Living with ‘mad land-ladies’ in ‘gloomy rooms in Oxford … with terrible gas-meters’ was over.1 ‘We have,’ wrote Iris, ‘bought a country house.’2 Fourteen miles out of Oxford, off a winding lane in the straggling village of Steeple Aston, and immediately opposite the old school, is a stout old farmhouse built around 1725, substantially added to a century later. The church bells are audible inside. Cedar Lodge cost £3,500, and John got a college mortgage for a sum equal to that which Iris soon inherited from a wealthy great-uncle.3 The house is fairly long but thin, and, having no damp-proof course on the north side, chilly and damp except in summer. There are two Georgian bays on each floor of the main house, with side windows, and a lunette above at the back. From a lobby you enter a south-facing drawing-room giving on to the big, rambling garden, with its many springs sloping steeply down to a muddy, shallow, stream-fed fish-pond, where in the early days Iris liked to swim, John trailing down in his dressing-gown. There were golden carp that a heron ate. The pond kept drying up – John struggling to keep it open. April 1961: ‘Puss very sweet playing with his pond.’ Iris loved watching John play.
Iris, a city-girl, loved the idea of living in the country; indeed John believed this was one reason she agreed to marry. Unlike other suitors, he was prepared for the rigours of a country existence. While he was waiting anxiously for her to make up her mind, he asked her, ‘Well is there anything that appeals to you about the idea of being married?’ Iris considered for a moment, and said, ‘Well, yes. I rather like to think of you coming home in the evening, and me rushing out to say, “Darling: the badgers have broken into the garden.” July 1992: ‘This little picture of our life together touched him very much. He said (today) that he did not think that he would have been much good at evicting badgers!’ Iris’s natural start as a novelist had been urban. Under the Net and The Flight from the Enchanter were London novels; The Sandcastle, completed in March 1956, before her marriage, suburban. The first novel written in Steeple Aston, and showing something of the imagination and spirit of the place, was The Bell, which many think her best. Before she went to live in the country, Iris might not have done it so convincingly. Though only fourteen miles from Oxford, Steeple Aston was then a real country village inhabited by country people.
It was still a ‘deference culture’, with squire and vicar held in respect. Iris and John, living in the ex-squire’s house, were considered odd birds. The hunt would visit, once killing a fox in a field the Bayleys had bought, much to Iris’s displeasure, which she forcibly expressed. The huntsmen were apologetic. During the thirty years they lived there the village changed greatly, only the Rector Michael Hayter remaining. He did not believe in the Christian story but was persuaded by the faith of Patsie, his tall wife, thinking, ‘I love the woman, and she believes the story implicitly, therefore it is no trouble for me to do so.’ The Tankerville-Chamberlaynes, previous owners of Cedar Lodge as run-down as the house itself, kept horses, and were reputed to sit in full evening-dress on antiquated car-seats to a dinner of tinned pilchards and raw tomatoes. Bayley bohemianism succeeded such broken-down gentility. They inherited a Mr and Mrs Grantham who cleaned and gardened for a while, but the Bayleys did not really want others in the house, and in due course they left.
The house was in a bad way, and comparatively cheap because only a mile or so from the big airfield at Upper Heyford, leased to the USAF and very noisy: about one night a week an immense tanker would zoom in, three hundred feet above the house. Iris and John would turn over and go back to sleep. Iris put such flights into a draft for Mitzi and Charlotte’s funny and sad ‘idyllic’ Surrey cottage in An Accidental Man. There were aerial displays sometimes – one gets into The Bell, though probably that episode derives from a display at Kidlington, Oxford’s airfield, which had fascinated Iris.
To the left of the lobby, beyond a box-room, was an unused ‘library’, painted dark red, the shelves gilt-edged, with an old tapestry in need of re-stitching; log fires burned here during parties. To get to the kitchen quarters you turned sharp right onto a long corridor with a warren of smallish rooms off it on the road-fronting side, past pantries and an old scullery (which had a well that supplied the water-tank by an electric pump that often broke down until, after twenty years, the local health authorities insisted the Bayleys go onto mains water). Here Iris washed up, and John put in a sauna in 1970 for her arthritis; they enjoyed it like children, then forgot about it. Turning left you reached three very dark rooms en suite: an unused dining-room; a small kitchen with a range, in which John had his chair, wrote, and lived half the time, the other half being in bed, where he also read and wrote; beyond that a room with the electric stove. The house was never warm, and only half-lived-in. They knew theoretically where all the rooms were, but never had a sense of quite dominating the house, and had a fantasy that there might be somebody else living in some part of it they had never found.
It was indeed shared by mice, whom they early on watched planning to confiscate Iris’s Mars bar. Some gentlemanly rats, there for generations, commuted, coming home late at night after a busy day, one, in an excited state because the drains had gone wrong, in 1964 startling John on the stairs. Disconcerted, he slept that night with a walking stick by the bed. A rather tempting veal and ham pie which they had been much looking forward to mysteriously disappeared – leading to the conceit that whenever something got unaccountably lost (not infrequent) it had ‘gone to Pieland’ to join the missing pie. Eventually something was done about the rats.
