John Bayley has recorded sighting Iris on her bike before knowing her name or anything about her, thinking her to be superior, mysterious, with no ‘past’, and hoping that she was waiting for him to arrive.1 A cocktail party given by Elaine Griffeths, who taught English at St Anne’s, brought them face to face. Iris’s manner on those early occasions was kindly but repressive, avoiding intimacy. He did not admire her looks. He believed her to be old, wise and plain, and hoped therefore that he had minimal competition. Each of these assumptions, he later decided, bore further thought.
John and his colleague Patrick Gardiner threw a party for the publication of Iris’s book on Sartre in November 1953, serving ‘Black Velvet’, which they had read about in Evelyn Waugh, a mixture of Guinness and champagne slightly more disgusting than it sounds. Iris was discouraging too. She does not mention John in her journal until February 1954: ‘a dear man’ whom she had visited at his college. In March they met three times, at her Southmoor Road basement flat, or his first-floor room in St Antony’s, a new college which had only postgraduate teaching. John taught a little at Wadham and New Colleges at one pound an hour, and, with a small grant from the army, got by on £200 a year. St Antony’s had been an Anglican convent, his room once a nun’s cell.
Soon they gave each other feedback, over vin rosé, on drafts they had exchanged of each other’s first novels. They sang German and English songs together; John played his descant recorder. When he accompanied her back to Southmoor Road – both on bikes – on turning to hand over some books of hers he had carried back, he stood in her way and kissed her firmly on the lips. It had no prelude and, she wrote, ‘delighted me very much’. It is no accident that her earliest references to John associate him with ‘gay & sweet laughter’, ‘suppressed laughter’. Her entry, 'O the calming externality of an Englishman after the upsetting inwardness of these continentals!’2 was not à propos John, but it could have been. He had a happy, solitary temperament, and carried around with him always a sense of joyous carnival, of holiday. Four days after that first kiss they stayed up till 4 a.m., he confiding in her about his earlier love for a woman who wanted to be separate and alone. Iris spoke to him vehemently ‘about love & about his work, feeling a deep concern for him’. She grieved at leaving him and was tempted to run into St Antony’s the following morning. Iris was playing the woman of the world; John the ingénu or child.
When John, who did not think matters were going well, that night disparaged Charles Morgan’s novel The Fountain, Iris defended its depiction of physical desire. Noel Martin had sent her in 1942 a Morgan quotation which travelled with her:3 ‘The freedoms of the spirit are not attained by violence of the will, but by an infinite patience of the imagination.’ Today The Fountain seems a slack and portentous spiritual adventure-story, full of grimly high-minded Schöngeisterei,* with no spark of comedy. Its influence on Iris is nonetheless discernible, with its Platonic quest-motif, its discovery that inner freedom can be found within enclosures (castles, monasteries), its patrician brooding on the contemplative life, and its crisis merely a conversation between two men locked in a love-hate relation, in which the wiser (Narwitz) teaches the more callow (Lewis). The crisis of Under the Net also consists in nothing more than a hospital conversation – marvellously comical and touching – in which Hugo teaches Jake, ‘God is a task. God is a detail. It all lies close to your hand.’
At a dance at St Antony’s on Friday, 14 May, Dee Wells watched Iris and John whooping and galloping around the two rooms, Iris dressed strangely; Wells was asking her future husband A.J. Ayer, whom she had just met for the first time, about white rabbits and coloured handkerchiefs. He retorted, ‘I did not say I was a magician – I am a logician.’ Iris had twice fallen down the stairs to the old crypt where the dance was held. She noted ‘extraordinary events’ and that she had fallen truly in love with John, who
was, is, certainly very deeply in love with me. Since then, all sense of time & place has been dissolved. Does this endless capacity for new loves shew – what? that I am very shallow, unstable? I can’t think this. God knows what I can do for, or with, JB – but I shall try not to harm or hurt him. What can I do? His wide undeceiving eyes, his laugh, his strange Byzantine figure, his hands (which I examined the other day – ‘I’d have washed them if I’d known this was going to happen!') He delights me in a thousand ways & fills me with laughter & joy …
They kissed and, like children, talked and talked. Two weeks later she recorded:
Terrible intensity of life. I must not leave tasks undone. Extraordinary need for JB. His laughter, his poems, his letters. His helplessness & emotion in the face of my attachment to him is very touching. He said ‘I feel like a dog overwhelmed by being given an enormous bone. I can’t pick it up, can only lick the corners!’
To some they made an improbable couple, Iris so fine-looking, John, as one friend quipped, the runt of the litter of three brothers – slight, balding, myopic, uncoordinated – and yet also, with his brilliance and his confident modesty, ‘the best argument against eugenics we have’. Iris admired John’s slim grace, and gave his ‘white flank’ when they bathed naked in the Thames that July to Toby in The Bell. She had explained to him at the dance that her situation was not simple, naming Momigliano, Asa Briggs and Canetti as important to her too. ‘I can give but a sort of constancy,’ she extemporised in one of many poems to him, this one on 23 May; and ‘So many others in my life have place/How can I dare to look you in the face?’ On 15 June they were at another dance, at St Anne’s, from which she dragged him away to walk back through pouring rain, having indeed experienced sudden jealousy about Asa Briggs who was there with a different partner. The incident is doubtless one of those which made Iris in 1968 disclaim ‘identification with the ass that I then was’. The 1954 Iris noted that
the who am I to be jealous? aspect doesn’t stop me being in great pain. At the very same time I am in delight & grief over JB. I have never seen such an undefended mortal. (Except perhaps Shah, of whom he reminds me oddly … in … his extreme slimness & grace.) The other night I … kissed him & his cheeks tasted salt – he had been weeping very much. I am overwhelmed by his gentleness and self-effacing sensitive love.
John particularly enjoyed this part of the evening – Iris weeping and talking of suicide. He explained that he couldn’t but enjoy being alone with her, whatever was going on. His willingness to accommodate Iris as she was comes over clearly, together with a (to her) healing lack of curiosity about the detail of her trouble. She later recorded his comment ‘emotions for their own sake’. She and John were soon lovers, she being his first, at twenty-nine.
John went home to Kent one week after the momentous St Antony’s dance and cabled Iris: ‘The Sunday Times has made it clear/Perilla’s in her proper sphere’. In that journal J.W. Lambert had praised Under the Net, whose publication the same week as the dance anyone vainer than Iris would have recorded. Asa Briggs saw signs of pre-publication nerves. The same month during a tutorial her student Gabriele Taylor registered that Iris was not concentrating as she should. ‘There is something I want to show you,’ she said. She went to a cupboard and produced a copy of Under the Net, published on 20 May. She was clearly thrilled and philosophy, for once, forgotten.
2
Iris had decided to ‘chuck’ her earlier attempt at a novel, ‘Our Lady of the Bosky Gates’ on 27 October 1949, asking herself, ‘What sort of novel shall I write?':
Vague reduplications of my own situation must be rejected … A tale of someone making a choice! … Some simple frame. In form of a diary? (cf. La Nausée) Half in Paris, half in London – some ex-lover confidant in Paris. The task – to break a liaison, achieve something intellectual? Introduce a ‘rub’ – of the Xavière variety.4 … Some cool other female in London. Light on relation with women. How shall religion come in?
