Iris Murdoch: A Life

On 4 May 1952 Iris, returning from a holiday at the Court Hotel, Charmouth in Dorset where she had missed her journal – ‘things I would have told it are lost now’ – wrote, ‘Much, much since last I wrote in here.’ One week before she had made Wallace Robson understand that their relationship was ‘impossible’. She thought of him all week, but he seemed far off, receding into the past with terrible speed: ‘I don’t feel it now, as in the past – all my crying was done before. I just … am deeply sad.’

She was living in two unfurnished rooms at 13 King Edward Street costing £7 a month¹ – if only this were Russia, she reported cheerfully, the landlady, who fully returned her dislike, and who the following year after eighteen months ‘chucked her out’, would be ‘destined to be killed with a hatchet’.² (In June 1953 Iris moved to a couple of basement rooms at 48 Southmoor Road, owned by Dr Alice Stewart of Lady Margaret Hall. Here she called herself ‘slave to the Aga’, which it was her duty to tend, and bought an old canoe to take out on the dark canal which ran at the bottom of the garden. ‘Bathing in summer, rheumatism in winter,’ she wrote to David Hicks. She liked listening to the sedge-warblers, and watching the swans.) Among the letters awaiting her from admirers was a ‘lovely’ one from ‘F': ‘I belong to you quietly without dialectic, tho’ you will never belong to me.’ ‘F’ was Franz Baermann Steiner, who had written into his diary on Friday, 11 May 1951, ‘Enter Iris Murdoch’. He had seen her once before, in 1941, and remembered it well.³ During 1951, a lonely year,⁴ Iris and Franz met six times, mostly for a drink in the Lamb and Flag pub.

Iris first mentions this new acquaintanceship nine months later, in February 1952. On 3 March they discussed their differing understandings of the past in the Golden Cross pub. He remarked: ‘A cut-off past is in a way easier to convey to another than a continuous one. You have a shorter unit. When the past is continuous it mixes with present consciousness and is harder to comprehend.’ Iris, trying to understand his mood as he spoke of his home city, Prague, a city he liked to compare for its provincialism and artistic vitality with Dublin, for the first time took his hand. Franz, surprised, asked, ‘Am I talking too much with my hands?’ Understanding that Iris simply wanted to express a wish to be closer, he told her he felt almost frightened. He wrote her a letter starting: ‘Was doch die Sprache für ein seltsames Ding ist – how strange language is.⁵

Franz Steiner was slight, short-sighted, balding, moustachioed, disorganised, absent-minded, sometimes unshaven.⁶ Born an Austrian citizen on 12 October 1909 in Karlin, a middle-class Prague suburb, he spoke that lost Prague German of Rilke and Kafka’s youth which now survived only among educated Czech Jews. His father in the 1920s bought a shop selling waxed cloth, leather goods and linoleum, and from the autumn of 1934 they lived in a flat on the top floor of the Susicky Palace. Educated at the German State Gymnasium on Stepanska Street – earlier attended by Kafka’s friend and biographer Max Brod and the writer Franz Werfel, both of whom he knew – and at home in the coffee-house culture of middle Europe, he gave poetry readings in the bookshop of Fritz Baum, co-founder of Freie Gruppe Prag. After a brief flirtation with Marxism, he went in 1930 to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to study Arabic, and grew close to another intimate of Kafka’s, S.H. Bergman. Franz identified with Kafka as writer and Jewish mystic. In 1935 he was awarded his first D.Phil., on the history of Arabic language roots, from the Charles University in Prague. He became an eccentric Zionist who spoke Arabic and wanted a rapprochement between these two, as he saw it, colonised peoples, Jews and Arabs. The child of non-practising Jews, he began to emphasise his Jewishness.

On the boat to England in late autumn 1936 to attend the London School of Economics seminars of Bronislaw Malinowski, who had established modern British anthropology after the First World War, fellow Jewish refugees, to seem English, started puffing on pipes they had bought on board. Franz, put off by this, stuck to cigarettes. In July 1937 he returned to Prague for his only field trip – studying the gypsies of sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. Early the following year he again left for England. The break in his past he spoke of to Iris in the Golden Cross happened then. He had a last picture of his parents, seated in sunshine on a park bench,⁷ but the Munich Agreement of 1938 and the betrayal of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis meant he could not return. In May 1939 his father wrote to him: ‘The horror of the time is the way in which people fail. All their worst characteristics multiply, so that the neighbour on whom you were counting suddenly disappears or just walks over you. Everyone thinks only of themselves.’⁸ One month after the war began Franz registered for his second doctorate, entitled ‘A Comparative Study of the Forms of Slavery’. This choice of subject was determined by his need to bear witness to what was happening to his homeland, family and fellow Jews. Internalising the persecutions, and assuming responsibility for the pain of those afflicted, he described his research as a sacrifice, or penance.

One friend, the marine archaeologist Honor Frost, recalled him as bird-like, bent, frail, with his small black moustache, terribly vulnerable, his emotions all close to the surface, often upset. She remembered his extreme modesty, sensibility, goodness —'always adorable, ironic, self-deprecatory’. He would keep bills and railway tickets and – like Stendhal on the tram ticket in Livorno – write vers données on them which he would later work up into poems. The anthropologist Professor Srinivas recalled a small, foreign-looking man, wearing a shabby mackintosh over his suit. Franz was incapable of dealing with authorities. Often very poor, he spent what money he had on the books strewn chaotically about his room with his papers, nothing on clothes. His poetry is essentially religious.⁹ An idealist and mystic – influenced by Boehme, Lao Tse and the Bhagavad Gita – Buddhist, Taoist, Jewish and Muslim ideas converge in his poetry. Pre-war Franz had been a carefree, fun-loving, life-affirming satyr,¹⁰ a self-confident cheerful youth whose often overpowering sensuality got in the way of long-term relationships; being a poet, he was naturally said to be ‘highly sensitive to beauty’. A pre-war engagement to a New Zealand girl came to nothing. In April 1940 his mother wrote to him, dreaming of ‘when you come home, how I will clean everything for your arrival!'; she knew this was a dream.

