In April 1948 Philippa Foot sent Iris details of a philosophy tutorship at St Anne’s College, Oxford. Iris felt odd about applying. She had once acted as secretary to an UNRRA committee of which Miss ‘Plummer’ (sic) – St Anne’s Principal, Miss Plumer – was chairman; this tried both their tempers. She also felt sick at the idea of competing with her old friend Mary Midgley. But by 11 July she had won the job – Mary cheering herself up afterwards in the Foots’ garden in Park Town, North Oxford, by wittily decapitating some irises (shades of Frank Thompson digging up the irises at Boar’s Hill in 1939).
During the summer Iris read, inter alia, Rousseau’s Social Contract, set text for the following year, and also Tacitus’ Germania, noting of the Romans that ‘if they had to be imperialists they might at least have done the job properly & civilised the Germans!’ As well as philosophy, she at first taught ‘some accursed Latin’1, looking after the few Classics students St Anne’s attracted each year. Women’s colleges were still struggling, and tutors were asked to ‘fill in’. Iris lengthened her skirts for the ‘New Look’ – a mode she would stay loyal to after it had ceased to be fashionable and laugh when this was pointed out – said farewell to Hijab when he left for Palestine and then, after the cycling holiday with Shah, to him also: ‘It breaks the heart.’ As for Iris’s love for Philippa, ‘ça continue, ça reste, ça me donne de la paix’.*
Philippa and Michael, expert and kindly rescuers, partly under Donald MacKinnon’s tuition, took in Iris as a weekend guest in 1947 at their house at 16 Park Town, and as a formal lodger for more than a year from late July 1948.2 Jokes about having to go to the rent tribunal as the Foots are ‘grossly undercharging’ her do not disguise Iris’s alarm about her presence offending Michael: living with the Foots seemed ‘daring’.3 The arrangement worked, but all thought it odd, and when Philippa had to be absent, Iris’s journal suggests that she found meeting Michael on the staircase as peculiar as he did meeting her.4 She hated what she termed ‘mislaying’ anyone (1965: ‘How did I mislay Queneau?'), as if her own carelessness were always in question. Conversation with Philippa was unbroken but relations were sometimes constrained: intimacy had lapsed.
Iris’s plots – and opening chapters – sometimes present a Shakespearian ‘court’ so interconnected as to dizzy the reader, and demand concentration. In the interests of clarity, this biography follows a few strands only. The presentation of such interrelationships in the fiction accurately reflects the extraordinary degree to which, mid-century, educated middle – and upper-class British persons knew one another; and also the complexities of family life after divorce became commoner in the 1960s and 1970s.
Park Town, where Iris had been in digs as a student, is a distinguished 1850s neo-Regency quasi-circular close. The Foot household and its neighbours in 1948 reflect the interrelatedness of a Murdoch novel. Honor Smith, a distinguished neurologist lodging at the top flat in number 16, was daughter of that Irish Lady Bicester who had admired Iris’s Magpie acting on 29 August 1939. She was now Senior Research Fellow at St Hugh’s. Soon afterwards living at number 25, she and Iris’s old Greats tutor Isobel Henderson, who lived at number 30, later planned to end their days together. Honor Smith’s erstwhile fellow neurological researcher Peter Daniel later married Philippa’s sister Marion; they lived happily together at Seaforth.
Iris’s predecessor on the middle floor at number 16, Prue Smith, working for the new BBC Third Programme, commissioned two broadcasts from Iris in 1949. Smith knew Iris as a philosopher who always carried a novel written during the war in her suitcase, which she was so foolish as still to hope to get published: ‘She has a lovely voice. I can strongly recommend her.’ ‘Dear Prue,’ Iris wrote on 8 November, ‘What I had in mind was to discuss the conception certain French novelists have of their vocation: that they are to picture the “situation of man", the human consciousness caught in the act of making its own world &tc … I could discuss all this in relation to Sartre and Queneau, who represent two entirely different types of “metaphysical novelist".’ With unnecessary but not untypical secretiveness, she added that this wholly anodyne letter was ‘for your private eye’ only.5 ‘The Novelist as Metaphysician’ and a second talk, ‘The Existentialist Hero’,6 were broadcast on the Third Programme on 26 February and 6 March 1950, Iris receiving forty guineas plus expenses. Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s characters, she argued, are appealing but they are never enchanting – and the worlds in which they live are without magic and without terror. There is here none of the enticing mystery of the unknown … and none of the demonic powers we feel in Dostoevsky. There is not even the nightmarishness of the absurd Kafka expresses. Sartre’s nightmares are thoroughly intelligible. This is … an unpoetical and unromantic literary tradition … This fact alone, that there is no mystery, would falsify their claim to be true pictures of the situation of man.
Here is a programme for her own fiction: to restore poetry, mystery, nightmare, terror, opacity to modern fiction and also to criticise Sartre’s ‘dramatic, solipsistic, romantic and anti-social exaltation of the individual':7 ‘We are not yet resigned to absurdity, and our only hope lies in not becoming resigned.’8
2
St Anne’s was different from other women’s colleges. Originally confusingly called the ‘Oxford Society for Home Students’, suggesting a correspondence or domestic science college, or a body of extramural students, its name changed to St Anne’s Society in 1942. At this point most tutors still taught in their own homes, and earned less than those of other women’s colleges. In 1948 it was still designated a ‘Society’, and poorly endowed, its dream to become a college, and thus have Fellows rather than tutors, realised only in 1952.
There was no college accommodation before then, and no formal dining-room until 1960. No student lived in until 1953, when ten houses on Bevington Road were bought: large numbers, living mainly in hostels, were needed to cover the overheads.*Fellows were very good about dining at the hostels in turn, and students were happy when Iris came: ‘She was very beautiful, with a calm, steady regard. She … listened kindly and was a most courteous guest,’ remembered one.9 St Anne’s was sometimes willing to take a risk on a girl who had failed to get into the more prestigious colleges which had a joint entrance exam, and there were some odd and interesting students (called ‘Principal’s funnies’ later, under Lady Ogilvie). It had other advantages, too, beyond being easier to get into. Anne Moses, later married to Wallace Robson, who read English 1950–53, found at St Anne’s the ‘most exciting’ of women’s college senior common rooms, full of young, brilliant and often beautiful dons. Chic Peter Ady was not exactly conventional: among other attachments to both sexes, she was later involved with Rose Dugdale, whose identification with the IRA led Dugdale to terrorism and to prison. Neither exacting Dorothy Bednarowska, one of three splendid English tutors, beautiful, cool Jenifer Hart who taught history, nor Iris were hide-bound. Hart, arriving in 1952, found it a friendly place, with only nine tutors, ‘unstuffy, liberal and generally go-ahead’. St Anne’s alone was willing to defy the convention that frowned on a candidate who was married or pregnant, or who wished to marry her tutor.10 Moreover by the early 1960s, under Lady Ogilvie’s tutelage, and with notably brilliant teaching in English, excellent exam results were achieved.