She later wrote the aphorism: ‘Everything that is deep loves a mask’. Although Under the Net is not strictly a ‘diary’, male first-person narrative liberated her. She had hit upon an idiom in which she felt instinctively at home, and to which she would return, which enabled her to speak confidently through a masculine persona. (It was also a way of championing that inner life philosophers neglected. Philosophy undervalued the inner life, but a first-person narrative could still display its potency, strangeness and consequentiality, its shape as a ‘pilgrimage’.) If her first-person novels are often among her best work, it is also because the form granted her the freedom of involuntariness. It is no accident that each of her first-person male narrators is the same age as Iris at the time of the novel’s composition, from Jake in Under the Net, in his early thirties, to Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea, who, like Iris in 1978, is sixty-ish. Both Jake and Charles are, for all the evident differences between them, like Iris, short persons who blush and like swimming.
Like Iris, Jake Donaghue is an Irish Londoner who has ‘shattered nerves’, who was once in the Young Communist League and is now disaffected, who is translating a French novelist just as Iris had translated Queneau’s Pierrot mon ami – and who like Iris is about to turn into a novelist in his own right. London is a real presence, almost another character in the novel. Jake jests that Dave Gellner, being Jewish, could afford to live at a ‘contingent address’ – off the Goldhawk Road – whereas he is not sure that he could. The address in the notebooks for Under the Net – Iris’s parental home, 4 Eastbourne Road – is in Chiswick, ‘contingent’, as the novel jokes, ‘to the point of nausea'; her schoolgirl poems expressed routine contempt for suburbia.
The instrument of Jake’s education is Hugo Belfounder. Those who see Wittgenstein in Hugo are not wholly misled: both have Central European origins, a tormented love-life, a care for their boots, give up their fortune, are associated with hospital work, employ the word ‘decent’ as high commendation. So keenly did Wittgenstein’s pupils emulate him, even to his Austrian accent,5 that when he gave a lecture at Cornell University in New York, one student asked, ‘Who is that old man imitating Norman Malcolm?’6 Malcolm was another of the holy fool-disciples Wittgenstein sometimes preferred in philosophy, the main conveyer of his ideas to the United States.
But Hugo was based on a different holy fool. ‘What a poor image of Yorick Hugo Belfounder is! But this is unkind to Hugo. The fault is mine,’ Iris noted. Wittgenstein’s star pupil Yorick Smythies resembled a cross between Hamlet and the first gravedigger, thin, stooped, myopic, tall, pure of heart, given to the slow catechising that Wittgenstein favoured as a method of investigation, and to strange abstinences. He read Plotinus at the age of five. Friends use of him precisely the same parlance as Iris of Hugo: he was ‘totally truthful’,7 to the point of wild eccentricity. Like Hugo torn between Anna and Sadie, Yorick in real life was divided between two loves (neither of whom, however, resembled the Quentin sisters). Like Hugo, finally apprenticed to a Nottingham watchmaker, Yorick aspired to become a bus conductor but, Iris noted, was the only person in the history of the bus company to fail the theory test. They muddled him with complex situations so that he could not give the correct change;8 when he accidentally pressed part of the ticket-punching gadget which conductors wore around their necks, ‘great sausages’ of rolled-up tickets came spewing out. During his single driving-lesson the instructor left the car as Yorick drove on and off the pavement.
Though Iris in 1977 wrote to Chatto pleading for a philosophical work by Yorick to be taken seriously by them,9 his only known publication is a review of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, a book he feared would encourage slipshod thinking.10 He lived mainly as a librarian; Wittgenstein wrote a warm testimonial. Yorick for Iris was a wise counsellor, quick, sensitive, humorous, an excellent listener. When he died in 1980, she wrote his death into the novel she was then composing, The Philosopher’s Pupil, where Hugo leaves his clocks to ‘that writer-chap, I forget his name’ – in other words to Jake Donaghue. Before this a schizophrenic breakdown caused him to hide behind trees, making strange utterances ('soft soap'; ‘Heil Hitler'). Like Elizabeth Anscombe, Smythies was a Catholic convert and a pacifist. A record of conversations with Yorick kept by his friend Peter Daniel from 1952 makes clear his wide culture, his wholly original views, his religious passion, his belief that ordinary consciousness is unfree since enslaved to sin, his attraction to Buddhism (when a film of Under the Net was discussed in 1956, Iris proposed to simplify the philosophy by making it Buddhist11), his preoccupation with saintliness. He believed in human ‘transformation’. He wished we had recorded conversations between a saint and an ordinary worldly person. He wondered why no saint has left us rules for living – they themselves must have them, but not such as we could follow, like: ‘Think of nothing for one hour.’ It would be good if, at the end, one were praying all the time. The kindest and most charitable Christians he met were his fellow-inmates in the mental hospital following his breakdown. Saints, though suffering, were still happy. He found the anonymous mystical Cloud of Unknowing helpful. He was not so unworldly as to be unable to see that many Oxford dons were bored and jealous. He took snuff.
Iris shared Yorick’s concern with sin and saintliness, and his love of the great mystics; also of Kafka and of Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji. Yorick helped Iris through a number of emotional crises. The wise fool Hugo, in the novel, cuts through Jake’s illusions about who loves whom, but also, by his very mode of being, reawakens in Jake a humility and a related sense of wonder. ‘It’s just one of the wonders of the world,’ are the final words. The novel concerns a re-enchantment of the ordinary, the redemption of particulars, a re-christening of the eyes. Hugo stands in this process for the puritan ideal of silence, to which art must of necessity be opposed, but by which it may also be refreshed; Jake for the necessary compromises of art.
In July 1953, after completing the novel, Iris rowed Yorick Smythies in her canoe as far as the Plough pub at Wolvercote.
… a long conversation in which Y. was more like Hugo than it’s possible to imagine. A diary couldn’t but be ‘a lie’. All art was a lie. Only the Bible was not a fabrication. Chaucer, Dante? Perhaps Chaucer was all right … I said, some people’s trade is writing, & if it’s possible to sin in it, this doesn’t differentiate it from any other trade. Y. said – it’s different because it involves judging. He agreed later perhaps this only differentiated it from simple manual jobs. All others were ‘tainted’ in some similar way! I said too – there must be people who try to purify ideas & speech. You advocate some terrible dichotomy – tainted speech or silence.
Jake writes up such conversations with Hugo as a pretentious dialogue called ‘The Silencer'; while Anna Quentin, who loves Hugo, creates out of his influence an equally silent mime theatre in Hammersmith. Being nobly unselfconscious and living without self-image, Hugo is unable to recognise these reflections. The quarrel between Hugo and Jake is the first of many treatments in Iris’s work of the fruitful war between ‘the saint and the artist’ – for ‘artist’ read ‘arch-individualist’.12 She came to think of Under the Net as immature.13 Jake and Hugo are together for only half an hour during the entire book, and Hugo’s saintliness is not immediately clear to the reader, remaining itself in the realm of theory.