His friend the deaf poet David Wright recorded the post-war Steiner as ‘learned, caustic’, ‘broken and not defeated’, ‘comic in courage':

Franz, barely forty, an old man already:

His face had a scorched look. It is my fancy

Those burnings – books, then bodies, the nightmare

Of middle Europe, unimagined here –

Withered the skin of this lean survivor,

Always unlucky Franz, man without family

In exile from his language, living on.¹¹

‘Always unlucky Franz’ nonetheless had strokes of good fortune, of which his reciprocated love for Iris was not the least. Around Christmas 1938 the retired Classicist and Magdalen Fellow Christopher Cookson invited Franz to visit for a few days: he stayed happily for ten years, until Cookson’s death. In 1944 Tambimuttu, thanks to David Wright, published some of Franz’s poems in the fat issue 10 of Poetry London. Stephen Spender wrote admiringly, Paul Celan later expressed appreciation too, and Adorno admired his prose. In early 1939 his charismatic acquaintance Elias Canetti contacted Steiner two weeks after his arrival in England. Their friendship prospered, albeit with an interruption, and was fruitful for both; Honor Frost recalled Franz as – her word – one of Canetti’s ‘creatures’.

There were also setbacks. On 22 November 1932 his beloved younger sister Suse – of whom Iris always reminded him – had died, aged nineteen, in just a few days, from a streptococcal infection. When he left Prague he also left behind his early fiction, plays, and some eight hundred poems. All disappeared on the arrest of his parents. Then, in the spring of 1942, on the train between London and Oxford, the heavy suitcase containing his collection of materials for his D.Phil. – records, drafts, research – three years’ work, was lost. (This was almost a tradition among anthropologists in the early 1940s: Edmund Leach lost his notes in Burma, Max Gluckmann his in a canoe on the Zambesi, and Ruth Pardee hers under a palm tree where she hid them on the invasion of Sumatra.¹²) One version has Franz’s bag stolen from the guard’s van; another – recalling T.E. Lawrence’s loss at the same station (Reading) around Christmas 1919 of a draft of Seven Pillars – has Franz depositing his case at the lavatory entrance while changing trains and on his return being handed a case belonging to a luckless nurse. Great Western Railways sent him £50 in compensation. He telephoned Honor Frost, ‘All my work! All my work! But this is just like me!’ Frost, like most of us, would have howled. Franz, resigned, set about patiently reconstructing his thesis from scratch.

For much of the war he had no news of his parents. Then on 24 July 1945 his childhood friend and fellow writer Hans Gunther Adler wrote to tell him that he had survived internment in the camps. Adler had watched his first wife Gertrud – they had married to get deported together on the same Gestapo ‘list’ – choose, when her mother was selected to be gassed at the Auschwitz ramp on 14 October 1944, to die with her; and on the same transport he had seen the mother of Bettina Gross – his second-wife-to-be – similarly refuse to abandon her sister. Franz’s steadfast parents were with Adler in Theresienstadt from July until mid-October 1942. He had tried to be a son to them, to help them as much as he could, to reduce the bitterness of their suffering. He was unable to prevent their being sent to their deaths in Treblinka. In one of his novels Adler writes, of the incommunicability of such loss: ‘How does one address a human being who has not died?’

Franz’s work was his way of living through tragedy, even a source of joy. That summer he enquired of the anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown about the distinction between ‘work’ & ‘labour’. Radcliffe-Brown asked, ‘Got any letter from home?’ Franz replied, ‘Both my parents are dead, that’s what I hear.’ Radcliffe-Brown: ‘Oh dear! Have you looked up Firth?’¹³

Franz would say that the news of his parents’ deaths finally ‘broke his heart’, and this seems no idle metaphor. To his close friend the poet Michael Hamburger, his heart disease seemed less like a physical condition than an after-effect of that blow;¹⁴ Iris too considered him ‘one of Hitler’s victims’. From Franz’s greatest poem, ‘Prayer in the Garden’, begun on the anniversary of his father’s birthday in 1947: ‘A great, a mighty frost has entered my heart’, and his father is ‘The noblest presence ever shown to me’. In 1946 he was diagnosed after a fainting fit as suffering a nervous breakdown; in 1948 his chest pains were put down to ‘hypertension’. The next year, when attempts to publish a collection of his poems – In Babylon’s Niches – floundered, he was hospitalised for weeks in the Radcliffe Infirmary after his first heart attack; a nurse recalled him as a frail-bodied, eagle-spirited gentleman.

Despite attending synagogue irregularly, Franz perceived himself (and was seen by others) from 1939 as a profoundly religious traditional Jew, placing faith in none but Yahweh. He believed the Jews should have headed for India, where, as he wrote to Gandhi – who published ill-considered advice to the Jews in Harijan^* – they would have been simply one more caste, and not stigmatised as in Europe. In 1943 he wrote that ‘A life without suffering is useless. A world without suffering is useless.’ Religion was the ground we have to communicate about the possibility of ending suffering. He recited the daily prayers, usually silently. Judaism alone offered the riches to ‘transvalue his suffering’.

Franz was set apart by ill health, by tragedy, by learning. For his first D.Phil. he took courses in Siberian ethnology and Turkish studies. He had a working knowledge of Classical and Modern Arabic, differing degrees of competence in six Slavonic languages, could read Dutch, the Scandinavian tongues, and others.^* When he let slip to Edward Evans-Pritchard, greatest of English anthropologists, that he knew Hebrew, he had the unpleasant feeling of having shown too much of himself: ‘In England you mustn’t be a Jack-of-all-Trades.’ (Frank too had met Evans-Pritchard, in Syria on 7 June 1942: drinking arak, they watched a French general dance with his mistress, and discussed the coming decline of Europe and ascendancy of Asia.) Evans-Pritchard later helped publish Franz’s Taboo.¹⁵ In 1952 Franz was starting Chinese, and attempting a book on economics. He had wide-ranging interests: shamanism, arrow studies, boat-building and the sociology of the elephant were among his studies, and his posthumously published work on taboo profoundly influenced Mary Douglas, especially in writing Purity and Danger. She thought him far better-qualified than any other anthropologist in Oxford, despite his single field trip, and more modest too.