Miss Plumer, despising the dons as unworldly, was an efficient and strict disciplinarian, always getting up earlier than anyone else,11 a field-marshal’s daughter and a tactician. When she gathered that one student was having an affair, she asked the junior common room, aghast, ‘How am I to know that she isn’t one of many?’ Another student sensibly replied, ‘You have no way of knowing, Miss Plumer.’ She rusticated the student in question on hearsay evidence, over the Christmas break, to the later consternation of the dons. Iris gave her student Jennifer Dawson the impression that she found Miss Plumer (whose deformed shoulder scared Dawson) imperious and autocratic. ‘If you must have children,’ Plumer advised one lecturer, ‘kindly ensure that you have them in the University Vacation.’ If she could appear a narrow-minded martinet, she could also show practical kindness, and it was much to her credit that St Anne’s moved so smoothly towards college status. On her retirement in 1953 Iris was involved in canvassing for Plumer’s successor, writing to Hal’s sister Jane Lidderdale, a civil servant;12 Iris also went, with her kindly Scots colleague Kirsty Morrison, to see T.S. Eliot about the possible candidacy of the then literary editor of the New Statesman Janet Adam Smith;13 the latter recalled Iris at the time of the interview wearing a man’s peaked cap, very ‘present’, very attentive, and (probably) voting for her.14 In the end Lady Ogilvie was elected; though watchful, she could be liberal,15 and she transformed St Anne’s for the good.16
Iris was widely thought to be adored by her St Anne’s colleagues, a number of whom typified (in Lord David Cecil’s good-humoured phrase) ‘old-fashioned lesbians of the highest type’.17 Yet at governing board meetings Jenifer Hart cannot have been the only one to be mildly irritated by Iris on occasion reading more interesting matter under the table: Iris is unrepresented in college governing records. Hart was annoyed, too, by Iris’s being referred to as the expert on moral problems. Iris would never send anyone down, no matter how ill they behaved, preferring to tear her hair while saying she didn’t know what to do. Her interest lay very much in teaching, and she was dedicated, generally liked and admired by her students.
Nonetheless a disparate range of opinion survives about Iris as tutor. Gabriele Taylor, later Tutor in Philosophy at St Anne’s herself, found Iris, despite a reputation for disliking lecturing, a brilliant lecturer, good at indicating new directions for enquiry, but was surprised that she siphoned off first-year tutorials in Logic to her as an inexperienced postgraduate without coming back to confer about how they were doing. A number speak of her as a superb teacher, enabling and respectful,18 and the effect of her teaching as life-changing.19 Others found her unfocused. Deirdre Levinson felt disenchanted when Iris dedicated her Sartre book ‘To my parents': to some students she was fighting their own generational battles.20 Ann Louise Wilkinson (later Luthi), the rusticated student, recalls that for her year ridding themselves of their virginities was seen as important, and their love-lives took up much of their time. Iris seemed (to her) to be leading the same life as her students – she was once discovered by one of her pupils21 lying in the long grass of the Parks with a lover, she even on occasion went to the same bohemian parties, and once she and a student climbed the Parks gates together.22 By 1953, Iris had twice been thrown out of lodgings by indignant landladies.23
Many recall Iris sitting or lying on the floor, even during an admissions interview, or lying on a sofa, sometimes bare of stockings, splattered with mud after riding through puddles on her bike, a mop of fair hair over her eyes, or giving a tutorial with wet hair, having just washed it. When Katrin Fitzherbert was interviewed in 1955 Iris asked why she wanted to study philosophy. Fitzherbert replied, ‘I want to be wise'; Iris collapsed into peals of laughter. Some days later, when the letter offering her a place arrived, she finally forgave Iris.24 It was, after all, what Iris herself sought, too.
3
Oxford brought, at last, outward stability. Iris found the city, though not in general pretentious or snobbish, stiffer and more formal than London. One antidote lay with that aspect of post-war Oxford summed up by Maurice Bowra as ‘the era of the dancing economists’. A group of the beautiful people – ‘posh Labour’, in Mary Warnock’s phrase* – decided that they could combine being influential intellectuals with spare-time dancing.
Around 1950 Ian and ‘Dobs’ Little gave the first of two dances at Burcot Grange, an eighteenth-century brick house with modern additions on the Thames.25 Dancing was to a radiogram: there was no band. High-spirited parties, with much cheerful rudeness, they were frequently copied on a smaller scale.26 An entire pig was staked and roasted. Trinity College’s butler made a cup; no one knew how strong it was: there was gin disguised by orange with white wine, an orange liqueur and soda. This may help account for the number of people who proposed to Iris, whose inner radiance Ian Little recalled: ‘she would shine’.27 There may have been sixty or seventy guests. Tony Crosland, then Labour MP for South Gloucestershire, came. Hugh Gaitskell, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, complained that the music wasn’t loud enough, but it was at full volume: the sheer crush of people absorbed the sound. Gavin Faringdon, the Socialist peer from Buscot where the Magpies had played, was there. A huge ring was formed, a dance extemporised. More and more people joined until the ring got too big, and many fell – or, as Mary Warnock recalls, jumped – into the Thames. Iris went to the second party which was in fancy-dress, in June 1952, with Peter Ady. Tony Quinton, fellow of All Souls, and his fiancée Marcelle Wegier went as Arabs, the austere Magdalen economist David Worswick, robed in a sheet, as Nero. Thomas Balogh, unrecorded by Iris, was a Chinese grandee, in Mary Warnock’s memory an exceptionally predatory one.28 Iris drank a great deal. Worswick kissed her; the budding historian Asa Briggs, at once ‘completely and totally’29 in love with Iris, and soon important to her, was ‘very charming'; he danced better than she. In the car going back Peter Ady made a declaration of love and they kissed ‘with equal passion’. Iris, who ‘would have needed little prompting to spend the night with her’, was ashamed afterwards at having been so drunk.
There were other antidotes to stiffness. John and Jean Jones, she a painter who had met Iris in Cambridge, he a Law Fellow and later an English don, living at Holywell Cottage, and their circle of friends, were one, and thought by some to be one model (there were others) for the kindly, hospitable, ambiguous host-and-hostess figures who dominate Iris’s novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Another was that ‘happy band of free spirits’ and hard-drinking companions (the Horse and Jockey on the Woodstock Road was one favourite pub), many of them Irish or Antipodean or both, who represented to her ‘a piece of London broken loose': the novelist Joyce Cary;30 the painter Gerald Wilde, whose bohemianism caused him wrongly to be cited as model for Gully Jimson in Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth,31 lodging free from February 1949 on the Woodstock Road with Wendy Campbell-Purdie, who acted as ‘land-lady, spiritual director and friend to a miscellany of talented persons';32 Dan Davin, the Irish-New Zealand novelist and executive at the Clarendon Press, and his wife Win; trousered Enid Starkie, whose biography of Rimbaud Iris read in 1947.33 Iris often wore trousers too, that mutinous signal of independence, displaying that one was an emancipated post-war woman.34 She never wore gloves and was amazed when others did.35 She gained a reputation for going about, sometimes be-sandalled,36 ‘without a thought for her dress or a penny in her pocket’.37
Also living in Park Town was another companionate spirit, Audrey Beecham, profoundly eccentric niece to the conductor Sir Thomas, sharing both his arbitrary quality and boundless self-confidence, very butch – liking all-in wrestling – genuinely bohemian and unexpected. She had lived in Paris and fallen in love with Anaïs Nin, done gun-running for the Anarchists in Spain, been improbably pursued by Maurice Bowra who was carried away by her transsexual charm. Convinced that there were terrorists in the next house, she turned out to be perfectly right: they were deported. Beecham lent Iris Henry Miller books.