Other rooms could be entered only from outside; one of them, the so-called ‘groom’s bed-chamber’, just opposite the back door, they never really came to grips with. The beautiful loose-boxes stayed full of rubbish of all kinds. A gardener’s earth-closet had an uncanny atmosphere. All this may have contributed to their slightly haunted sense of sharing the house with persons unknown. Initially they lived simply in the kitchen. Around 1965 their builder Mr Palmer – and his ‘dogs’ (i.e. workers), as Iris called them – put in a reinforced steel joist and joined a small dining-room to the hall space, to make one fine big open room. This was the first room you entered, giving directly onto the garden. It made the house even colder. When a boiler was finally put in, it never worked well. John painted the new drawing-room Georgian green, and the upstairs corridor Chinese red, to cheer them up.
They did a minimum of upkeep, both being too busy, and not caring much either. In those days people lived more primitively. The house was fearfully cold in winter. Frequently the roof leaked very badly. A valley-gutter filled up with snow, leaking furiously onto the exact spot where they lay in bed, John once waking up to a steady stream of water pouring onto his face. This was considered a good joke. There was no real heating except for an electric fire which had the habit of blowing the fuse and making the trip-switch jump out, which it did at the slightest opportunity, plunging them into darkness.
In a tumbledown greenhouse, lying sideways on the floor and very green, they found a good Victorian marble bust of Venus, ‘thrown in’ with the house. Here they created ‘Iris’s wallow’, a pond in which she could swim, six feet deep, ten feet long by eight feet wide, lined with plastic inside concrete. John laid immersion heater elements on the bottom, which when switched on sent up a cloud of bubbles through water of uncertain quality. The system was perfectly safe, and the baby green tench and perch Mr Palmer, a keen fisherman, gave them never minded either being heated or swum with. A note with skull and crossbones none the less warned against swimming with the system switched on. When Angus Wilson in 1972 noticed a single-bar electric fire hanging above the wallow from an overhead crossbar by a piece of string, John replied with a look of concerned technical seriousness, ‘The mornings in Oxfordshire can be very cold.’4 John painted the surround with an Etruscan motif from Volterra, and fixed a picturesque ceramic Poseidon above. Iris clambered through smilax (ground-herb) to get into the pool.
Iris planted a liquidambar, John a silver birch, and her letters show an informed knowledge of plants and of gardening.5 After two years, she planted old-fashioned roses – Mme Alfred Carrière, York and Lancaster, Rosa mundi, Zéphirine de Drouhin – near one of a number of springs, close to a concrete path with box growing alongside. They were very proud of them, but they were perhaps planted too closely together, and some succumbed to black spot. ‘Captain John Ingram’ went almost entirely black. This right-hand part of the garden became facetiously known as ‘Iris’s concentration camp for roses’. She also, idiosyncratically, planted giant hogweed seeds, admiring the architectural qualities of the mature plant more than others do. There was no terrace at first, but more than two acres of rough uncut grass. The mowing problem was solved eventually by ‘letting all the grass grow naturally’, while John created ‘rides’ through it, for walking about. John collected three slate mortuary slabs, with neat plug-holes for bodily fluids, which lived outside, one incorporated as a working surface by an unsuspecting later owner into the newly smartened kitchen. Lady Violet Powell, wife of the novelist Anthony, was struck by the number of ageing Volkswagen Beetle cars secreted about the garden, which John reassured her were, ‘of course, a hedge against inflation’.
Upstairs they disposed of their space ‘extravagantly’. They shared a big bedroom with a fine large bed obtained at auction for one pound. Iris moved her study twice, starting at the east end upstairs, and ending at the west, where she faced out onto the south-facing gardens, and enjoyed watching generations of foxes and fox-cubs at play; they made their way into The Philosopher’s Pupil John had a work-room, and there was also a spare bedroom at the end of the corridor. Soon both got glandular fever, Iris not too badly, but both were laid up. Being ill together was a new and interesting experience.