A polymath observer of English culture with a strong sense of whimsy, a quaint, acerbic humour, and a love of puns, his talk could be quizzical and light-hearted, his erudite wit and wisdom admired and sometimes feared.¹⁶ He was direct, simple, touchy, took vast delight in small things, was lonely and valorous.¹⁷ He could also be illogical, intolerant, difficult, imperious, and sharp when it came to exposing dishonesty, smugness and cant. His favourite writers had been E.T.A. Hoffmann, Dostoevsky, Rilke, Kafka, Adalbert Stifter; in many of these a guilt-ridden inner world confronts a wicked political scene. He now also studied Donne, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Hopkins, Eliot. He adored dancing. Naturalised as British in 1950, he, like his new compatriots, favoured freedom and distance in personal relationships. By nature reticent, he did not open up easily. He would say: ‘If you are sick and penniless, have no relatives left alive and no friends, and no hopes for the future, pray that you may find yourself in England.’

But there was much in Britain that was inhospitable to émigrés. Franz made more friends in Spain in ten weeks than in eighteen years in England. Despite having a Czech D.Phil., he had to complete a second, British doctorate, in July 1950. He was nonplussed by assimilated Anglo-Jews, disliked British weather and imperialism, and saw before others how the will to power over, and the will to knowledge of, other societies were inseparable in old-fashioned anthropology. To Adler he wrote that the English were so backward in the human sciences that ‘it makes one shudder. Many subjects couldn’t be taught without émigrés. At the BM they don’t even have an expert on Armenian, they can’t even catalogue the relevant publications properly.’¹⁸ A late journal entry makes clear how insufferable he, like Canetti, often thought the English intelligentsia, deploring their

mixture of moral insanity and secularised puritanism, killing any ideas, but ‘better’, ‘more moral’ than anyone else. This is the suicidal renunciation of ideas by the English. This is the root of sterility. Even when this renunciation is seen as a noble sacrifice, and proposes no alternatives, it remains a kind of lethargy. A lethargy broken by the aesthetic rebellion of small, nervous bird voices …

In 1950 Franz was appointed Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Anthropological Institute in Oxford, a large Victorian family house on South Parks Road. He went to the regular Friday-afternoon seminar and to drinks afterwards in the King’s Arms; his presence helped make Oxford anthropology distinct. He gave his groundbreaking lectures on ‘Taboo’ – and on the organisation of labour, kinship, slavery, language and society – which inaugurated a revolution in anthropological thought. He denounced the Separation of society and culture – ‘Meanings are generated in social life; society has to be studied as part of a system of beliefs.’ He would talk to students as he rested on a chair on the half-landing to catch his breath on his way to the first-floor lecture-room. He looked frail, older than his years. He was giving the first series of lectures in a British university on the German sociologist Georg Simmel, remembered, among other matters, for propounding a theory of the cultural Kreis or circle in his study of small groups, which Franz, Canetti and Iris each lived out. Each was secretive, kept their friends apart, living in more than one circle at a time. Franz commuted between 10 Norham Road in Oxford and, in London, a Notting Hill Gate room containing his library. He vacillated between loneliness and sociability; between acceptance of an early death and hope for a new life, including marriage and children. It was probably in April 1952 that he asked a friend which of two women she thought he ought to marry: one Viennese, the other Iris.¹⁹

Iris’s sense that she had always something new to learn constitutes her special aliveness and humility. In the 1960s she recorded of her Royal College of Art colleague Frederic Samson that he ‘is the latest of my Jewish teachers, of whom the first was Fraenkel and the most beloved Franz’. Franz continued Wallace Robson’s role of deepening her understanding of literature. She wrote in her journal on Sunday, 4 May 1952: ‘talking yesterday with F. in the Crown: poetry and philosophy are close after all – I see it now.’ Rilke’s sensibility overwhelmed his poetic thought, she learnt, while in Eliot, often, there is mere versified thought. ‘So much about this I learnt from W[allace] – and now from F[ranz]. I am trying to feel more than I do – as if sheer will could do something for him. Sadness.’

A dozen entries precede Franz’s departure for a summer holiday with his fellow anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers in Spain, and show Iris’s feelings shifting from the ‘willed’ towards something deeper. They spent the vivid blue evening of Saturday, 17 May together at the Victoria Arms. She had been reading Franz’s poems. The river was very still. They queued for drinks and listened to a saxophone. ‘God help me to become better,’ she prayed the next day, remembering Franz’s gentle face and anxious, loving eyes, and also Wallace, over whose hurt she brooded. ‘Let me see the way. Let me try to see – God be with W.’ Four days later (Thursday, 22 May) she and Franz studied German together and Iris noticed in him ‘a curious grace. (Like Shah it occurs to me.)’ Franz was brown and remarkably muscular, considering he could take no exercise. ‘He said: a time will come when I will see you every day. I said: not now. He said: I know not now, but it will come. He said too he was a little bit like W[allace], meaning possessive. Felt a deep quiet strength of tenderness for him. Peace.’

They met on Sunday, 1 June, a weekend crowded with other points of interest, including Arnaldo Momigliano, who was jealous of Franz,²⁰ and with whom she walked along the river at Abingdon while he read her Italian poetry and they laughed a lot: ‘Tired now – and wanting to create silence about me.’ Eight days later she travelled to London to give her paper ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’,²¹ taking the midnight train back and ‘surprised & very moved’ that Franz met her at Oxford. On her thirty-third birthday that July Franz gave her a wine-glass together with a little German poem:

The crushing of a wine-glass beneath the groom’s heel is a crucial symbolic moment at a Jewish wedding. Two weeks later Iris visited BMB at Little Grange and prayed ‘that I should not have done harm, after all – that I may not do harm’. She saw Franz off on his way to Spain, in heavy rain, from London on Friday, 15 August: ‘he was cheerful. I was very sad to leave him.’ A photograph shows them together, she duffle-coated in the uncertain weather, and clearly in love. (In Paris nine days later she nonetheless sent Queneau a fourteen-sided declaration of love from the Gare d’Austerlitz; his reply soon made clear that he, at least, was hors de combat.) She spent time in Italy with Momigliano, later regretting that she had not gone with Franz to Andalusia. The growing strength of her feeling is evident. A week before he left she had walked with Franz again by the river.²² She had lent him the manuscript of Under the Net, and was delighted by his reaction: ‘It is a Slav type of humour.’ More detailed response came from him immediately on his return from Spain: it is possible that she entrusted him with the second half of the first draft for the summer.²³ She mentioned having written the novel to few; Franz alone was permitted to read it. She greeted him at Oxford station on his return on Saturday, 18 October,²⁴ bringing a bunch of gentians as a welcome-home gift, then transcribing the poem he wrote about this – ‘Enzian brachte sie mir’ – into her journal. On Monday, 17 November, she wrote:

In the evening, chez Franz. He was in pain. I stayed with him till late. He said: now you are getting fonder of me, not because I am decent or industrious or good, but just because I am in pain. Today I saw him again. He was better. He said, touching my hair, I don’t want this to fade. I said, why choose this, it will all fade. He said, I know this, it is very close to me. It occurred to me that I didn’t really know it. It was abstract. On Saturday I talked of religion with F. He said, in answer to my asking if he believed in God, that he loved God. In him, it seemed no affectation.

Later, she accused herself of having recorded ‘stupidities’ rather than so many more important things, and set out, in pages of lamentation, some omissions.

Franz too kept a journal.²⁵ On Saturday, 18 October, back from Spain, he saw the lights of Oxford with delight. There stood Iris on the railway platform, in trousers and grey duffle-coat, serious yet laughing, ‘lovely to see’, holding her small posy of gentians. Being fit and well, she dragged his massive suitcases into the house at Norham Road while he, almost dying of fear and shame, arranged the gentians in a wine-glass. They talked of a thousand things at the same time, crouched on the floor like children, pressing against each other, and he spoke further about Under the Net. The ‘child-like’ description looks forward almost two years to 14 May 1954, when she and John Bayley would prattle together about anything and everything – a sure sign her heart was opened. Franz commented only on passages in her novel that he had very much liked, they agreed on those needing reworking, and he reproached himself later that he hadn’t been sufficiently encouraging. What made him happiest is how difficult it was for her to leave. He ‘wallowed’ in reminiscences, prayed and went to bed very happy.

The next day, a Sunday, Iris came for two hours after lunch, ‘soaking wet from rain, the dear creature’. They discussed Fraenkel. ‘Does the old man love her?’ wondered Franz, answering himself ruefully, ‘Can’t imagine anyone knowing her without falling in love.’ Their reading together of Goethe’s ‘Bride of Corinth’, influenced by the Classical distych, inspired him to write his ‘small poem’ about the flowers.^* She helped him unpack, he showing her the folder in which he stored all early versions of his poems, beautifully ordered, apologising for his vanity in the English fashion. ‘But you are vain!’ she replied simply yet with emphasis, as if registering something to which she had long ago been reconciled. Franz, greatly affected, a trifle hurt, was haunted by the exchange all evening. They met on nineteen days of those four weeks, and during those times when they are not together she is constantly on his mind. When he opened the Observer on 26 October his eye at once caught a picture of and a short article about Thomas Balogh. Franz had heard Balogh lecture on economics years before, and his arrogance and ‘utter vanity’ repelled him. The photograph showed a handsome, clever and successful man. He knew that Iris had been his mistress and that this affair, more than anything else, ‘tore her life apart. She never got completely over it.’²⁶

Monday, 20 October. What wouldn’t I give to sing & accompany myself on a guitar! How happy it would make Iris! I’d give all my versifying. (And how she would tell me off for wanting to make such a swap).

Tuesday, 21 October. After 8.30 Iris came & stayed for almost 3 hours, the angel. We talked about everything & nothing … She arrived in funny checkered trousers & an almost masculine jacket. For quite a while we spoke in German … Tomorrow I shall go and see her. At least she can lock her room.

Wednesday, 22 October. Then to her. She has a bad cold, raised temperature, and her face all swollen. Wishing to spare my feelings, she told me that today it was not possible, gently, as one would tell a child that today it can’t have its toy but would have to wait for another day. Whenever she looks least beautiful I love her most … Pain in the arm and the wrist. 12.30 to bed.

Thursday, 23 October. Again & again I thought about last night. How I keep puzzling her endlessly as if I were the sole specimen of an unknown species, a little dog with feathers or a bird with six legs instead of wings. It may well be I really am like that but I chose to interpret her remarks as words of love … I’ll have to give up smoking before it’s too late. But, how, how? … Now I know what makes me wonder at her surprise over my strange eccentricity. Her sense of wonder & surprise is motherly … How I prayed to God to take care of her and thanked him for her.

Franz’s heart condition gave their love-affair both its urgency and also a tormented check to that urgency, as if, as in the Tristan myth – Franz being a myth-connoisseur – there were a sword in the bed. Saturday, 25 October: ‘Were there ever two people who loved each other so much and were experienced, that at the same time were so afraid of each other?’ Sometimes he feared that things were as they were because ‘she had decided to give herself in order to comfort me, and her feelings were not obeying her’, recalling Iris’s May entry about ‘trying to feel more than I do’. He goes on, ‘Then she talked me out of this desperate supposition, and in the end it happened. But she was afraid because of my heart. Neither of us made a single spontaneous movement, each disappointed the other.’ They lay in a draught from the window, he thinking about Iris’s cold, she worrying about his heart. His journey home was sad. He listened to the owls hooting, the leaves rustling, and the following day, brooding and fearing a strong reaction on her part, did not dare leave the house. She had no telephone. Again and again he imagined the door opening, her entering, saying: ‘Darling this is perhaps the last time we can see each other,’ or maybe just horrific silence. If there were no letter in the morning ending it all, he fixed his hopes upon a meeting they had agreed on next day to visit Elizabeth Anscombe at 27 St John Street. ‘To bed at 1.15 … to the left of my heart sits a little mouse gnawing away. Dear God, what can I do to deserve that woman?’

He had indeed put himself in a cage with imaginary bars. Like a good wife fetching her man from work – as he optimistically expressed it – Iris, ‘beautiful, loving, tender’, collected him at 6 p.m. from the Institute. ‘What a fool I am, so fickle. Not at all like this steadfast creature.’ After Anscombe they drank a bottle of Beaujolais over dinner. Both drank and smoked plentifully, he aware of the dangers, unable to stop: ‘The most beautiful hours enthusiasm. For the first time she found fault with one of his poems. Franz told her a lot, about a previous girlfriend, Mary, and about the Carpathians. ‘To bed at 12.15. A glorious day, completely free from pain.’