The novel Iris was then writing, with the (to put it mildly) unpromising title ‘Our Lady of the Bosky Gates’ – the excuse being that it was a modern imitation of Ancient Greek38 – involved a semi-bogus spiritual seeker known as the Guardian who, having travelled in Tibet and met the Dalai Lama, finds he can communicate with the statue of a Greek goddess, possibly Aphrodite.39 The statue comes to life. 1949, ten years before the Chinese embarked on their brutal crushing of the country, is an early year to take an interest in Tibet. Iris’s interest flowered in The Sea, The Sea in 1978. In June 1949 Audrey Beecham talked to her of Tibetan Buddhism, ‘where religious concepts were not “contaminated” by morality – i.e. the rules were technical – how to reach certain states of mind, which were accounted better than others’.
4
Iris was teaching moral and political philosophy, principally to students of PPE and of Greats: ‘Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, moral philosophy …’ she wrote to Queneau.40 Her quarrel with the constrictions of the exam-led curriculum – connected to her dispute with Oxford philosophy itself – made her want to range more freely: she asked some 1949 students to read Lenin’s State and Revolution.41 Students from other colleges and disciplines, especially mature postgraduates, profited most, while those most needful of coaching for ‘Schools’ sometimes expressed frustration, finding her diffuse. She would write blaming herself if a student did badly in the exams.42 Stronger students enjoyed precisely the fact that Iris could be ‘blithe and insouciante’ about the curriculum.43 Many ex-St Anne’s students, like the novelist Penelope Lively, even fifty years later referred to her as ‘Miss Murdoch':44 she could help others ‘Open up’ without dropping her own guard. And judging by the number of students whose weddings she attended, she was very popular.
It is somehow typical of Iris that her first student in 1948 should have been Mother Grant, a nun in the Sacred Heart order, later seriously to investigate Hinduism, then in her last year reading Greats. Tall, blue-eyed, black-veiled, habited and with goffered cap around her face, she was supposed to go out only when essential. Tutorials took place at 16 Park Town, Iris seated on the hearth-rug. She gave as one tutorial essay-topic ‘Space, time and individuation’, and relentlessly challenged each statement Mother Grant (a thoroughgoing Thomist) made: ‘Could you say a little more about that, Mother Grant?’45 They also met often, outside tutorials, at the St Anne’s hostel at 11 Norham Gardens, where Iris’s journals suggest that they discussed religion, Mother Grant evidently continuing by letter a conversation they had had about the ‘rottenness of our desires’.
1 March 1949. To tea with Mother Grant. Felt very great affection for her, & was immediately afraid & spoke of ‘snakes’ & ‘loss of nerve’. She said that she held me in her heart. A great feeling of gladness & humility where she is concerned. MG told me: when she was a child she was worried about the interminable list of people to pray for; later she understood a ‘lived solidarity in Christ’.
Mother Grant was later co-Acharya of an ashram in Pune (then Poona), the ecumenical ‘Christ Prem Seva Ashram’, together with Anglicans and Hindus. Iris firmly and romantically believed that the Vatican, in a fit of absent-mindedness, had given her permission. In fact the Vatican knew nothing of these ashrams’ existence: the local Bishops encouraged them.46 She wore salwar kameez (tunic and trousers), became expert on the texts of Sankaracarya, and was sometimes known, to her pleasure, as Mataji (Little Mother). Iris’s own ecumenicalism – her feeling that Christianity needed to be revitalised by exactly the kind of reflection in which Mother Grant was involved – meant that such developments were of great interest to her. In 1948 she would sometimes make reference to ‘your Church’, which made Mother Grant feel personally responsible for its vagaries. She knew that Iris, carrying a Latin missal, sometimes went to Mass at Blackfriars, and felt that they met at some profound and wordless level transcending faiths, Iris’s absolute honesty and integrity making it necessary to dwell on essentials: ‘The thing that has struck me most about Iris is her sheer goodness.’47 Iris, characteristically, blamed herself when Mother Grant just missed a first. They stayed in touch and met, if rarely, once in India and also in Oxford.
Also of continuing importance was Julian Chrysostomides, who went up in 1951, after a rejection from St Hugh’s. She had cried for two days. ‘Tell me your story!’ said Iris. Her English had been so poor, they told her, once she had the courage to ask, that they had been unable to decide whether she was stupid or intelligent. Iris accepted her to read Classics, and taught her ‘probingly, imaginatively’ in her third and fourth years, in 1954 and 1955. In December 1954, because she looked sad and a foreigner, Iris said, ‘I want to look after you!’ and took her home for Christmas. When Julian’s father died, Iris arranged for her to stay at a hotel in Paris, near her; Iris met her at the Gare du Nord, where she (Iris) rushed to help an old lady with her bags. She and Julian went to the Rodin museum, the Bois de Boulogne, the Jeu de Paume. Iris introduced her to English poetry, they went for frequent walks and picnics, and Iris was, for solitary Julian, her England,48 manifesting only its better aspects: humanity, humour, tolerance. Iris introduced her to three of her ‘gurus': Canetti, Momigliano, Fraenkel.
Julian saw Iris as vulnerable despite great inner strength. Iris helped her write letters, helped her with her mortgage when she needed such help, helped accelerate her British naturalisation in 1962. Iris would claim that all the best poets – Yeats, Sheridan, Wilde, Swift – were Anglo-Irish; in due course Julian visited the Dublin ‘cousins’. Iris was enchanted when she learned of Julian’s twin brother Nikos, and of how, when one twin cried, the other cried too: the depth of this love fascinated her. Julian was not offended when Iris put her picture of her to imaginative use in the character of Rain Carter, who is simultaneously proud and humble, in The Sandcastle; something they did not discuss. They met at least twice a year over the next half-century.
Jennifer Dawson read history from 1949 to 1952, and in 1961 published the novel The Ha-Ha, about the experience of mental breakdown. She had Iris as tutor in political theory in 1951 for what was supposed to be one term, but turned – so spendthrift was Iris of her time – into a year, tutorials often running on an extra half-hour. Iris, uninterested in clothes or make-up, wearing flat-heeled Brevitt Bouncer shoes, lisle stockings (nylons were expensive) and Sloppy Joe sweaters, cycled to St Anne’s, smiling as if she had a secret joy. Her room at that time in Musgrave House, 1 South Parks Road, was big, bare, with one picture on the wall. A coffee-bar on the other side of the front door enabled Iris to go out and bring her students coffee.