3
Iris wrote to Queneau to tell him he was the book’s dedicatee. Jake’s hearing Anna sing on the wireless at the end refers to Sartre’s La Nausée, where Roquentin hears Josephine Baker;14 a private reference is to Iris and Queneau listening to Juliette Greco, perhaps singing Queneau’s ‘Si tu t’imagines’. The casualness of Queneau’s reply to her letter hurt her – ‘When I think of the letter I would have got from Franz …!’ He was bemused by the way Jake breaks into other people’s flats in their absence, and enquired whether this were a peculiar old English tradition. Iris reassured him: ‘No!’ – only Jake and she had this ‘nomadic insecurity’.15 Under the Net tries to copy Queneau’s Pierrot mon ami and Beckett’s Murphy, both of which are among its charming, feckless, bohemian hack-hero Jake Donaghue’s few and treasured possessions, but it resembles neither closely. Its humour is very different from the owlish pedantry of Murphy. Iris admired ‘that vertiginous heart-breaking absurdity which Queneau achieves by his ambiguous serio-comic play’.16 Like Queneau’s Pierrot mon ami, Under the Net concerns petites gens and is picaresque and unexpected. But its marvellously lyrical evocations of London and of Paris, its wit and endless comic invention, its philosophic theme yet lightness of touch, make it unlike either book. In her journals Iris calls it ‘a philosophical adventure story': the title alludes to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, 6, 341, the net of discourse behind which the world’s particulars hide, which can separate us from our world, yet simultaneously connect us. Sartre is here too; but where La Nausée presented the contingency of the world as the enemy, Under the Net presents some healing surrender to its otherness as a precondition for happiness and creativity alike.
Anna Quentin is a persona Iris wished to shed. Anna – like Iris in her grief over Frank and Franz – has a ‘taste for tragedy’, taking life ‘intensely and very hard’. Her character moreover ‘was not all that it should be’, her existence ‘one long act of disloyalty’. She is constantly involved in ‘secrecy and lying in order to conceal from each of her friends the fact that she was so closely bound up with the others’. Sometimes she tries deadening by small, steady shocks the sharpness of jealousy, so that her enslaved victim becomes resigned to ‘the liberal scope of her affections’.17 When Jake memorably pursues the woman he takes to be Anna through Paris on the glorious fourteenth of July – ‘Alors, chérie’ – Anna’s double finally addresses him. He has mistaken a lady of easy virtue for Anna. Another judgement comes when the authoritative Hugo, his voice ‘edged with fury’, portrays Anna both as a ‘frenzied maenad’ and also as less intelligent than her sister Sadie.
By Iris’s standards the novel grew slowly. One year into writing she notes that only ‘a dash to the summit [is] worth attempting’. May 1952 journal entries make clear her identification with Jake, the narrator who then believed his sidekick Finn to be a relative, and a character called Rosina, later dropped, also features. In March 1953 she compares the novel to ‘a crop of clover – not much in itself, but it cleans the soil’. In June she asks, ‘Is it “symbolic"? No more & no less than anything else that happens to human beings.’
On Under the Net’s publication the Times Literary Supplement hailed a ‘brilliant talent’ that, despite a lack of ‘fit’ between characters and plot, promised great things. Kingsley Amis in the Spectator admired her ‘complete control of her material'; she was ‘a distinguished novelist of a rare kind’. John Betjeman in the Telegraph disdained the novel’s ‘intellectuals, washouts, and seedy characters in general’, its excesses of farce and fantasy. Canetti enjoyed Angus Wilson’s grudging quip in the Observer that here all was ‘Wein, Weib and Wittgenstein’.* The Guardian dismissed the novel as ‘sentimental … strictly for those who can take their fantasy neat’. Philippa Foot was amazed by the wit Iris had hidden from the world and could express only in writing; Asa Briggs was struck by her ability to turn common experience into poetry. Iris’s father Hughes was proud, and spoke of the novel to his bank manager.18 Julian Chrysostomides saw how happy and not at all vain Iris was when an Oxford bookseller congratulated her: ‘You must have worked very hard to produce this!’ She grew, John observed, in self-confidence. A possible translation into French was a ‘dazzling vision to me of course’.19 Chatto had what sounds like a record-breaking number of copies (215,00?)20 printed for the Reprint Society book club.
4
On 30 June John wrote to a depressed, tired Iris at Chiswick: ‘Darling, don’t ever give me up: I could live in any contradiction indefinitely with you, and never mind the mornings when one wakes early & alone.’ Iris had been seen with John at a party for the marriage of J.B. Priestley and Jacquetta Hawkes, and reported by a ‘snake-in-the-grass’ to Canetti, whose letter filled her with foreboding. Having tried not to think about the approaching crisis, she now felt ‘terror & wretchedness mixed with relief … What sort of living in contradiction can I offer [John] now?’ Canetti interrogated Iris, who was consumed by guilt towards both lovers. He was ‘very gentle and very firm, continually turning my head towards him & making me look into his eyes while he questioned relentlessly’. He told her it was as well she had not seen him when he was really angry.
Not that he would have beaten me, though he might, but he would have said things which couldn’t be unsaid … I am very glad & relieved to have told him. There remains the problem of how to get the required bounds to my relations with John without doing some irreparable damage to that gentle beast. I feel full of grief – and will feel even more so when I face the details of this. I have a considerable capacity for dividing my mind (rather my heart) into compartments and giving apparently a full attention to a number of people at once. Then, as now, I am suddenly trapped – & this causes pain to others.
Canetti was ‘the king’, yet Iris saw little of him, having to ‘live on a myth in intervals of seeing the flesh & blood man’. Meanwhile it was hard for her not to love those who surrounded her. Fear prevented her feeling a full joy in Canetti – whereas she could ‘bring measureless joy to [Momigliano] or to JB. I am terribly to blame for all this duplicity. (I feel this when it is being unsuccessful.)’ She also feared hurting John, ‘a totally innocent person’. Canetti’s conditions – that she and John break off sexual relations – made her feel ‘as if a Ford lorry had driven straight through me … miserable and half crazy’. She explained these conditions to John who arrived at Victoria station, ‘slouching out with his rucksack’ on 3 July, his delighted smile visible from far away. They stopped at a pub.
I began to tell him. Interrupted. Then we went to Trafalgar Square & we stood beside the lions. I told him about C. and how I felt we had no choice but to ‘set bounds’, to be friends not lovers. It sounded crazy. We walked up & down a bit & then leaned against the monument. (J. said in his letter of this morning: ‘it must have been like clubbing a kitten.') My knees were giving way. J. said —'it wasn’t important before. Now it is.’ We had a drink in St Martin’s Lane & tried to eat but couldn’t. J. talked wildly of going to see C. I told him not to. I wanted terribly to embrace & kiss him, & told him so. He said – ‘we’ll go to the London Library’. We went there, & I followed J. upstairs. It was fantastic. We walked up & down the long dark alleys of books. Always there was here & there a reader, hidden. We kept climbing up more & more iron stairways. At last we found a floor where there was no one. We leaned against the shelves in the half darkness & clung to each other. J. wept. After a long time we went out, & I came with him in the taxi to Paddington. What will come of all this?