Not seeing her for even two days at the end of the month he found unbearable: ‘Living separately is only for young people.’ Other women who attracted him recalled Iris. Addressing a Spanish girl gave him such joy he went down on his knees and prayed. He did not speak to a ‘ravishing’ nineteen-year-old Swedish girl at the British Council because of Iris, since he ‘liked her too much’. Smiling his most engaging smile at a French barmaid called Nadette – she had a walk whose vibration he ‘felt in his sex organ, even when she is at the far end of the room’ – he is suddenly reminded ‘how much Iris loves my smile, so I wiped it off my face, and this absurd grimace was mirrored on her face as she listened with great attention’. He invited Nadette to a dance; she came accompanied by a friend for protection. The combination of cold night air and dancing brought on hellish chest pains; his eyes were riveted on the gramophone needle that was working its way towards his release: ‘I shall never forget that dance. It was like dancing with the devil.’ His liaison with Iris was semi-public, in that they decided to have lunch together on 30 October at the Abingdon Arms, where Nadette worked, to put an end to stupid talk about ‘his’ French girl.

Franz recorded each meeting, each absence, each telephone call. They felt to him like a couple, and he wanted the arrangement solemnised. As they listened to Mozart’s string quartet K.593, Iris described her room in St Anne’s so vividly he felt he was walking around in it. The blue jar he had brought from Spain, looking proud and content with its rough bright colour. The picture she had painted as a slip of a girl, a still life of sensuous yet stern primroses (or coltsfoot), by the side of a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses, against a curiously empty yet intense blue background. On Friday, 31 October in the Eagle and Child pub they drank beer and he watched her order for herself, not for the first time, a ham sandwich. So interested in general in Jewishness, she was unaware that in certain moods he objected to being offered ham: ‘I shouldn’t be so bothered about that,’ he reproached himself, fearing that she was slipping away from him.²⁷ But ‘intimate understanding’ survived. He was overjoyed that his blood pressure had improved, felt hopeful for the future. She looked in through the window, saw him bent over his prayer book, resting on his elbows, his hands against his ears. ‘What were you puzzling over?’ she said as she entered, bringing a posy of violets. The doctor was satisfied with him. She was pale and radiant, all the little hairs on her face displaying ‘the purest goodness’. They agreed to meet on Sunday evening, and went to the pub for a while. He admired the violets, whose long stems he put into a tall glass, describing them at length and admiringly to himself: ‘How she unconsciously expresses herself in all her presents.’ Throughout a lecture at the University Jewish Society he saw in his mind’s eye her face, interested, amused, now and then rejecting and so making him aware that this or that humorous remark was cheap. He was always able to visualise her face exactly, her hands not as clearly. Browsing in Simmel to prepare the following Monday’s lecture, he felt stupid, too much in love to work: ‘Silly old tom-cat,’ he reproached himself. As they grew closer he repeatedly felt – as on the following evening, when she stayed until midnight – that ‘we’ve never been as close as this’ before. After she left he worked on his lecture till three in the morning.

The Monday was glorious: one of those spring-like English days you get in late autumn. They met and walked about Portmeadow, enjoying the fields, willows, the white sails, ‘all those small ordinary, sparkling things’. A gaggle of geese thrilled Iris. On Tuesday, 4 November he had not seen her all day, yet felt her presence so strongly that he didn’t miss her. He noticed during his lecture that the movements of his hands had started to imitate hers:

He called on her that Thursday, 6 November, after dinner. She was exhausted, having eaten nothing since the morning, just taught through the day, ‘poor angel’. In the disorderly kitchen he talked her into eating something. They ‘just kept looking at each other, like young lovers’, scarcely talking sensibly.

Next day he lectured miserably. Evans-Pritchard had recommended him for the Chair in Sociology at the University of Jerusalem, and the possibility of a choice between Jerusalem and Iris horrified him. His heart condition prevented his going to her now the weather had become colder. Many evenings Iris arrived at his lodgings late, flicking a stone against his window to attract his attention – once, when she was tipsy, a big one. She was often tired after a full day’s work and on one occasion also after a debate at the Socratic Club where she opened discussion. It seemed like a miracle to him: she arrived so tired and absent-minded and then slowly became peaceful and happy. They read German poetry:²⁸ ‘How happy we were,’ Franz wrote, and he quoted ‘Verweile doch!’ from Goethe’s Faust, inviting the happy hour to linger.

Franz’s entries that November are dominated by Kafka, whom both admired.²⁹ His poem ‘Kafka in England’ concerns the gap between those who had lived through or felt the guilt of witnessing the Holocaust, and those English who had done neither. Iris, however, was always accounted one who ‘understood’.^* A translation of Kafka’s Letters to Milena was coming out; Franz was a little afraid of this Milena, who reminded him that, like Kafka, that other, older ‘Franz’, he was in love with a gentile girl whom he did not know how to make his own. Like Kafka, too, he was mortally ill. And like Kafka, he suffered from excess of scruple: ‘How disgusting even unintentional lies are. One can’t correct them without making a big issue out of nothing.’ He bought Letters to Milena the day they appeared, the day he also heard of the death of a Spanish baby for whom he and Iris had, in August, bought a present in London.³⁰ Kafka’s letters made him sad. Much in them seemed to him unworthy of such a noble human being: ‘The longing to find shelter in the beloved, to find, at long last, a home in another human being – and at the same time such fear of the bed.’ These letters, he feared, would bring joy to few people and would only strengthen the tendency to interpret Kafka ‘psychologically’. What was noble in them reminded him of Canetti, while Kafka’s

As he read the letters he told himself: ‘That’s just what I don’t want, I don’t want a mistress, even if it’s necessary to pass through that phase; I want a firmer tie, something which she and I wd feel to be a marriage, a container for love in which she can forever radiate.’ Meanwhile his need for a nurse as well as a beloved was pressing. After a dinner-party with her in Headington he came home alone and, entering the unheated room, was ‘knocked down’ by pain. When the electric fire went out he could neither insert a coin nor undress himself. Afraid he would have to go back into hospital, he fought for breath, writhing in a pain not spasmodic enough to be a thrombosis or angina, but (he hoped) stress on the heart as a result of continuous smoking, extreme cold and the big meal. Medicaments did not help. The ‘hell’ lasted two hours. When he could breathe again he read the Kaddish (prayers for the dead), scribbled a farewell note to Iris, and undressed. The pain went on for another hour, during which he endlessly reproached himself and tried to read ‘poor Kafka’. He was so exhausted that he fell asleep without offering a prayer of thanks for his recovery. Iris, when he recounted all this two days later, gripped and would not let go of his hand.