The syllabus should have been Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau’s Social Contract, which both she and Dawson hated. So instead they studied Plato, then utopias (More, Swift, Rousseau, Oakeshott’s theory of the state, which Iris attacked: it was not enough for the ship of state merely to ‘stay afloat’ as he argued – more should be possible) and Simone Weil’s Waiting on God, which fascinated Iris, who read it in French. ‘Miss Murdoch’, as Dawson, like Penelope Lively, still thought of her fifty years later, was so brilliant: why was she so nice to her? Iris often carried a string bag with bottles of beer in it, which they sometimes drank. Hating waffle, obscurity, pretension, she would ask, ‘What is the cash-value of this?’ That forced Dawson to learn clarity, and to write lucidly too. Encouraging precision, Iris would ask: ‘Wouldn’t one think this argument rather bizarre?'; she was fond of that impersonal locution, ‘one’. (Dawson finally looked up ‘bizarre’ in a dictionary.) They wistfully discussed the meaning of life, as if they hoped to find it. A perfectly rational society would have no poetry or history, Dawson once said, to which Iris riposted, ‘Come off it: there’d still be the history of the railways, the water-supply and the Trade Unions. And there would always be love and death.’ Once, in a discussion of déjà vu, Iris suggested Dawson read the myth of the Cave in Plato’s Republic, à propos the cave-like half-life we seem to inhabit. Iris had a genius for connecting the prose and the passion of life,49 and Dawson would leave each tutorial excited by the world she had been shown.
5
Iris seemed to appreciate, too, the mature Greats students Gerry Hughes and John Ashton, both Jesuits from Campion Hall, studying ethics. Hughes recalls that her room had very low furniture and an unused, unmade-up divan bed on which she would sit, curled up, spiralled up, playing with her hair, listening with the most intense interest. Once, flustered because she had unwittingly made a girl cry by saying, ‘Don’t you think that it’s immoral to say you LOVE somebody whom you don’t LIKE?’, she poured them each a gin. She was demanding, challenging and stretching, had so many backgrounds, analytic, Marxist, Existentialist – you never knew which angle she would approach from: she could set Sartre’s Existentialisme est-il un Humanisme?, or the proceedings of the First or Second Internationale for tutorial essays. She encouraged Hughes to trust himself, to go to the heart of the matter. Ashton so enjoyed his tutorials he asked for and got extra ones on political philosophy, where she set him off reading Kierkegaard, Weil, Marx, Lenin – no one else would offer so varied a reading-list. One essay topic goes to the heart of her concerns, both as novelist and philosopher: ‘Liberalism cannot succeed as a creed until it purges itself of its romantic elements.’ (It was Ashton whom she startled when he quoted St Augustine by asking, ‘Have you any evidence that he was a good man?') She wore flouncy, billowing clothes, deflected questions about herself, and her quality for him is generosity: of mind and spirit and with her time, of which she gave freely, especially when she helped see him through the crisis of leaving the Order.
Iris was supervisor to A.D. Nuttall and Stephen Medcalf, who went on to distinguished careers as literary critics, and who came to her in 1959 as graduate students writing on literature and philosophy. For Nuttall, who produced out of his work with Iris the unclassifiable Two Concepts of Allegory, Iris had to read Prudentia’s long, boring Psychomachia. Her tremendously, disquietingly messy room in no way detracted from her painstaking efficiency as a supervisor, writing detailed and helpful notes. She supported Nuttall when he (an atheist) married a Catholic, and gave the couple a very generous cheque. Medcalf too was helped and influenced. At his first tutorial with Iris in Hilary term 1960, she had for him the look of some being one might expect to find living quietly underground at the end of a deserted garden, at once faintly ‘unearthly and of the earth, earthy, like a kobold’. Hugo Dyson, their Merton tutor, said simply of the strong impression Iris made during that first meeting: ‘She’s suffered.’
6
Oxford then saw itself, to some degree rightly, as the philosophical centre of the world.50 A word sometimes used by that richly talented generation of philosophers of Iris on her return is ‘exotic’. Mary Warnock, who conceived herself a stay-at-home, saw Iris as an ‘exotic’ who had actually had a ‘proper war’ and been abroad, to the Austrian camps, to Paris. She admired Iris’s insight into other people’s ideas and her ability to put these to use, which she found reminiscent of Coleridge.51 Warnock was not alone in thinking Iris’s Sartre book brilliant, and Iris herself ‘unearthly, legendary, sophisticated, extraordinary’. David Pears, a good friend, recalls her as very beautiful and, since she had arrived from Cambridge, regarded as the person who knew about Wittgenstein, there being a great mystery in Oxford about what Wittgenstein was thinking: it was wrongly supposed that she had grown close to him. Richard Wollheim, who taught in London, remembers her first at a summer weekend joint session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind, tossing her hair back in debate like someone out of a social novel by Aldous Huxley, very striking, determined and emancipated. Tony Quinton felt her reputation was helped by the fact that she was working on Sartre; Anthony Kenny, based in Oxford after 1963, was struck by the way she concentrated totally on whoever she was talking to, never looking over anyone’s shoulder to see who else was around, and by her gift for taking everyone seriously. Peter Strawson was enormously impressed by her beauty and intensity alike, her lack of either vanity or conceit, and had no difficulty with the ‘strenuousness’ of her moral philosophy; Stuart Hampshire, both a friend from around 1950 and later a polemical opponent,52 felt that her presence was of positive assistance to analytical philosophers, redeeming them from the constant accusation that they were
philistines, a dried-up lot, that all the literary splendours of the idealist movement had been done away with and everything was thin and precise and dry. The fact that someone like Iris minded about it, took it seriously, was part of it, had all these friends, made an enormous difference.53
A now forgotten storm accompanied the publication in 1959 of Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things, famously attacking Oxford philosophy, which Iris defended vigorously, reviewing the book unfavourably.54 She appears, indeed, even to have considered writing a higher degree on ‘meaning and thought’55 which would have taken issue with Gilbert Ryle and A.J. Ayer, to whose viewpoints she had both ethical and logical objections, and accordingly to have consulted Henry Price, Wykeham Professor of Logic. Yet Oxford philosophy, however much Iris enlivened it, never entirely constituted home territory. While it is true that Bernard Williams saw her in the 1950s, together with Michael Dummett, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and David Pears, as a valuable mainstream Wittgensteinian,56 and Dummett himself felt that she was always held in great respect, others, watching her courageously developing her own original views, thought her ‘exotic’ in the sense of unassimilated. Philippa Foot: ‘We were interested in moral language, she was interested in the moral life … She left us, in the end.’ Isaiah Berlin declared her in a private boutade a ‘lady not known for the clarity of her views’. To her developing Platonism* he and a few others would later declare themselves ‘allergic’.57
When recognition of her philosophic originality finally came, it would be from a less provincial tradition, one more open to Continental Europe and mostly working in North America: John McDowell, Stanley Cavell, Charles Taylor, Cora Diamond,58 Martha Nussbaum, Mark Platts.59 After Schools in 1955 Taylor went on to do an Oxford D.Phil., and found Iris tremendously helpful in two ways. Firstly, she herself was daring to explore those interesting philosophical issues declared out of bounds; secondly, the sheer quality of her listening when he visited her to try to sort out his confused ideas ‘was extraordinary; that and her questions. It helped enormously.’ He found much of what she wrote helpful and suggestive. She was a leading ‘role model’ to him and others trying ‘to break out of the post-positivist analytic box’, a teacher to whom he owed much; while John McDowell would in the 1970s read and re-read The Sovereignty of Good and declare himself pervasively influenced.60
Iris was never invited to John Austin’s central Saturday-morning ‘kindergartens’ where minute and combative investigation among younger tutorial Fellows took place. Example: ‘Why can you say “highly entertaining but not highly good"?’ Here Austin, shortish with thin curving nose and thin lips, was as terrifying as possible, with a taste for self-congratulatory complicity. Eventually Philippa was invited and felt obliged to attend both Austin’s Saturdays and, after 1959, and despite the fact that both events were overwhelmingly male, Ayer’s rival Tuesday soirées also. Iris came to neither. Michael Dummett felt that Oxford’s narrowness was Gilbert Ryle’s fault as much as Austin’s. Ryle, author of The Concept of Mind, resembled a Prussian general, tall, well-set-up, operating from Magdalen.61 Iris, typically, though she made Ryle a polemical opponent in Sartre, liked the man himself. He lent her Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit62 – pointing to considerable openness to non-Oxonian thought – ‘with a nice note’ early in 1949, and she later poured her heart out while he sucked on his pipe.