On Iris’s thirty-fourth birthday on 15 July Canetti gave her a copy of the Ching P’ing Mei, a book (perhaps unsurprisingly) about a man with six wives, inscribing it ‘To Iris – for her second novel with great expectations’. On his birthday, ten days later, he twice told her he loved her, and then regretted this; she joked that he need not say it again for two years. There is no record of Canetti proposing any self-denying ordinance for himself, but John and she obeyed his edict. When she proposed John’s coming to meet BMB in August his deliberate misquoting of Dante’s ‘la tua volontade è mia pace’ – in your will is my peace – delighted her. Photographs of Iris and John in his room at St Antony’s before Canetti’s decree show him happy, concentrating on the cotton cord he has rigged up to operate the camera at longdistance. Those Iris took in Paris that summer show him miserable: he hated Paris, and Iris insisted they stay in separate little hotels. By September they once again were lovers, meeting at a friend’s flat in West Halkin Street in London.
Iris was depressed about her new novel-in-progress, The Flight from the Enchanter, which seemed to her emotional, shapeless, repetitive. ‘Another failure. If I imagined I now knew “how to do it” I was wrong. Not a great writer in training, but a mediocre writer who had a single stroke of luck? (I will not believe this.) … A terrible haste has infected my work. Not exactly that I grudge time to the writing of each piece – but a sort of metaphysical sense of rush. Be quieter in the soul.’ She rarely discussed her creative depressions with anybody. John’s sureness of instinct helped.
4 August. JB rang up this morning. His voice was consoling. How can I describe how remarkable he is? … A grace of soul – humility, simplicity, and a way of being very acute & subtle without ever protecting oneself by placing & despising other people. (J. in a letter today: ‘You don’t know how earthy & inconsiderable I am – how completely without enlightenment of any kind.')
In Oxford that October she noted that:
… courage, courage, courage is the secret of all … I know I can overcome the hurts from my work and from other people … At such moments a yearning for union with this infinite joins with the sheer sense of creative energy. My task after all to write – thank God for this much of a solution.
5
Within days of finishing Under the Net Iris registered the approach of The Flight from the Enchanter. In March 1953: ‘The next thing. Which is already present, only I have not yet turned to look at it. Like a king whose bride has been brought from a far country. But he continues to look out of the window, though he can hear the rustle of her dress.’ That spring she made a first draft, in which the main characters are Jewish, and Peter Saward, based on Franz and named Kostalanetz, is writing a history of the Jews. On 10 July: ‘Astonishing progress since my last entry. The novel now stands up, as a completed plan, all characters present, all scenes planned, many small details in! If only my wise Jew were not such a bore.’
She decided to ‘unmake’ this and start again. Her second draft generalised the conditions of rootlessness and of enslavement. Here she invented not only the mysterious Fox, the demonic Polish brothers to whom Rosa is enslaved and the dressmaker Nina (a half-rhyme for Veza; Marie-Louise von Motesiczky’s well-known picture At the Dress-makers may have suggested her profession) but gentile English characters too. Annette Cockeyne is deracinated by being a diplomat’s daughter, speaking four languages, none perfectly. Rosa Keepe tries to uproot herself from a Campden Hill Square background by working in a factory, recalling Simone Weil’s working for Renault, while Agnes Casement is upwardly mobile instead, acquiring a typist as her own ‘slave’. Even the foolish Rainborough suffers a small deracination when the wistaria in his Belgravia garden is cut down to make room for a neighbouring hospital.
This final draft was finished in February 1955, when Iris was increasingly drawn to John, and her relations with Canetti unresolved. ‘When will you tell Canetti?’ John would ask. ‘I don’t want to lose him at the moment,’ she would reply. ‘He’s very jealous.’ The fugitive autumn leaves in Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ are secretly driven by that greater power. So Rosa’s defection from Fox, like Iris’s from Canetti, obeys the enchanter’s secret wish. Fox’s power – like Shelley’s ‘unseen presence’ – is literally inexplicable. If there is a literary parallel, it is Thomas Mann’s short story ‘Mario and the Magician’ (1930), a prophetic anti-Hitlerite fable where a conjuror-hypnotist bewitches his audience, and the voluntary enslavement of that audience is as blameworthy as are the manipulations of the Magician himself.
No one knows Fox’s age, what country he comes from, or can fathom his apparent omniscience. Rainborough stands in for all Fox’s ‘creatures’ in asking anxiously, ‘Did he say anything about me?’ Annette, like the younger Iris, positively wills her enslavement to him, suffering the illusion that she can thereby ‘liberate [his] soul from captivity';21 while Rosa, like an older and wiser Iris, dislikes his assertions of power and finds the ‘strength to flee … the demon’.22 Isolated Nina (Franz had noted that slaves were ‘kinless’23), captive to her fear of Fox, finally escapes, not to Australia as she plans, but by throwing herself out of the window to her death. Fox’s power is ceded to him by his creatures, who will their own enslavement. Both parties are complicit; an analysis of power running throughout Iris’s oeuvre.
Although Iris denied putting Franz or Canetti into her work,24 both shadow The Flight from the Enchanter, whose opening meditation concerns the vulnerability of monsters. Annette thinks of Dante’s condemned minotaur in the twelfth canto of the Inferno: ‘Why should the poor minotaur be suffering in hell?’ He hadn’t ashed to be born a monster. This softens our judgement on Mischa Fox, named for his cunning, inspired by Canetti: what is monstrous deserves our pity. Yet monstrosity, the novel also suggests, is bred out of an ambiguity within the experience of pity itself, which may be corrupted into cruelty and power. The inward nature of that protective anxiety Iris had vicariously felt about Friedl, and which Canetti (like Fox) recorded especially about the fate of animals – ‘Why do animals suffer death? What is their original sin?’25 – is closely examined in the novel.
Iris made her mystery-man Fox wealthy, because it disguised Canetti who was then poor, and because wealth can fascinate as a power-source. We forget that he is a newsaper magnate: the point is never developed. He is given Canetti’s moustache, also one blue and one brown eye, pointing to a divided nature, and is ‘famous for being famous’. Much is merely stated of him: that he is ‘capable of enormous cruelty'; that the ‘sight of little independent things annoys him’ – he wants them in his power; that he is capable of taking a careful revenge after ten years; that he has collected around London ‘dozens of enslaved beings’ waiting to do his will whom, as Saward observes, he drives mad; that his parties are carefully constructed plots for the forcing of various dramas; that, dragon-like, he eats up young girls and, for Rosa, is sometimes the ‘very figure of evil’.
Little of his power-broking, his ‘oriental magic’, is actually shown. One of the best scenes has him arriving unannounced at Rainborough’s when the latter in panic has shut away young Annette, bare-breasted, in a cupboard. Fox talks, with a poetry both sinister and interminable, about the protean and malleable nature of women and their need to be broken; his Schadenfreude or malicious joy, both towards Rainborough, whose predicament he intuits, and towards women, is simultaneously comical and disturbing. Fox enjoys disquieting others. The crisis of the novel, also funny and sinister, is a Dostoevskian skandal, a party in Fox’s palazzo where a goldfish bowl gets smashed and a fish, by mistake, ‘saved’ in a decanter of gin. His inviting Agnes Casement is typical of Canetti, who would make a point both of discovering his friends’ secrets, and also of paying attention in social gatherings to the least probable guest.