Their last discussions concern religion.³² Iris asked him whether he believed in God. He replied that he could not use the word ‘believe’ because, among other things, it misinterpreted his relationship with God: he could only say that he loved Him. He skirted lamely around the most important thing for him, wondering how he could talk about such heartfelt matters, ‘least of all to this seriously questioning angel’. He tried to speak of his understanding of Judaism, in painfully brittle words: the dual relationship of God – to the individual as creator, and to the people as spouse ('Gefreier'^*). Then she spoke: about her ignorant ‘groping’ for truth; her feelings of guilt because of her past life; her ties to the Anglican Church. Only within the framework of that Church could she imagine a realisation of the religious life. Had sentence been pronounced on Franz? He listened, half turning away, silently praying for mercy, that all might not be lost, his heart thumping a grand march of breathlessness: ‘Thank God she didn’t see how things were with me.’ They read Kafka’s story ‘Josephine, the Singer’ together. The pains began, and ‘once again made everything impossible': ‘That the dear, modest girl should have to go through this farce of undressing to no purpose seemed to me like a physical punishment. Yet she was so loving, so touchingly kind to me. Quite suddenly the beloved was a nurse. Despite all the pain, I felt happy in her care.’ Finally she sat, dressed, by his side holding his hand, comforting him as much as possible. When he felt better he read her his poem, ‘Spaziergang’. She found it somewhat dependent on Eliot and not unlike Rilke, with reference to the line, ‘Die ganze Gestalt ist der Toten': ‘She’s becoming a good critic. Nonetheless she likes the poem very much. She left at 12.30. I stayed awake for a long time, prayed, thanked God for her, and asked Him to bless her.’

They continued their discussion of religion and the conduct of life on the morning of Sunday, the sixteenth, after which he noted: ‘How dark life is, when I’m not hearing her voice, her steps. How meaningless it would be without her. I mustn’t lose her.’ Night pains caused him to cancel the next day’s lecture. He stayed at home, read Kafka, slept a great deal. Tea, toasted cheese, dry figs and apples made his lunch. That afternoon his doctor³³ prescribed teobromine-phenobarbitone for his pain, took his blood pressure ('170. – Not bad'), warned him against sexual excess. Franz commented: ‘Poor Franz. I should marry a Jewish girl and then all would be well.’ Iris came at 4.15 with half a bottle of sherry, which they almost emptied. ‘I was once again touched by the same things. She is so full of concern – if only she knew, that with one short sentence she could give me lasting joy.’ After she left, the pain started again, cramp-like in the wrist and the middle of the chest.

A warmer day … What have I achieved? My poems are unpublished, all was in vain. My illness comes and goes as it likes. I have the love of the best woman I can imagine and she won’t marry me. I still don’t know whether I’m any good as a scientist. Recently she said, ‘You certainly are a religious person (religious in English usage means pious) but you’re not really a good person’. If she says so it must be true. When I looked at her in horror she smiled her dearest smile and said, ‘But it doesn’t matter. Not to me.’ The night was unbearable. Paul Eluard, that noble poet has passed away as well.

Around this time Honor Frost took Franz to see a friend’s paintings.³⁴ There was a Tarot pack which he cut. ‘Yes, I know,’ he said, in the resigned tone she remembered from when he had lost his suitcase: like a character in grand opera, he had contrived to draw the card for ‘Death’. On the evening of Wednesday the twenty-sixth Franz showed Iris his poem ‘Über dem Tod’. He said, ‘Notice it is “dem” not “der” – not “About death", but “Above death".’ Iris, tired after meetings, puzzled away at it and couldn’t understand. ‘Never mind it,’ said Franz, tossing it aside. ‘You relax now and be quiet.’

Franz died the following evening. He had recently turned forty-three. Iris formally registered the death: ‘I was with him on so many days. I did not expect this.’³⁵ One of Franz’s aphorisms had been that, in matters of love, the more faithless is the stronger. Until that last week, Iris’s strength had, in every sense, exceeded his, and her time, energy and love, though increasingly devoted to Franz, were also shared with others. Now it was he who (like Frank before him) had unequivocally deserted her, an act worthy of respect, the relative balance of strengths changed for good. Other suitors thus vanquished, she was flooded, as can happen in bereavement, with pain and remorse, with tormented longing, with a love deferred for good, hence unappeasable. ‘How does one write sincerely about great pain?’ she interrogated herself.

7 December 1952. My love for F. which was becoming such a broad serene river, now is a raging torrent.

21 December 1952. F. saying, as I knelt by him: Darling, I do want to get better for you … Even then I didn’t see or understand anything. Sick and rent with misery. The way F’s eyes gleamed through his glasses – & I wept over him only a few days before, & he said: You do love me. Was für Steinereien hast du heute gemacht?^*

26 December 1952. When I told F. he was foolish, he said: Oh Darling, you don’t know how foolish … F. needed me. [We] could have built a universe together … F … created me by his love. Misery today, tying up F’s letters … Every day there are things I would like to ask F. I can’t stop yet the gesture of turning towards him. Franz.

28 December 1952. The reality of death. How all trivial references to it now sound different. One wonders: but don’t all these people know?

18 January 1953. It suddenly strikes me as funny (& as I think this I am crying) that the only legal right I have where Franz is concerned is the ownership of his body! (I received yesterday the deed giving me the rights over the grave space.) Everything else has passed, legally speaking, into the hands of others.