Philosophy, as Iris noted, was then at its driest, morality being treated as a special subject dealt with by various technical devices ‘(emotive utterances, imperatives &tc). Fact [was] firmly separated from value, and value was insubstantial,’63 the moral agent reduced to an isolated will and intellect choosing afresh and ex nihilo, moment by moment. This picture, she felt, was not merely excessively individualistic, but inaccurate and wrong. She noted that Ryle ‘describes the mind without its unconsc[ious] or even involuntary side – and so fails to describe it … This simply will not do. The mind R describes is controlled by me – when I imagine I fancy, pretend, know how to etc. This may do for deliberate imagining, but what of the picture that surges up?’
‘The picture that surges up’ correctly suggests that she declined to give up her belief in the inner life, or in ‘introspectabilia’, about which (in her view) Wittgenstein, Ryle and Ayer all had excessive suspicion. Iris was never impressed by fashion; her entire oeuvre, philosophic and novelistic alike, is given to exploring the ‘soul-picture’ under attack. Her first paper to the Philosophical Society – the faculty’s in-house colloquium – was thus aptly on ‘The Stream of Consciousness’.64 Ryle was in the chair. Geoffrey Warnock, a disciple of Austin, made a rough or tart respondent, and was, as Isaiah Berlin reported, deeply unsympathetic: ‘Have you ever seen a machine for making spaghetti? That was what it was like. Iris put in large lumps of dough, and Warnock extracted very very thin strings.’65 Stuart Hampshire none the less told her she had been ‘gallant’, which Iris noted ruefully ‘was the best that cd be said’. In that forum she later introduced a discussion with Gabriel Marcel – skilfully translating between the Oxford and the French philosophical dialects, without strain – ‘probably no one else could have done it,’ thought one observer.66
Her first Aristotelian Society Paper, given in Bedford Square, London, on 9 June 1952 and entitled ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’, was equally disputatious. David Pears and Mary Warnock alike recalled the abrasiveness of Ayer, whose viewpoint it challenged and who patronised Iris ‘in a philistine way’.67 Both also thought it a good counterblast to Ryle’s quasi-behaviourism, a head-on attack on his advocacy of an image-less world, and a defence, once more,68 of the ‘inner life’. Here Iris memorably observed that it is ‘difficult to describe the smell of the Paris metro or what it is like to hold a mouse in one’s hand’. As Pears noted, Iris was at war with the desiccation, the detailed casuistry, of contemporary philosophy, seeking herself what the American philosopher William James famously called a ‘tender-minded’ approach; one in which, as in the Renaissance, the sense of wonder at nature is not at odds with the desire to understand it.69 Her journal entry for 14 December 1951 – ‘Good = saintly?’ – suggests her distance from the surrounding philosophical scene.
7
Iris wanted a more inclusive philosophy, and struggled to find it elsewhere, in meetings of the High Anglican group called the ‘Metaphysicals’. There were at first eight ‘members’, and Iris was present, a ‘wistful seeker’, at the inaugural meeting late in 1948.70 Their aims were to explore how far the anti-metaphysical bias of analytic (linguistic) philosophy could be resisted; how far you could make a good philosophical basis for a religious metaphysics; and to show that theological discourse had real philosophical meaning. They met three or four times a term in one or other of the members’ rooms. It was very informal, with one person elected to start un-minuted discussion with a few remarks.
The leading voices among the Metaphysicals were Eric Mascall, Austin Farrer and Basil Mitchell. Dennis Nineham, Chaplain-Fellow at Queen’s College when he and Iris first met, was the most sceptical male participant; Iris, the only woman, would say very little. Dressed informally, ‘like a fisher-girl’,71 she would sit on the floor, rather like a kitten, her knees bent up in front of her, usually in front of another participant, to the occasional embarrassment of Mascall, a strange, kindly, old-fashioned celibate Anglo-Catholic clergyman. The Metaphysicals were his brainchild, the intention being to get like-minded people together, and the first meeting happened in his rooms in Christ Church. Elfin, occasionally waspish, Farrer, leading Oxford theologian, Warden of Keble and mystic who in his exceeding shyness and brilliance recalled ‘a sort of male Iris’,72 attended. So did Richard Hare, then Fellow of Balliol, still visibly suffering from having had a bad war, and somewhat withdrawn. Iris (like Philippa) felt that Hare, a dominant voice in moral philosophy, a topic undervalued at Oxford, urged too restrictive a conception of moral discourse, and she took exception to his prioritising of the will. Experience of the war years – separations, losses – had taught Mitchell that ‘love was the one thing necessary’.73 Ian Crombie, Fellow of Wadham and friend of Donald MacKinnon, who said what he thought succinctly and then stopped, and kind, bleak, solitary Michael Foster, teaching philosophy at Christ Church, a tortured soul, his lips permanently aquiver, were also at that inaugural meeting.* Iris gave a ‘paper’ (unrecorded) on 25 October 1950.