Iris solves the aesthetic problem that Canetti/Fox is morally mixed, at a time when she was in thrall to Canetti, by giving him a wicked double, Calvin Blick, who is ‘the dark half of Mischa Fox’s mind. That’s how Mischa can be so innocent.’ Blick argues that reality ‘is a cipher with many solutions, all of them right ones’, a view Carol Stewart recalls as close to Canetti’s,26 and is opposed in this foggy relativism by the good Peter Saward, who argues on the final page by contrast for a humble striving towards truths which may be unreachable. Peter, like Franz, is a scholar-saint in his forties whose beloved sister has died, and who, also like Franz after the loss of his thesis in 1942, at the end patiently has to restart his work. He is dying of TB as was Franz of heart failure, and Rosa’s proposal of marriage to him on the last page, just after she has dreamt that he is dead, reflects Franz’s last days. ‘He did not defend himself by placing others. He did not defend himself – a description recalling Iris’s view of John as well as of Franz. Saward plays saint to Mischa’s artist, as necessary to the others as an object of contemplation and speculation as is the cunning Fox himself. Evil (in Fox) and Good (in Saward) embody forces half-independent of society, the drama of whose opposition is the secret dynamo of the novelistic world.
The novel memorably distances its tone – surreal (Annette swinging from a chandelier), lightly comic, Lewis Carroll-like, fantastic – from its grim subject-matter. The worst we know of Mischa Fox, reputed to cry when reading the newspapers, is that as a boy he killed a kitten. ‘If the gods kill us, it is not for their sport, but because we fill them with such intolerable compassion, a sort of nausea,’ he comments. Hitler, mentioned once only, who killed those he had rendered piteous by uprooting, is a real presence. When Fox asks Peter whether he does not feel that everything in the universe requires his protection, ‘even this matchbox’, Peter demurs, observing how close in Mischa lie the springs of pity and of cruelty. The protective anxiety that preoccupied Iris during 1943 and again in 1953 is displayed here in a new light. It holds her as much as snobbery and memory obsess Proust.
Canetti’s own writings, also tender towards animals, are memorable when encountering what is maimed or not whole – the anonymous human sack at the end of The Voices of Marrakesh that produces a single note;27 the paralysed young cripple Thomas Marek whose mother pushes him around on a wagon, whom he befriends near Vienna in his memoirs.28 He liked to rescue those ‘in extremis’. In The Flight from the Enchanter a bird with only one foot (in real life sighted by Iris with Momigliano at Kew) fascinates Mischa. How will it manage in a storm? The novel examines the connexions between pity and power, sentimentality and cruelty, like Ezra Pound in Canto XXX. Rainborough is predator to Annette, victim to Agnes Casement; but most play both victim and predator. Only Peter Saward and Annette’s mother stand outside the web of enslavement, which reaches one comic apogee in the persecutions the old Suffragette Mrs Wingfield visits on her companion Miss Foy: ‘Would you say old Foy was a virgin? … She isn’t!’ Agnes Casement too, who nearly swallows Rainborough whole, shows Iris’s consistent refusal to depict women only as victims.
6
When Rosa flees from Mischa in Italy towards the end of the novel, Iris was enacting her own symbolic liberation from Canetti, one which in real life she had not yet achieved. Liberation took one further year. Finally at Gwenda David’s party for the publication of the novel in March 1956 the enchanter announced to John: ‘I like you.’ Iris had begged his blessing the previous month, and, though he remained ambivalent and jealous, she had apparently won it, he surrounding her ‘with a sort of positive radiant concern, very deliberate, as everything that he does’. She felt ‘deep deep relief at being free; and joy at all the freedom & simplicity of my love for JB. Back again in a world of simplicity & truth. Truth bought at that price.’ Canetti was nonetheless angry when she left the party with John, without having greeted him; his refusal afterwards to come to the phone to speak to her – she tried several times – she now felt ‘objective enough … to see … as vanity on his part and just dislike it’. She did not ask John his impressions of Canetti, and he gave none. In April 1956 she put her hands in Canetti’s hair, saying he was Moses and that she was searching for his horns. He said: ‘Yes, the horns which you put there!’ He was gentle, that day.
Iris could display in fiction an objectivity she had not achieved in life. Hence the value to her of her art; and hence also the related ‘spiritual’ dimension of marriage, about which she was having frequent dreams. In December 1955 she noted:
The possibility of becoming a better writer, (??A great writer??) after certain renunciations. Thinking of marriage makes me realize the extent to which my writing up to now [sic] has an aspect of sheer personal adornment. I have wanted, with its help, to make myself more desirable & interesting, a centre of attention. By dropping all that, the possibility of a power & a freedom I now do not dream of.
The possibility of marriage was on her mind from late 1955. She wanted yet feared it. John wrote to her early in 1956:
If John Cranko’s Josephine could get at me perhaps she would turn me into a bat. Then I could be (life’s ambition) small, and no trouble, and furry and gently fruit-eating. I could hang inconspicuously upside down in the corner of your ceiling while you did your work or entertained your lovers, and since I should be pretty witless and nearly blind my presence would not upset you. But, as you said, this being always near is only a dream. If I was a bat, it would be pointless. If I was me, it would be both unseemly and impossible. Forgive this drunken letter. The only bat I am is bâteau ivre. My head is frail comme un papillon de maie. But my heart, so obstinately wanting to be given, is firm as a rock. At least, it’s givable all right, but not acceptable.
Mischa Fox had announced that women have a Protean, shape-shifting nature, and that the way to deal with Proteus was to hang onto him while he changed form. So, when he despaired, Iris would comfort John: ‘Simply hang onto me as if I were Proteus, and I’ll assume my real nature.’ On 15 February 1956: ‘I cannot help being swept now toward JB … with a great force of joy & love. What will come I don’t know, probably marriage.’ Formally, they were ‘engaged’.29 Yet the event remained unsure: ‘I hesitated and hesitated and hesitated’.30
7
One day in 1955 Iris took Julian Chrysostomides to St Antony’s, where a cat had littered in John’s rooms. Julian felt the affinity between Iris and John at once. It was as if they were so much a part of one another that there were no barriers between them. Each was part of the other; a deep intuitive understanding linked them: ‘She chose well!’ Susan Gardiner witnessed the tension and passion John felt for two years. He was seen gazing up at Iris’s window and following her, while Iris appeared ‘radiant, luminous, like a Fra Angelico'; John was also sighted climbing out of her flat window the odd morning.31 He constantly read the runes. That she took him to Badminton to meet BMB in August 1954 was a sign of hope. That BMB remarked to Iris, ‘My dear, he doesn’t look very strong,’ was ominous (he cheered himself up by buying a jumper). Being permitted to teach Iris to drive that year was a positive sign. Even crashing her Hillman Minx en route from London into a stationary lorry was happily forgiven. Helping her replace the Hillman with a dark-green 1946 Riley with black wings, which she loved and put into The Sandcastle, brought hope. So did driving her to London in the Riley in February 1956, to take Rene and Hughes out, first to eat at La Coquille, then to the musical Salad Days: ‘a lovely evening’, Iris noted. When in October 1955 Iris left out in her Beaumont Street flat, to which John had a key, her journal account of her affair with Canetti, he was deeply upset. Nor, in 1955–56, were his rivals only men: Audrey Beecham was reported as remarking, perhaps optimistically, that Iris was ‘one of us’ – i.e. lesbian – until ‘that horrid little man’ took her away. In the autumn of 1955 Iris and Brigid Brophy were close; the following spring Iris and Peter Ady holidayed in Burgundy, their second French jaunt. Ady later commented that no other intimate friend was so ‘unintelligible’ to her as Iris.