That Friday, 28 November, Iris interrupted Barbara Mitchell’s Latin class at St Anne’s in tears and took her outside to cancel their lunch-date; a note on her door in Hartland House cancelled all further tutorials that term. The funeral was at 1 p.m. at Oxford’s Jewish Cemetery, a day of brilliant, bleak, cold sunshine after early snow. Seven of Franz’s London friends, including Adler and Canetti, were there, and some sixty people from Oxford, many from the institute. There were neither flowers nor speeches, but the customary prayers, including the Kaddish, greatest of Jewish prayers, for the dead. Iris stood apart from the others and near the grave, chief mourner.³⁶ Dressed unconventionally for a funeral in her usual day-clothes, she looked ‘utterly desolate’.³⁷ It had been Philippa, who baby-sat for Michael and Anne Dummett that weekend with Iris, at Iris’s urgent request, who had bought Iris news of Frank Thompson’s death eight years before: her desolation over Franz was quite different.

lately lost, by death, the person who was closest to me, whom I loved very dearly, whom I would very probably have married, if things had gone on as they were going. I can’t at the moment see how one recovers from such a loss. It was sudden & unexpected … I wasn’t ready for it. We were both so full of the future. And now I simply don’t know what to do.³⁸

On the Sunday she fell in the snow, breaking a little vase of Franz’s and wrenching her ankle, a sprain bad enough to have to have her leg set for a week in plaster. Friends and admirers tried to console her. Her St Anne’s colleague Elaine Griffeths took her to talk for an hour with John Jones³⁹ who, with his wife Jean, was ‘so kind. But they are so young and so happy’. Asa Briggs, first to sign his name on Iris’s plaster cast, said: ‘It is not an empty world.’ It seemed empty, though Iris noticed people’s kindness, even their love. Wallace Robson told her over sherry that he loved her deeply, and asked if this was any consolation. Handsome Ferruccio Rossi-Landi,⁴⁰ with whom she had had a happy, brief liaison, said conventionally that ‘the dead are out of trouble & our relation with them is made perfect’. Arnaldo Momigliano was in fear for himself, his desperate love kindling no warmth in her; he noted Iris’s terrible rhythmic weeping, like that of a distraught child. Iris said to Adler, in Oxford for two days dividing up Franz’s things, ‘You have known F. so long & so well.’ He replied: ‘Yes, but you loved him & one day of love tells you more than years of friendship.’ And he added: ‘Franz was loved for the first time.’ Franz had kept all Iris’s letters, had indeed kept everything, even each silly note arranging a rendezvous. In London with the Adlers on 10 December, Bettina Adler wanted to speak to Iris alone, of a ‘great light’, and how Franz was happy and protected at the last. Iris felt moved by her sincerity and simplicity. But it was no use. ‘No love is any use,’ she reflected. Two days later she wrote to Queneau, apologising for her ‘foolish’ August letter: ‘My whole existence seems to me now a tissue of foolishness.’ Franz, she told him, whom she loved very deeply, had been, by contrast, ‘daily bread’.

“ Even in deep grief, her imagination was active. She collected her memories, fearing they would fade, tried to catch his voice and intonation. The way he said, ‘A warm night – or ees eet feelthy?’ The way he asked, ‘What ees eet?’ The way he would wave down his hand ‘Indyed.’ She recalled a day that summer when they lunched in the Parks, and she delighted him by cutting the cheese with a blade of grass.

22 November. 20th anniversary of F’s sister’s death.

50 November. What can I do with such a degree of misery? … How I overtook him on my bicycle in Parks Rd in the summer, and how his eyes shone so glad thro’ his glasses & he ran a little toward me – & I took his briefcase from him. And how we lay in the grass in the parks and he took photos of me. And how he would say ‘indyed!’, and whistle like a bird, & move his ears. And how I wd feel him moving them when he lay against my breast & we would both laugh. Mein Franz – dein Franz indeed – & more than you know. Ganz Steinerisch. Steiner and Steinerism. These things are as nearly unbearable as anything I have known. I love him. I don’t know what I can do with such pain. How to face it.

In agony. No overcoming death.

I only met F. a year ago in the summer. Except for that encounter in 1941 which he remembered so well …

Demented with grief. I don’t know what to do.

Though ‘in such pain as never before’, the urge to record little things, to notate the psychopathology of grief, remained. When at last she ate some food, the taste surprised her. She noted, too, the distance of ordinary things, their lack of any contact with her; how all love, which might have consoled for anything else, was as nothing here. And ‘how boring bereaved people are. They have only one subject.’ Yet she knew her own strength, too, and what would, as she believed, serve it. ‘The horror of feeling indestructible. I can bear all this grief and more without breaking.’

Franz joined Frank in Iris’s private pantheon of martyrs.⁴¹ She sanctified both.⁴² Others vouchsafe that Franz could be difficult and moody, could speak ill of third parties, had an envious anxiety that he might lose one friend to another, a love of control,⁴³ was thought solipsistic. Iris herself had told him he was ‘not really a good person’. Here she is silent, all is sanitised. Since ‘Good = Saintly’ and there were no saints, there were also no entirely good people either. His character improved retrospectively. About such a tendency to idealise absence she wrote sharply at the end of The Unicorn: ‘She [Hannah] was like the rest of us. She loved what wasn’t there, what was absent. This can be dangerous … She could not really love the people she saw, she could not afford to, it would have made the limitations of her life too painful.’

When Iris telephoned Adler in London to bring him news of Franz’s death, he at once asked, ‘By his own hand?’ ‘Hitler’s victims’, a later journal-entry, annotates this exchange. It was Franz who that August brought Iris the news of the suicide of Tommy, son of the refugee and ex-disciple of Wittgenstein, Friedrich Waissman – his wife had killed herself earlier. ‘All violent & hurtful & senseless,’ Iris noted.⁴⁴

In 1988 Iris elegised Franz, a ‘cheerful, happy person, very tender, very full of feeling’, and

The best muses are unattainable – ‘Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, he would have written sonnets all his life?’⁴⁵ Or if Minnie Temple had not died, Henry James would still have created Millie Theale? In her last, unpublished book of philosophy, on Heidegger, Iris wrote of those who resisted Nazism and Stalinism as ‘reflections of pure goodness, a proof of [Good’s] connexion with us as a reality, as a real possibility’.⁴⁶ Frank and Franz – probably also a later friend, the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky – were on her mind. She again associated Frank and Franz when she wrote that ‘They were both of them full of truth and pure in heart.’⁴⁷ If Frank helped inspire her characterisation of virtuous soldiers, Franz helped inspire her scholar-saints Peter Saward, Willy Kost and Tallis Browne,⁴⁸ all of them isolated figures. The good slave in Acastos echoes Franz too when, on being asked whether he believed in God, can reply only that he loved Him. Of course Frank and Franz’s goodness shone the brighter because of the darkness of that to which they were opposed: like Muriel Spark and William Golding in particular, Iris came of that generation of writers whose ability to create a world is defined by the need to oppose Hitler, which led to Golding’s quest, in Lord of the Flies, to understand the blackness within Jack and Roger, the goodness of Ralph and Simon. The courage of both Frank and Franz was to stand against. Thus they expressed their different styles of practical idealism, which constitute their legacy for her.