In the book born of these discussions, Faith and Logic: Oxford Essays in Philosophical Theology (ed.? . Mitchell, London, 1957), Iris’s contribution, though unspecified, is acknowledged. The influence went in both directions. In the only record she kept of a meeting,74 on 6 May 1953, with Hare, Foster, Mitchell and Keble’s chaplain Christopher Stead also present, Michael Foster’s comment: ‘[This] account of moral judgement is too existentialist – it is all a matter of “decision". I would like to speak of a contemplative element,’ strongly anticipates Iris’s line, in its conflation of British and French voluntarisms, and its invoking of contemplation as antidote. Foster, again like Iris, argued that the ‘ordinary language’ philosophers purported to analyse and interpret was in fact deeply theory-laden, and that it proposed an unavowed metaphysics which they should acknowledge and defend. Dennis Nineham’s interest in Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), who, influenced by Heidegger, urged a demythologisation of the New Testament, on which he gave a paper, once again prefigures Iris’s. When Iris left the group – probably late in 195375— she explained that, as far as the Church was concerned, she was ‘more of a fellow-traveller than a Party member’.76 Mitchell protested that the group would be the stronger for such a member, but she would have none of it.
Iris engaged in a Socratic Club dialogue (on the ‘Existentialist Political Myth') during Hilary term 1952,77 and hymned that institution forty years later. The Socratic Club was started by Stella Aldwinckle in 1941, with C.S. Lewis as President, originally to propagate Christianity among undergraduates. Meetings were large, with sixty to a hundred students; either one speaker, or two who held dialogue with each other, generally in college junior common rooms. Speakers included Anscombe with her monocle and cheroot,78 devastating C.S. Lewis on the subject of miracles,79 C.E.M. Joad (of The Brains Trust), the polymath writer Jacob Bronowski and Austin Farrer. Iris liked the club’s bold attempts to reintroduce philosophy and theology, which had not in the twentieth century been on speaking terms,80 to each other, and its courage in raising true-to-life issues that might elsewhere be deemed non-admissible. Buddhism, Communism, Existentialism and Wittgensteinian philosophy were all permissible topics.
Iris had met the striking Stella Aldwinckle in 1941 at Somerville when she was a Marxist student and Aldwinckle, attached to the college as representative of the Oxford Pastorate, proselytised with the Student Christian Movement. Now she was Women’s Officer for the evangelical St Aldate’s Church, much involved in the post-war Christian resurgence, and a potent if not always popular force in Oxford, starting the Horsemanship Club as well as the Socratic. Many found her a trying, simple-minded, self-righteous woman who, after some conversion experience, overestimated her own capacities. She had bought an old farmhouse in South Hinksey where she lived in a semi-rustic state with her horses, often appearing in riding gear like a land-girl. Iris was very impressed that she had driven a cart drawn by six pairs of mules when a farmer in South Africa. She wrote Iris sentimental letters, arousing in her a curious mixture of ‘coquetry & brutality’, and was unclear how Iris could be interested in ‘someone so unsophisticated’. But Iris appreciated her innocence and freshness – ‘she is still as if fifteen’ – and thought her wise, with ‘her strange narrow-eyed weather-beaten & wrinkled, yet so young, face’.
I told her she was like a sybil. And I told her that the strange mingling of masculine & feminine in her was a mystery that moved me deeply. She said it was odd that something which had caused her such grief should move me, and so bring joy to her. I hope, I would pray if I could, that I may do her no harm. Her pure heartedness may do me some good.
This recalls Iris’s wartime letter to Frank about not believing any more in ‘clean hands and a pure heart’.81 Perhaps only someone irremediably innocent makes such observations and expresses such wishes. ‘May I not harm [so-and-so]’ is a refrain in Iris’s journals, repeated in relation to admirers of both sexes.82 A later friend of Iris’s, Frances Partridge, who shrewdly recorded late Bloomsbury in her many journals, observed more harshly of herself: ‘What appalling selfishness, what smug desire to be always in the right, what craving always to be liked, what hypocrisy can be concealed by aversion to causing pain …’.83
On a drive from London to Oxford up the old A40, Aldwinckle told Iris to stop the car in a layby; they walked half a mile to a wood where nightingales were magically singing. Iris shared Aldwinckle’s Platonism, her exaggerated sense that metaphysics was undervalued by the Oxford ‘school’ (the subtitle of Peter Strawson’s 1959 Individuals, after all, was ‘An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics'). In 1990 Iris wrote an introduction to Aldwinckle’s poem ‘Christ’s Shadow in Plato’s Cave: A Meditation on the Substance of Love’.
8
Rosemary Cramp, an undergraduate at St Anne’s from 1947, and fellow-lecturer, in Anglo-Saxon, from 1950, later dedicatee of The Sea, The Sea, was close to Iris, and noticed how Iris’s friends belonged to different courts or worlds, and also that she had the gift of keeping friends, all of whom loved her. Iris once asked her meditatively whether she didn’t agree ‘that any worthwhile person ought to have at least some Jewish blood?’ Cramp, from deep in wildest gentile Leicestershire, was nonplussed. Iris sometimes forgot to eat. She would enjoy Cramp’s trout and almonds, then say, ‘Darling I’d have eaten anything. I hadn’t eaten for a day and half.’ Iris later called her a ‘lovely and wonderful girl’, remembering the time they lay drunk on the floor of her room at Norham Gardens and Cramp read her the whole of Beowulf, ‘and I understood every word. Eheu fugaces.’ Very much under Iris’s spell, and finding Iris’s capacity to enter into others’ worlds enthralling, she read all that Iris read, including de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, a book whose ‘fierce war-like manner’84 Iris believed fifty years ahead of its time. Iris, like de Beauvoir, insisted that women laboured under atavistic constraints.
Cramp observed Iris moving unhappily from person to person, perhaps in revolt against such constraints, unbesmirched and uncorrupted by the relative wildness of her private life. (Iris’s judgement was sometimes harsher: she charged herself with lying to all and sundry; and her novels demonstrate that she thought the temptations of vanity and power in matters of love both difficult – and important – to avoid.) The whirligig continued. There were minor players such as diffident, anglophile political scientist ‘Tino’ de Marchi, who sponsored Occidente, a non-Communist Resistance paper in Italy during the war, who loved his Lancia and the Muffin Coffee Bar on Oxford’s North Parade, and started a dining-club, the Cavour, where everyone had to sport a green waistcoat – he became much more important as a friend than a lover. Iris (later, Iris and John) visited his chocolate-manufacturer-father outside Como, with his black boxer dogs, one called ‘Eliot'; and she dedicated The Black Prince to Tino. She was also attached to the Viennese Professor of Engineering Hans Motz,85 and to Marxologist and anglicised Berliner George Lichtheim, who saw himself as a ‘burnt-out case’ and, after two earlier attempts, killed himself in 1973.86
There were also major players, who expected, if not marriage, at least proximate fidelity, and were hurt when neither were to be. In January 1949, on an odd, lonely, saddening walk, the talkative Fred Broadie, an ‘old man of the sea’ with a passionate love of philosophical discussion, told Iris how he had seen her, every week, waiting for Elizabeth Anscombe outside Schools before he knew her, and how Anscombe ‘was the Queen’, Iris flushing for pleasure when Anscombe came out: ‘He’s hellish observant.’ Before the war Broadie had been a café violinist with Mabel Steedman ('a terrible sweet scent of the thirties from those old programmes,’ Iris commented) when the eminent Manchester philosopher Samuel Alexander ‘discovered’ him. After the war, during which he was wounded while serving in the RAF, he became one of many protégés of MacKinnon, who helped him into Balliol. At first thinking him a blunt instrument, Iris soon changed her mind and was ‘profoundly touched … that I may not harm him’. By June she ‘absolutely cannot get? out of my head'; in July there are rows, he accusing her of insincerity, she fearing being ‘swallowed’, losing her integrity.