Soon Iris had also met John’s formidable, strong-willed and beautiful mother Olivia* and his engaging father (Frederick – except to Olivia, to whom uniquely he was ‘Jack') at ‘Nettlepole’, the Bayley house at Pluckley, near Charing, in Kent, with its occasional butler. They were more anxious than Iris’s parents about what was going to come of this relationship in which Iris was six years senior and had – distinctly – an ‘odd past’. John’s mother uttered a strangely expressive phrase by which Iris was much amused, ‘She’s like a little bull!’ This referred to Iris’s resolute stride – ‘une démarche decidée’, Queneau had written – holding her head slightly down, a determined expression on her face. She looked as if she was really going somewhere, knew what she was about.
In Michaelmas term 1954 John had written his first critical book, Romantic Survival, which discriminated between surviving ‘Romanticisms’ and showed Auden and Yeats recolonising the modern urban world and in so doing giving it back to us afresh – a thesis relevant to Iris’s fiction. ‘In our moments of most acute observation’, she wrote praising Surrealism, we see a world that is ‘strange and startling’.32 Her best writing startles us with exactly such strangeness. In 1955 John won a Fellowship at New College and a splendid set of rooms. His prospects were improving.
The writer Brigid Brophy, a new friend, spoke in April 1956 to Iris of her own ‘loss of identity’ during her engagement. Iris was having continual dreams about marriage. In that month The Sandcastle, which had taken a year to write, was finished and at the typist. Hughes was operated on – lung cancer was found, one lung removed and the cavity, as was then customary, filled with ping-pong balls. In the evenings at her parents’ home there was an atmosphere of sadness and doom.
Sense of deep psychological upset. I dreamt last night that I was getting on famously with Wittgenstein … In the dream I was very pleased, & afraid because JB was due to arrive & I feared some clash. Hesitation always between the son and the father. Now that I seem to be choosing the son, I am anxious about the father’s attitude. This comes in with deep anxieties about my own father …
She was choosing the child: ‘How utterly without fear are my relations with JB.’ John’s favourite brother Michael had tied up John’s shoes until he was seven and a half. At nine John and his mother had sailed to the Caribbean to help pre-empt incipient TB. A much loved and indulged delicate youngest son, John early learnt that his wit could charm and flatter; at his wedding his mother would remark, ‘John is such a chatterbox.’ He inherited from his maternal Heanan grandfather a very Irish desire, and ability, to please. At eighteen, in the autumn of 1943, down from Eton and at the end of his first leave from the Grenadier Guards, where fellow-soldiers helped him on with his puttees, he (wearing uniform) took a red-sailed yacht onto the Round Pond at Kensington Gardens, and was mortified when his mother reported that a fellow Grenadier officer, passing by with his girlfriend, had looked much amused. ‘Child-soldiers,’ Iris commented in May 1978; John received his call-up papers before his eighteenth birthday.
In 1945, after active service in Belgium on the ‘second front’ and in Norway, he escaped from London without permission to Target Force* in Germany, to get away from having to work with his senior officer Nigel Nicolson, whom he charged in a farewell letter with ‘Grenadierismus’ – officious pomposity. Nicolson generously pursued neither offence. John’s stammer, worsened by criticism, prevented his giving parade-ground orders as Second Lieutenant, and when stationed at Windsor, where he was in training as a three-inch-mortar officer, his Sergeant-Major gave orders in his stead; it also necessitated a friend (he claimed few as a student) reading out his Newdigate Prize-winning poem ‘Eldorado’ for him in the Sheldonian in 1950. It was no accident that in his accomplished first novel In Another Country (1955), admired by Elizabeth Bowen, whose influence in it is clear, John chose the name ‘Childers’ for his own character.
He signed himself to Iris ‘child’ or ‘your child’. The six-year age-difference excited him. His admiration for Hannibal, he would jest, was partly because the Carthaginians practised child-sacrifice: he did not appreciate competition.* Iris early noted that he was free from guilt. He detested responsibility and still found it most soothing being driven around by his forceful, elegant mother at home in Kent on her charitable visits, sometimes taking patients to mental hospital. His mother ‘paralysed’ him into a benign passivity. The prospect of adult life having to start filled him with gloom, and he felt no urge to accelerate the process. In Iris he had found his ‘ideal co-child’.33 Together they could be babes in the wood, and she liked, always, watching him play. On 7 April 1969: ‘Puss has been trying to dye some daffodils blue – not so far as I can see with any success whatsoever.’
Iris’s July 1956 visit to stay with Elizabeth Bowen at Bowen’s Court, County Cork was critical. She had met Bowen for dinner at the Cecils’ Oxford house at 7 Linton Road, and they had liked each other. Lord David Cecil, at the time a Fellow of New College, who acted as mentor or father-figure to John, though later very fond of Iris, at first wondered if she had a sense of humour. He and his wife Rachel kept a protective eye on John, and on the progress of the affair in general. Bowen was very enthusiastic about Iris and liked watching her develop, liked the idea, Stuart Hampshire recalled, of a woman novelist operating out of Oxford. Indeed Iris influenced the aesthetic daring and escape from realism in Bowen’s final novel Eva Trout in 1969.34 They also had Protestant Irishness in common. Photographs of Iris’s 1956 visit to Bowen in Ireland show the ambience of Bowen’s Court in its final days (the house was sold three years later), Iris watching intently a company that included Lady Ursula Vernon, daughter of ‘Bend Or’, second Duke of Westminster – thought by neighbours to be a model for Hannah in The Unicorn – and Eddie Sackville-West, dilettante writer, Catholic neighbour and heir to Knole. She was much struck when Bowen hymned her late husband Alan Cameron, older than her and less distinguished, Director of Education for Oxfordshire and gloomy First World War veteran: ‘I couldn’t buy a pair of shoes without him,’ Bowen confided. Here was a successful writer who had found marriage essential to her stability. Iris thought hard about this.