She records that Franz influenced her, especially her views on religion, but does not vouchsafe how. Adler’s son Jeremy suggested three aspects: the religious sense itself, guilt, and an impassioned sense of good and evil. Bettina Adler agreed that, coming from a harmonious home, Iris felt the evil of the world more keenly than most; and that she saw in Franz both an absolutely truthful attempt to see the evil of the world, and how, though ‘none of us could cope with it’, an understanding of the powers of Good, in the Bible, in poetry, and in good things in the world, perhaps good people, were the only means we have of opposing it.⁴⁹ ‘Prayer in the Garden’ remains to Michael Hamburger ‘one of the few valid and adequate responses in poetry to events literally unspeakable and beyond the range of good sense, decorum or realistic presentation’, a long poem that ‘exposed the raw nerve of his anguish and of his faith’. Here Franz utters the unspeakable by negating the will and identity of the speaker; the dead can be ‘uttered’ only from a posture of complete selfabasement. The poet, ‘wounded’ into his own inwardness, must bear witness to the transcending of all taboos, to the defilement of all that is held sacred, accepting his own spiritual death as a condition of witness – a martyr taking on himself the world’s pain.

For Mary Douglas, Franz single-handedly invented the ‘sociology of danger’⁵⁰ and that reading of ‘taboo’ that relates it not to aberration, but to the sacred. He himself became, because of what he had endured, both sacred and taboo, coming from the place where Nazism undid all taboos, so questioning the idea of the sacred itself. The Dachau survivor Willy Kost in The Nice and the Good, inspired by Franz, is also both sacred and taboo. His Trescombe neighbours leave anxious gifts outside his cottage door, unconsciously appeasing a source of danger, propitiating one whose ill luck makes him an object of holy dread. If Iris argued later for a recovery of our sense of the sacred, Franz fed this, and taught her to view the world in terms of the relations between what is taboo or forbidden and what is holy. They held in common an essentially religious vision that reverenced difference or otherness and privileged the sense of wonder, a mistrust of systems and of modernity, a fascination with exile, a belief that the ancient gods or powers now reappear as impersonal forces.⁵¹ For both, the truth must be grounded in pain. Iris could look steadily at the terrible aspects of human existence. Friendship with Franz strengthened this.

Iris had lunch that foggy December of 1952 with her old Somerville friend Lucy Klatschko. In general Lucy found communication with Iris easy and delightful, Iris entering so much into other people’s lives in a self-effacing way. But Iris was so upset that a great friend of hers had just died – ‘a Jewish refugee who was a brilliant poet’ – that this meeting was memorably different. Iris only stated the fact and said nothing more: not even his name. The meal was silent and strained.

Lucy was working for Thomas Thorpe, a bookseller near the publisher John Murray on Albemarle Street, a ‘horrible man’ who secretly ate buns and pinched the behinds of the girl assistants. She consoled herself by reading as many books against the Catholic Church as she could find, only to discover, to her horrified and dismayed interest, that she was gradually becoming persuaded by the power of that which was being attacked. By Christmas 1952 she was received into the Church. On 23 March 1953 she wrote to Iris, ‘I don’t think I will become a nun on account of the Rev. Mother Superior!’ but on 1 May 1954 she was accepted at Stanbrook Abbey near Worcester as a postulant, living out the next half-century there. These developments were later of great interest to Iris. She wrote in her journal on 12 January 1994: ‘Lucy’s life – to imagine it …’

Meanwhile, she recorded on 10 December 1952 that there was only one person she now really wanted to see: Elias Canetti. ‘I telephoned Canetti when the pain was unbearable, but he was not there.’

^*On 20 July 1946. Gandhi was concerned that Muslim sovereignty of the Holy Land should not be ceded as a result of the war; some felt that a desire to demonstrate solidarity with fellow-Indian Muslims underlay his pronouncement, which was by no means his first on this topic. In 1938, ten days after Kristallnacht, he advised German Jews to practise non-violence.

^*Hebrew, Turkish, Armenian, Persian, Malay, English, French, Russian, Greek and Latin, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Yiddish.

^*Iris later copied out the poem: ‘Wed Oct. 22nd. A poem from Franz for some gentians which I brought him: “Enzian brachte sie mir und stellte die Blüten ins Weinglas,/ O das bereite Gefäss, immer erwartet es uns./Kelche im Kelch und satt von der Bläue verbotener Berge,/Da das kränkliche Herz kaum zu erträumen mehr wagt./Zwölf an der Zahl sind die edlen, sanft geöffneten Sterne,/keusch im farblosen Rund, leben mein sinnliches fahr./Wie, seid ihr Kinder des Weins? Ihr monate siegricher Bläue?/Nein, die Ältern seid ihr: Kindschaft beseligt den Rausch."’

^*On 7 August she had noted: ‘F. said: The Jews identified themselves more with the illegal immigrants than with the concentration camp victims. It was the people in motion, the archetype. This was a propos of “Gebet im Garten” – I said, why pick on us. Charming story of young Jew who started to eat pig after the farmer had killed a calf for him!’

^*Franz’s handwriting is very hard to decode: ‘Befraer’ would be ‘deliverer’.

^*‘What have you done for old Steiner today?’

12 Franz Baermann Steiner– 1951-1952

12
Franz Baermann Steiner–
1951-1952