 1945 ‘a tendency to want to be loved, and not engage myself in return’, echoing this in her journal ten years later: ‘I always want to have it both ways – to give moderately and yet have full attention.’⁷² Yeats’s father once pointed out that all creativity can be seen in some sense as a frustrated bid for love;⁷³ indeed Iris noted on 4 April 1948: ‘All speech is seduction.’ Within ‘speech’ may be included the writing of fiction. In 1964 she noted to a friend ‘25 years of being told in the most extravagant terms’ that she was beautiful.⁷⁴ ‘One of my fundamental assumptions,’ she asserted more baldly, during an imbroglio in December 1948, ‘is that I have the power to seduce anyone.’⁷⁵

The most brilliant of her generation of British philosophers, Elizabeth Anscombe was from 1946 a Research Fellow at Somerville, becoming a Fellow in 1964. If other colleges were less appreciative of her remarkable qualities than was Somerville, her mix of bohemianism and fiercely expressed scorn for the frivolity of the Oxford philosophical faculty may help account for this.

‘Do you stay awake worrying about the existence of the external world?’ Anscombe asked Mary Warnock, who did not. Fair without being blonde, of fine profile, broad noble brow and extraordinary stamina, Anscombe was both poor and unselfconscious enough to collect cigarette stubs from the gutter, and appears in Iris’s journals being pilloried for wearing trousers at early Mass, living at 27 St John’s Street in a squalor that Iris, tolerant in such matters, finds noteworthy, and getting arrested for wandering about with her hair down at 5 a.m., then refusing to give her name to the police. She was married from 1941 to Peter Geach, with whom, since he worked at Cambridge and then Birmingham, she practised what they termed ‘telegamy’ – marriage at a distance. Iris repeatedly pays homage to Anscombe and to Yorick Smythies, Wittgenstein’s leading students. Reading Norman Malcolm’s life of Wittgenstein in 1958 brings back suddenly to Iris ‘all that E[lizabeth] A[nscombe] and Yorick once “taught” me, were for me … ten years ago. A real sense of a great demand, & a hatred of the frivolous & insincere.’⁷⁶ One of her students thought Anscombe detectable within the serenely Buddha-like chain-smoking corner-shop newspaper-seller Mrs Tinckham, much given to silences, in Under the Net.⁷⁷ (The phrase ‘pathologically discreet,’ used of Mrs Tinckham, was, however, originally invented by Heinz Cassirer for Philippa Foot.)

What Iris termed a three-day ‘courtship’ between herself and Anscombe started on Friday, 10 December 1948. Iris noted in herself a feeling of curious detachment, ‘almost frivolous. A vague sexual excitement.’ When her delightful colleague at St Anne’s, the quarter-Burmese Economics tutor Peter Ady – despite her first name a woman, and one who hunted and dressed well – came in to drink gin and talk of candidates, Iris found herself contemplating her ‘with a sort of desire. Inclination to kiss her neck. (Something affected in all this.) I feel as light as a feather, can’t even see myself as bloody or in danger or a menace to others.’ Twenty-two pages of self-examination follow, full of hope and fear, seven excised, in which Iris appears to have wished to purchase love at the price of passion, but, with considerable ado and regret, renounces this yearning for the sake of peace of mind. She contemplates what she at first fears to be Anscombe’s lack of ‘generosity, gentleness, douceur, tendresse, of all that for me lights up & gives grace to my attachments to people’, but is then startled to realise how dangerous these qualities are, ‘especially in their corrupted form in me’. Yorick Smythies helps her to see that, on the contrary, it is essential for all concerned that no further idle emotions be aroused or aired. Iris went to Mass and prayed that she might genuinely desire the well-being of all concerned, and to confession with splendidly forthright Father Dalby of the very High Anglo-Catholic Cowley Fathers on the Iffley Road, who suggested that she get the nuns at Malling to pray for her also.

On learning that Anscombe was going to visit Wittgenstein in Ireland, Iris was doubtful whether Wittgenstein would positively discourage this courtship. If told that one had seduced numberless women, Iris reflected, Wittgenstein might not be at all moved; yet some frivolous remark about it would send him into a rage – an idea that gets into The Nice and the Good.⁷⁸

Friendship survived; fifty years later Anscombe remembered Iris as ‘someone who was obviously extremely attractive in a way which didn’t quite work with me. I mean we didn’t become close friends … and I don’t think we ever quite managed to work out what we meant to each other.’⁸⁰ In 1993 Iris dedicated Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals to her ‘old friend-foe’, as she had described Anscombe to Queneau.⁸¹

A woman character who conducts numerous emotional intimacies simultaneously recurs in Iris’s fiction:⁸² Anna Quentin in Under the Net, charged with ‘emotional promiscuity’ and with having a character which was ‘not all it should be’, who significantly ‘yearns for love as a poet yearns for an audience’ – or indeed a novelist yearns; Antonia in A Severed Head’, Lady Millie in The Red and the Green’, Morgan in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. They are dealt with with comic severity. The sequence comes to an end by 1980 in Nuns and Soldiers, where Anne Cavidge enters a convent having lived a wild youth and then wholly gone beyond it. Her youth had been

Yet Anne is attracted, too, by ‘the idea of holiness, of becoming good in some more positive sense’, and quits the world without regret. She does not later judge her sins therein too harshly, indulging no morbid sense of guilt: ‘Everything was provisional and moved so fast; others behaved quite as wildly as she'; moreover her early life had been in itself ‘a teaching, something laid down from the very start’.⁸³ Anne owes something both to Iris’s imaginings of a fellow-Somervillian (Lucy Klatschko) who entered a convent in 1954, and to Iris herself, apprenticed to learning how to love everybody dispassionately.