None of this stopped Iris’s last-minute anxious fear in late July that she could not marry John because of her commitments to two philosophers who were variously attached to her and whom she did not wish to estrange: John Simopoulos, half-Jewish gay son of the Greek Ambassador to London, whose ‘strong black eyes, down-drawn wry-smiling mouth, quick glances’ she records liking more and more; and David Pears, who in 1998 spoke of Iris’s quality of ‘luminous goodness … when she came into a room, you felt better’, and whose article in Mind on the incongruity of counterparts she put into Under the Net.35 John somehow intuited that quietness was his strongest card. For his part Simopoulos also recalled the importance to Iris of Hans Motz. Had John spoken of the ‘rights’ their understanding gave him, Iris might have fled. Something of this touch-and-go quality is captured by the apparent casualness with which Iris noted, in the margin of her journal, and after having torn out the two and a half previous pages, the words: ‘August 14. Married John.’
8
The wedding, in an Oxford register office, followed by a party at New College, was an extemporised affair. John wore his demob suit and bought an engagement ring at a pawnbrokers; Iris a bright-blue silk dress a friend of Rene’s had made,36 obscured by a mackintosh ('I’ve just been to a wedding where the bride wore a mac,’ reported John’s school-friend John Grigg, then Lord Altrincham before he, on principle, renounced his peerage). Iris hailed that morning in Beaumont Street an ex-St Anne’s student – Antonia Gianetti37 – and conjured, then opened, a bottle of champagne, from which each happily took a swig on the street, Iris explaining that she was about to be married. A confusion about ‘Mrs Bayleys’ dispirited her. Since John’s mother Olivia, his sister-in-law Agnes, and Iris – now Mrs J.O. Bayley – were all there, John’s colleague John Buxton remarked, ‘Everyone here is called Mrs Bayley.’ ‘That brought the full horror of the situation home to me!’ Iris commented gloomily to John. While they were waiting for Rene’s train to arrive – nursing Hughes delayed her – Iris cheered John up by saying, ‘Oh what a relief to have got it all over.’ He fervently agreed: the sense of détente, of ‘no more bloody emotions’ was welcome.
They took his Austin 10 van, nicknamed ‘Alligator’, to Henley, then to the Jersey Arms at Middleton Stoney, finally to France and Italy for three weeks, a time well described in John’s Iris: A Memoir. Over-excitement and the strain of the previous days gave John a spastic colon which doubled him up with pain. He took belladonna to relax the muscles. Iris was sympathetic; John grateful. They stopped at a pub and had another of John’s experimental drinks – gin and peppermint – which helped too. When, weeks later, they got to Borgo San Sepolcro they disputed the meaning of Piero’s great Resurrection. John, following Aldous Huxley,* saw the Christ-figure as a pagan nature-god; Iris was intent on a Christian meaning.
9
6 October 1956. It is somehow typical of the way things are now that the only time I find to write this diary is 5 minutes when JB has gone to get the car so that we can go out & visit the Cecils at Cranborne. I am happy. It is very strange now to read the entries above, et haec meminisse iuvabit. Life has such a quality of simplicity, warmth and joy … Hope that this diary may improve in quality. Now that there will be fewer entries of the type: ‘so & so kissed me and asked me out to dinner’, perhaps I shall be able to record something of importance! … And for such deep consideration of the consequences of my past actions I have plenty of other motives and occasions. I have these, but I don’t do it, or hardly.
Some of Iris’s Oxford friends were gloomy about her marriage, fearing lest she might be throwing herself away. Boon companions wanted her to belong uniquely to them, a figure of infinite charm, potential and mystery, and there were knowing comments that such a marriage could not last. Gentle Noel Martin made one unscheduled visit. One woman admirer would arrive unannounced and invite Iris out on her own. Hal Lidderdale on his motorbike would include Iris in a series of visits to old flames. One tactic if presumptuous admirers attempted to exclude John – most did not – was to ‘poke’ them verbally. He enjoyed the comedy of human vanity and liked watching conceited persons jump. But he worked to accommodate everyone, and no friends were ‘mislaid’ by the transition. Doubtless the move out of Oxford to the country, which Iris urgently desired, helped.
‘Why,’ Iris would later say, ‘should I be cheated of happiness?’ She told Rosemary Cramp that each year she loved John more and more, indeed that all time spent away from him was time wasted. In The Black Prince she would write, ‘Writing should be like getting married. One should not make a move until one cannot believe one’s luck.’ Both Iris and John had been lucky. Philippa Foot saw that she had chosen one of the few men who, though outwardly easy-going and timid, was ‘up to her’, who had extraordinary hidden strengths. John Simopoulos would call it a marriage made in heaven, and saw how John both anchored and liberated her.
John adored Iris’s mysterious way of being present yet distant; her face that expressed so much yet gave away so little. Of course there were alarums and excursions; the ‘contradictions’ he had declared himself willing to live in would make themselves apparent. Iris’s sentence in her journal about ‘simplicity, warmth and joy’ is in a later hand and ink, a truth grasped retrospectively. But they were married. He felt about her ‘silliness’, rather as a country yokel might feel about an urban intellectual, reverencing that intellectual’s formidable superiority, while seeing that it was clearly not achieved without other costs. It was what he most loved in her, what most moved him. The Latin tag – et haec meminisse iuvabit – from Aeneid, I, 203 – implied that painful matters might in future be seen in a new light.* Marriage and novel-writing alike would assist that transmutation.
10
Marriage provided what generals called a ‘base for operations’. Iris did not want a bourgeois or conventional marriage. This arrangement procured her a child-wife in John, who cooked, or assembled, picnic meals – ‘ Wind-in-the-Willows food’, she called it in The Sea, The Sea – and who would modestly prefer to say that he acted more as ‘comic relief to Iris than as a sheet-anchor. His absence of intensity and his common sense alike were tonic, preventing her other deep friendships from becoming too serious, giving her a pretext for keeping them light. Her protean gift for changing with different friends he saw as Shakespearian, while A.N. Wilson, later John’s student, then friend, saw John ascribe to Iris what was essentially his own negative capability, and believed he acted as Prospero, ‘a sort of controller of the demons and spirits who flew in and out of her consciousness’.38
But he, as much as she, had a personality without frontiers, with his own relaxed and humorous availability to everyone, the gift of intuitive sympathy developed ‘to an astonishingly high degree’39 and an ‘Ariel'-like impulsiveness, a brilliant whimsical ability to fly with each and every idea. When in 1956 Isaiah Berlin and David Cecil circulated a petition urging Britain to move into Suez against Egypt’s President Nasser, John signed. When, shortly after, a letter opposing this view appeared in the Guardian, John signed that too. He explained to Cecil, ‘I agreed with both.’ He had a saving irresponsibility about him, of which Iris’s intensity stood in need. He could put things back in proportion, by releasing the independent child in her – Canetti invested in dependent children. New College wits started a game which involved inventing the least probable statements by friends. The phrase for Isaiah Berlin, easily bruised, was ‘I don’t mind what people say.’ For the elegant Stuart Hampshire, ‘My feet are killing me.’ For John, ‘I’m afraid with me it’s a matter of principle.’ Not that he lacked decorum or tact – quite the contrary – but he did not take to those who ‘preen and peacock themselves’ on their own rectitude.40
John was, Iris believed, ‘the greatest literary critic in England since Coleridge’,41 and was soon reviewing novels weekly for the Spectator, working on an influential study of James’s Golden Bowl, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare’s Othello. The Characters of Love: A Study in the Literature of Personality (1960) called for a revival of the idea of ‘character’ as central to literature. John had the gift of total recall for poetry and prose alike, with a good reading knowledge of French and German, and later Russian. He was a living encyclopedia and walking concordance of European history and literature. He knew about cars, engines, hand-guns, battles, birds, fishes, flowers, popular songs and ballads. A gifted listener and an acutely perceptive observer with a retentive memory, he was not as unworldly as he sometimes appeared.