23 July 1949. continues to amaze me. Today when I was really angry, shouting at him, he quietly insisted that we should do philosophy, & in the end I had to laugh.
31 July1949. He talked of Judaism, said he had been often to the synagogue since his mother’s death, that he had been there that morning and held the tables of the law in his hand. I saw him then as wise and strange and rooted in the past, in old things and deep things. I had never thought I would see him as a religious person, but now he seems to me very religious.
She found his ‘naive frank joy’ in the countryside, and buildings, ‘poetic’, and he brought that out in her too. Broadie, wanting more from Iris than she was prepared to offer, ended the relationship in November 1949. Iris wrote back telling him to ‘resist the fatalistic daimon’.87
In February 1950 she met and liked Wallace Robson, recovering from a breakdown, who told her he wanted a shoulder to weep on. He had been a star pupil of David Cecil’s and was now English Fellow at Lincoln, a wonderful talker, Johnsonian in appearance and manner, resembling to some a very warmhearted, modest, subtle and learned lorry-driver, albeit a brilliant and complicated one. Both liked pubs, and Iris appreciated his willingness to share it with her. He later married, very happily, Anne Moses, who had loved him for a decade, then a student at St Anne’s and a perceptive observer of his and Iris’s affair.
Iris and Robson’s two-year relationship culminated in a semi-formal engagement, Iris meeting his Irish Catholic mother and sister, while he met Rene and Hughes, to whom Iris sent Robson’s greetings in January 1952, when they were seeing the New Year in together at Dover. She wrote, too, to Hal about ‘a rather intense situation – & the thought of marriage comes into my head’. She constantly quarrelled with Robson, whom she unfairly describes – perhaps placating Hal, who also wished to marry her88 – as a ‘very neurotic creature. Perhaps something too much of violence here on both sides. I don’t know what will come of it … (Don’t speak of this to anyone – all is so unclear).’ The description seems one-sided. On 9 January 1952 she noted: ‘Some good days at Dover. Felt very certain. There is a directness of contact which is good. I’m moody tho’. Yesterday he was in London and had one of his “unreasonable” fits. Today fearful depression. I wish I could understand my feelings.’ On 12 January: ‘WR is the shadow of the great man I wanted to marry. I am the shadow of the great woman I wanted to be. We are a pair of shadows. But perhaps we can move toward reality together.’ In mid-February they sat in the Mitre and Iris attacked him for not reverencing people —'meaning me’. She ended the relationship late in April 1952, and described her departure in a felicitous phrase that neatly undoes itself: she had left him ‘definitively (I think)’. (The wartime habit of postponing decisions until ‘after the duration’ died hard with her.) The relationship was not an easy one. Iris’s heart resembled an old-fashioned wardrobe, both capacious and full (as she noted89) of unexpected compartments; Robson’s description of her as ‘monumentally unfaithful’ does not sound exaggerated.
In October 1950 she had met and fallen for the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who offered the possibility of the unhappy love she noted, without understanding it, that she needed: ‘I hope Michael doesn’t break my heart before Easter.’ As for the ‘terrible pain and frenzy’ this inflicted on Robson, she felt ‘bad about it but not bad enough. All a very unhappy business.’ Iris’s St Anne’s colleague Jenifer Hart had an affair with Oakeshott soon afterwards, recalling him as highly attractive, easy-going, addicted to ‘love at first sight’, going ‘overboard’ for a new lover. She remembered his twinkling eyes, boyish bohemianism (he still resembled an undergraduate when he reached eighty) and disregard for convention and ostentation.90 Both Iris and Oakeshott will have been opposed to a scientistic rationalism in philosophy. Both were incurable romantics. Iris at this point disliked his right-wing political pessimism and his distrust of utopias alike,91 his ‘lazy philosophy based on refusal to think or do anything’.92 None of this prevented her engouement:
There is no doubt about this. I was sure, even before we met at Marble Arch. Agonizingly sure now. A deep pain of joy and fear in my heart. Can’t work or eat, just want to wander around thinking about M. What is he thinking today? I must try to work. I am making myself sick with emotion.
Later. Feeling perfectly demented about M. I don’t know how I can get through today without seeing him. Yet I can’t decently call upon him again before tomorrow.
Two months after the affair had begun, both cried when he announced his attachment to a third party. ‘Accept the end & grimly draw a line,’ wrote Iris, who did literally this across the page.
By October 1951 she and Robson had a rapprochement. In November he is ‘increasingly precious to me – his gentleness, violence, wit, all a language I understand. We communicate perfectly'; she has no doubt she is falling in love with him, feeling ‘blinding clarity’. Though they parted in April 1952, the affair again re-ignited after Iris was bereaved later that year, then once more, and finally, lapsed, to his pain and fury: ‘I loved the way she thought and talked. I loved her mind.’93 Some 1953 meetings were painful, Iris at one point comparing him to a great fish she had seen dying by the river, and wondering why she did not feel more distress. (Of another lover who stayed ‘stricken’, she commented coolly that it was like knocking someone down and then coming back, years later, and finding them still suffering by the roadside: a tender heart, it seems, can also be a callous one, though some grace about her meant that she rarely forfeited regard.) In November Robson wrote, ‘Dear little one, I’m so afraid of losing your friendship through being such a bore. And through constantly saying cross things.’ Such words made Iris ‘sad & humble'; in 1955 he took sabbatical leave in Australia. A reconciliation was first refused by Iris, and took place only after both parties married, Iris writing ‘beautifully’ when Robson’s sister died young, in 1964, that she would always love him. He and Anne moved to Sussex and then to Edinburgh once he got the Masson Chair in English there. Shortly before his death in 1993, he out of the blue reflected that ‘Iris was always so mysterious,’ wondering whether it had been this that he had loved in her.