There are moments throughout Iris’s fiction when physical touch takes on an importance not necessarily ceded to it in ordinary life. ‘Only take someone’s hand in a certain way … and the world is changed for ever,’ says the narrator of The Black Prince. In The Bell the first scandal breaks merely because Toby and Nick are disturbed holding hands. In The Unicorn our view of Hannah shifts dramatically when, while Dennis Nolan is busy cutting her hair, her hand ‘nuzzles’ into his jacket pocket. In The Good Apprentice we are told of the good character Stuart that he may yet break out, and are led to understand that this breaking out might possibly involve his touching young Meredith; we are somehow reassured that he ‘already knew intuitively about the terrible untouchable sufferings of others’.⁸⁴ Respecting the distance that separates us all, he can none the less build bridges. Iris’s 1982 Gifford lectures were dedicated to the proposition that ‘chaste love teaches’. No doubt the debacles of the early 1940s gave to the problematics of ‘touch’ a special potency.

Iris’s fiction, like her life, is a story of ‘touchment’, a nonce-word she coins and uses exclusively for thinking about and watching her husband John Bayley: ‘Puss [i.e. Bayley] at St Ant’s holding broken wine glass by stem. Touchment.’ Women and gay men in her fiction are often willing to allow the world to touch them. There are also ‘touchy’ and vain persons, some (not all) of them men. Is not ‘touchiness’ a defensive symptom of our refusal to permit the world, precisely, to touch us? What other novelist would give to her character a thought about ‘how moving a dog’s nostrils were, moist and dark’, identifying herself with all of that dog’s intense, involuntary sensitivity and responsiveness?⁸⁵ Iris – oddly – defines the good man in the 1980s, both in The Good Apprentice and also in interview, as ‘cold and dead’,⁸⁶ by which she partly means chaste. She herself learnt not to be ‘touchy’ or easily upsettable.⁸⁷

Of the deeply sympathetic gay character Simon Foster in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, we are told that his philosophy had been: ‘One offers oneself in various quarters and one hopes for love. The love he had hoped for was real love. But the search had had its lighter side.’ This is not a bad summing-up of Iris’s search either, where ‘lighter’ could of course mean less morally serious, but also happier.

* John Vinelott, reading Moral Sciences at Queen’s 1946–50, witnessed these discussions. Other participants were Stephen Toulmin, Norman Malcolm, John Wisdom and Peter Minkus.

* Dame Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century mystic and anchoress, was important to Iris. The Norwich chapel in which she conducted her long retreat, destroyed by enemy action in 1942, was restored and rededicated on 8 May 1953. The phrase ‘All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,’ from Dame Julian’s still vivid and energetic and much-loved Revelations of Divine Love, is repeated – often ironically – in many of Iris’s novels.

* Her comments on Sartre in the introduction to the second edition of her monograph (1987) are studiously polite about the sententiousness of his later work. Sartre is versatile, courageous, learned, talented, clever. He ‘lived his own time to the full’. But by 1992 and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (pp.377, 463) Sartre is a demonic figure, envisaging the Other as the enemy, his nausée ‘the horror of those who can no longer love or attend to or even really see the contingent, and fear it as a threat to their imaginary freedom and self-regarding authenticity’.

* No accident that in 1959 in her essay ‘The Sublime and the Good’ she would condemn convention and neurosis equally as ‘the two great enemies of love’ (see Existentialists and Mystics, p.217)

* ‘Someone taxed me with having become Christian and I replied, “I‘ve merely altered my technique.” ‘ Journal entry, December 1948.

* For the legendary superstitiousness of Irish Protestants see Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, p.221 et seq. See also Iris’s journal, 1945 (no date): ‘an animism – embracing cats, buses, stones … a tenderness for all things. Such as my mother has.’

* The first of many: as well as Sonja she was to be godmother to Angus and Joanna Macintyre’s son Ben; Vera and Donald Crane’s daughter Frances; Hal and Mary Lidderdale’s daughter Norah; Christopher Gillberg’s son Theo; Paul and Penny Levy’s daughter Tatyana. To her ex-student Nicolas Veto she declined the honour around 1967, but said she would act as ‘honorary’ godmother.

* Semiotician, linguist and translator of Gilbert Ryle’s Concept of Mind into Italian. ^† Maurice Charlton (1926–94), with a double first in Mods and Greats, in 1952 a medical student at Hertford College, later a leading medical authority on epilepsy. See John Bayley’s Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch.

* 1910–99, author of the standard work on accounting in the ancient world; he had just moved from Birkbeck College and the LSE to New College, Oxford. He met Iris through Hal Lidderdale, with whom he had worked in a filter-room in the Middle East during the war.

^† 1909–87, first Professor of Engineering at Oxford, at St Catherine’s.

10 Cambridge 1947–1948

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Cambridge
1947–1948