Iris was acquiring a family, something she had felt deprived of. John’s paternal grandfather had written Times third leaders and helped start the magazine Tit-bits in the 1870s; perhaps his own journalistic flair came from that side of the family. His maternal grandfather was a wealthy Irish builder whose family converted to Anglicanism. His mother sometimes played as a result ‘more English than the English’. His eldest brother David, taken POW in Italy, and returning evangelical and Low Church, was an engineer. John’s beloved middle brother Michael, seriously wounded in 1944, was a career soldier. Iris and Michael’s first meeting shortly before the wedding was unpropitious. John got Michael, serving at Windsor Castle, to drive them to the Catherine Wheel pub in Henley. Michael, cross to be using up his petrol ration, was crosser still when John announced that he was disappearing (he had a meeting to discuss Schools), leaving him to buy supper for, then drive back to Oxford, a woman he did not yet know, nor at that first meeting much care for or find attractive. Iris quizzed him through the frosty meal about his army career and his life, getting his ‘résumé’. It was a poor start. If the Bayleys at first were cool to Iris or Bayley père hostile, she never showed she minded. They warmed to her later.
John also provided new social worlds, in which Iris felt more at home than he. On the basis of his parents’ living during the war in Gerrards Cross, just outside London, uniquely happy years,42 he would boast of being ‘suburban’. He and Michael were the first Bayleys to have gone into the Grenadier Guards, which might not have happened in peacetime. Michael’s commanding officer Miles Fitzalan-Howard (from 1975 Duke of Norfolk) and his wife Anne, friends of Michael’s from the 1940s, became friends also of Iris and John. His mother Olivia was proud of having been presented at court; his godmother Eulalia Salisbury-Jones, known as ‘Aunt John’, sister to an equerry, was connected by marriage to Lord Saye and Sele. Iris was much more at ease in a fashionable setting, indeed in all settings, than John. With her he relaxed and flowered. For her, A.N. Wilson later wrote, the ‘weasels and the stoats had been seen off and Toad Hall repossessed; Ithaca … regained and the suitors gone … Iris’s wild earlier selves would find a happy resting-place and turn themselves into fiction.’43
11
Soon she wrote, ‘Love for J. deepening in all sorts of tender and absurd mythologies.’ Their house was ‘Dogers’. Both were cats named ‘Puss’, both were mice, and ‘mouse’ could suffix any other word. She had a Valentine card painted by John in 1980 mounted and framed. Entitled ‘Flags of Old Catland’ – one was ‘The Fighting Mouse’, based on the old Fighting Man of Wessex – it showed the two of them as adjacent countries, separated by a river, joined by a railway, representing two separate selves who shared what Swift called the ‘little languages’ of love. Small wonder that Morgan in A Fairly Honourable Defeat defines happy marriage as ‘like animals together in a hutch’.
Canetti remarked that Iris’s conversation with John about books was ceaseless. Her novels show much indirect influence.44 When he enthused about Henry James’s The Golden Bowl her novels – A Severed Head, An Unofficial Rose – became Jamesian. When he wrote a brilliant study of Tolstoy, his ideas about Tolstoy found their way into The Nice and the Good. When he praised Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground,45 her novels – A Word Child, The Black Prince – took on the form of that fable. John Goode would argue in the New Left Review that they together constituted a neo-liberal criticism,46 both believing against fashion that a high pleasure in literature came from the creation of character; Shakespeare and Tolstoy accomplishing that creation best. The same importance is given to the author’s love of his characters in Iris’s essays as in John’s criticism.
Iris liked to quote an early Auden poem, later excluded from the canon by Auden, which starts, ‘It’s no use raising a shout …’. She would quote the lines, ‘I’ve come a very long way to prove:/ No land, no water and no love';47 their cynicism upset John. Yet it was a legendarily happy marriage. John had army ice-skates from Norway in 1945, which they shared during the bitter winter of 1963, one holding onto the other’s coat-tails, on the frozen Cherwell, on canals, even on Blenheim Lake. Iris tried wearing the left skate, John the right, which never seemed to work particularly well. When in 1981 John for the third time broke his leg – something he had managed in 1958 and again in 1972 – they drove to Banbury hospital through snow, he with his good leg working the accelerator, she with a foot on the clutch. When in 1997 Iris had to be tested for diabetes and supplied some urine, in order both to keep the hospital on their toes and also to get two results for the price of one, John mixed in a little of his own.
It was at times hard to distinguish between them. Which view came from whom? The novelist Angus Wilson and his partner Tony Garrett were in 1972 shown the identical room ‘in an unbelievable state of chaos’ by John, later by Iris, and told by each that it belonged to the other. I was assured by both, on different occasions, that they disliked cats, but that the other was fond of them. Iris was cross when Encounter omitted the footnote to her landmark 1961 essay ‘Against Dryness’, ‘My argument owes much to the ideas of my husband John Bayley.’ Conversely John’s notion that the art-work, ‘like a human being, [has] a life of its own which is ultimately mysterious and irreducible’,48 occurs first in Iris’s 1947 journal.
*The cult of noble souls. See Ian Buruma, Voltaire’s Coconuts (London, 1999), p.68, for a history of the term.
*‘Wine, women, and Wittgenstein’. (Information from Allan Forbes, letter to author.)
*John Bayley, in Iris: A Memoir, states (p.66) that his mother had a moment of hesitation when introduced to Mrs Murdoch and her daughter: ‘Which of them had her son just married?’ This is one of a number of moments of poetic licence: the uncertainty about whether Rene or her daughter had married John was in reality expressed by his aunt ‘Flummie’ (Fiorisse) from Chicago. Not merely had IM visited Olivia in Kent: Christopher Heywood recalled Olivia’s presence at Iris and John’s engagement party at St Antony’s. See IM Newsletter of Japan, no. 2, December 2000.
*Known also as ‘T-force’, it was an Intelligence unit engaged both in headhunting German scientists and in requisitioning items from German factories for use in Britain.
*Possibly because she had a child in John, the desire for children which Iris had expressed in 1945–46 to David Hicks now lapsed. In 1989 (on BBC TV’s Bookmark) she added that by 1956 she was no longer young enough to raise a family. John Bayley in Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch says the topic of their having children was never discussed.
*‘More like a Plutarchian hero,’ thought Huxley in ‘The Best Picture’, in On Art and Artists (London, 1923), pp.197–202.
*‘Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit’. Translated in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Elizabeth Knight, as ‘the day may dawn when this plight will be sweet to remember'; in W.F.Jackson Knight’s translation of The Aeneid (Penguin), as ‘perhaps one day you will enjoy looking back even on what you now endure.’