9
Iris and the distinguished Jewish Italian Arnaldo Momigliano probably met while she was still an undergraduate. They were close friends by May 1952. A short, neat and bespectacled man, of very wide and deep culture and sometimes comical English, brilliant and touchy to a fault, he, his wife and daughter arrived in England in April 1939. During the war he was close to Iris’s tutor Isobel Henderson, and later to the sociologist Jean Floud, but he always referred to Iris differently. His wife Gemma accepted these attachments, and Iris met her and liked both her and their daughter Anna-Laura. Momigliano’s parents had been deported and killed by the Germans late in 1943. In 1951 he became Professor of Ancient History at University College, London. Every Saturday he came up to Oxford to work at the Ashmolean or Bodleian libraries. He spent Saturdays, after 4 p.m., with Iris in her flat, talking about the ancient world; they read the Divine Comedy together in Italian, and Iris referred to him always as one of her great teachers. Iris’s enthusiasm for Dante, whose work is well represented in her library, dates from this time; it would cause her to make Martin in A Severed Head, quoting from Dante’s Rime, which had been Momigliano’s 1953 birthday present to her, speak of the ‘terrible figure of Love’ which has struck him to the ground, standing over him with the same sword with which he killed Dido.94 Momigliano wrote to her that Dante now always sounded to him with the soft undertone of her Irish Oxford Italian.95 Iris would make him a salad supper; he would hold her hand and kiss her, leaving punctually at 11.30 to walk to his room in the Old Parsonage hotel on Banbury Road. In August of 1952 and of 1953, and again in 1955, they travelled together in Italy. On the first journey they were lovers.96
In January 1953 Iris noted a dialogue so intensely dramatised and ‘literary’ as to be halfway to partaking in a novel:
I saw A. this evening. His love was moving and enormously saddening. I found myself saying to him ‘poor darling’. He said – you are grieving for the pain you will cause me one day. I said: whatever pain I may cause you I shall be with you to suffer it. He said, ‘I believe you can do miracles.’ Oh, may I be able to manage this one!
In a novel of hers such high-mindedness would quickly merit a comic come-uppance. Soon, wishing to find the point where she could release her tenderness for him, she noted that his demands bred a bitter resistance in her.97 In April 1953 the death of Maud Gonne at eighty-eight – Yeats’s muse, just as Iris was Momigliano’s – prompted him to write to her of her many mental and sentimental commitments; but Iris was his life, he lived in fullness only when with her. This relationship, too, could be tricky. There was both rancour, and a break of many years, after Iris’s marriage in 1956. He asked her to return all the books he had given her, noting angrily a certain lack of integrity in her – a capacity for misleading and covering herself from open accusation of telling lies by using a lawyer’s devices; for her part Iris at one vexed point retorted, ‘You are the kind of person who forces others to lie to you.’
When she saw him four feet away at a reception at the Italian Institute in September 1968, she swiftly fled: ‘He was talking & might not have seen me … I was shaken, but not too much. Felt sad, sad.’ In 1977, on 19 February ('a day when things happen’98), after twenty years, they met again, and he wrote, ‘Our reconciliation is a fact'; after this she had dreams of pursuing him in crowds. On 18 July 1979, in the quad just outside the Bodleian Library, he handed her the copy of Dante’s Rime he had first given her in 1953, and which she had returned to him in 1956. Inside she found a birthday card inscribed ‘To Iris with my heart: A. July 15 1954’. Beneath this he had added, ‘July 1979 A’. He said, ‘You were a beast!’ and laughed. In 1983 she dedicated The Philosopher’s Pupil to him. Six weeks after his death on 1 September 1987, his widow Gemma wrote to Iris: ‘I often think to hear his voice calling me from another room; or opening the door of the room where I am working, and asking: “Che cosa fai adesso?'”
10
There were breaks in the intensity, moments when comedy looked in. In early 1952 there was a ‘very comical demarche’ à propos Kreisel and the smuggling of gold sovereigns into France.
On Tuesday, 4 March Iris was unsettled by a telephone call from Anscombe saying that she was going to Paris with Kreisel and Gabriel Andrew Dirac, son of the physicist, at King’s College London, and that it would make all the difference if Iris came too. She cancelled all her tutorials and took the 9.50 train to London to get her passport, it now seeming most desirable ‘to be in Paris with? and E’. Anscombe, by this stage, had received a letter from Kreisel with the phrase: ‘Of course you know the purpose of this trip?’, following which she had contracted ‘flu. Iris interpreted Kreisel’s question as Anscombe did, and felt undecided as to whether to proceed without her. At ten on the Wednesday Kreisel rang and Iris deprecated what she imagined were the conditions – ‘(going to bed)’.
K. scornful – nothing like that. ‘But you would be expected to carry something’. I decline – return to Ox. & busy myself fixing all tutorials on again. Chez E I find out that the dark phrases refer to what Dirac calls the cunt carriage of sovereigns. Helpless with laughter. K’s coolness and naiveté beyond belief.
You could then buy gold sovereigns cheaply in London and sell them at twice the rate in Paris, thus earning yourself a large illegal profit. Dirac, after taking his own cut, wished as a Communist in this manner to subvert the capitalist system. The incident shows Iris as something other than a humourless blue-stocking: she was sometimes a prig but, despite hating sexual innuendo, not a prude.* She also had more luck, or more good sense – or both – than another of Dirac’s victims. The journalist Jeffrey Bernard’s first wife Anna, similarly recruited by Dirac, went to Holloway Prison for a month and was then given two years’ probation in January 1954 for carrying £1,653-worth of gold and platinum in a pouch strapped to her back, rather than in the Rabelaisian fashion Kreisel had, not untypically, contrived to suggest.99
*‘This continues, stays, and is a source of inner peace.’
*In 1950, out of 257 students, 213 lived in hostels, four with parents, five with guardians, seventeen with ‘hostesses’, and eighteen were mature students in ‘approved houses’.
*Mary Warnock, A Memoir: People and Places (London, 2000), pp.157 et seq. Among those whose presence Warnock records are Hugh Dalton, Douglas Jay and Richard Grossman.
*The novel-form, as D.H. Lawrence saw, is ‘incapable of the Absolute’, and given over to the clash and claims of competing voices. See Peter J. Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, which argues that Iris’s fiction challenges her own Platonism.
*Foster killed himself C1959, and was the first suicide to be given a full Christian burial, V.A. Demant preaching an impressive sermon about how it was time the Church woke up to the fact that for some people life was simply unbearable.
*John Bayley believes Brian Aldiss’s account of their visit to China in October 1979 in The Twinkling of an Eye (London, 1998), pp. 348–9, to be apocryphal. In one town Chinese women enquired as to whether it was true that the genital arrangement of Western women differed from that of Chinese, being east-west, rather than north-south. While Aldiss recorded that Iris took the women into a separate room to show them that all women were sisters under the skirt, Bayley is sure that the demonstration was purely diagrammatic, and on paper. See also Iris’s journal, 28 May 1990: ‘Offering from Brian Medlin: “There was a young man from Cape Cod/Who didn’t believe in a God./His name was Ken Tucker,/The bleeder, the fucker,/The bugger, the bastard, the sod.” (Very cheering.)’