Iris liked to entertain, and found the house magical. John’s brother Michael, despite the Sellotape on window-cracks, agreed. Her old school-friend Margaret Orpen, now Lintott, recalled ancient newspapers all over the floor, everywhere, including upstairs, and an air of total chaos, Iris paying for taxis for students who had struggled out by bus. Katherine Duncan-Jones found the house elegant, and was charmed by John’s habit of chopping up ground elder instead of watercress during ramshackle lunches resembling high teas. Not everyone agreed with Tony Quinton that, while Cedar Lodge was smelly, all the different smells happily cancelled each other out. Fastidious Stuart Hampshire laughed uneasily at the recollection of his fears of the possible consequences of going there to eat: it was ‘beyond bohemianism’, outdoing Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. There were hats everywhere, and all manner of stones (philosopher’s stones, perhaps? They get into novel after novel, demanding to be loved and made sense of). There were liberal collections of dust. Genial John Grigg and his wife Patsy were close friends of the Bayleys, the two Johns having been friends at Eton while Patsy, a fellow-Ulsterwoman, had been taught maths at school by Iris’s first cousin Muriel Chapman. The Bayleys were frequent guests at the Griggs’ houses in Blackheath, at Tamariu in Spain and at Guisachan in Inverness-shire, and all four travelled successfully together, in the USSR (1963), India (1967), the Greek islands and Menton (1973). The Griggs only ever stayed one night at Cedar Lodge.
John did the cooking at dinner parties, reheating college food. Once he attempted an ambitious ‘sauce verte’ for the Powells, A.N. Wilson and Katherine Duncan-Jones, which Wilson recalled fondly as tongue-in-green-slime. A much-heralded ‘surprise-pudding of Iris’s’, to general astonishment and after quite a long build-up, consisted in each guest being awarded, from off a huge tray, a single Mr Kipling cake. Stuart Hampshire felt charmed by the unselfconsciousness of it all. Eric Christiansen, history don and younger colleague at New College, thought Iris and John were all the better hosts for seeming to be guests at their own parties, Iris’s intense interest in others untainted by any malice or gossip of the Bowra school. She had a way of staring down at her glass, listening very carefully to the speaker, possibly indicating also that the glass was empty. She loved the crowded room, the voices, the possibility of multiplying pleasure through many conversations.
1 September 1954. Some sad domestic picture The woman whose life work is being gay & tender in some slightly artificial way. The job of being a woman.
The Sandcastle, finished in January 1956, was published in May of the following year, and dedicated to John, whose stammer may be echoed in the speech defect of the novel’s ‘saint’, the art-master Bledyard. He, like John, is an Old Etonian and, like Hugo in Under the Net also, what Iris termed an ‘anti-art artist’, one who renounces, for puritanical reasons, his own talent. Following the success in 1955 of In Another Country, John ceased for thirty-five years writing novels: Iris’s career was ‘simply too meteoric’. Iris lost her copy of John’s novel, inscribed in his hand ‘Horror-Comic for IM from John Bayley, March 26th 1955’ in (it may be surmised) Bowen’s Court, where she had perhaps brought it for Elizabeth Bowen to read: by a coincidence that belongs within her fictional world, her second cousin Max Wright found and bought it in a Belfast second-hand bookshop forty years later.
The Sandcastle differs from its predecessors, and takes a love-triangle as its theme. The schoolmaster Mor, unhappily married to the bullying Nan, falls in love with the proud and humble Rain Carter, who has come to paint the portrait of the retired headmaster Demoyte. Rain was inspired by Iris’s student Julian Chrysostomides, whose proud humility and excellent French are noted in her journals, and who had told Iris about the sadness, during her Greek childhood, of watching sandcastles crumble in the tideless Mediterranean. Iris was much struck, both by the story, which provides a central unifying image in the novel, and by Julian herself:
She is a magical girl. Her detached integrity & pride … As if she had risen out of the animal world – & yet as a divine being – she is warmth, simplicity, & [has] a kind of small fierce strength like a beast. (All this is exact.)
The novel, though not her strongest, has memorable scenes. The way Nan and Mor can no longer communicate except through appeals to the memory of their deceased dog Liffey is well observed. The school, the garden, Demoyte’s worldly desire to see Mor win his love; Rain’s Riley (in real life Iris’s) falling into the river and having to be rescued; Nan’s lonely final victory. Rain is idealised – she is magical, fey, her ‘gaiety and tenderness’ not quite in the real world of the book – while Nan is seen only from outside, or – in Iris’s word – ‘coerced': The Sacred and Profane Love Machine is a much more disturbing and subversive later novel about a love-triangle. Raymond Mortimer, finding almost all The Sandcastle’s characters more interesting than its hero, noted further that he had no idea why any of Murdoch’s characters behave as they do, but felt her novels retained a dreamlike conviction.6 The novels are indeed surrealistic in the sense of dreamlike; and Nan’s carefully staged victory over Rain at the end shows Iris as concerned, for all her rhetoric about the novel as a ‘house fit for free characters to live in’, with matters deeper than freedom. Her characters are enslaved to one another and also to what she would eloquently term unconscious ‘life-myths’.
The month after the novel appeared Iris wrote to her redoubtable and parsimonious publisher at Chatto & Windus, the alarming, legendary Norah Smallwood, who increasingly ran the firm herself and on old-fashioned lines, ‘No, don’t bother to send cuttings thanks. I’d rather not bother with seeing them. Except for the ones one sees anyway.’ A bad review, she would famously later say, matters less than whether it is raining in Patagonia,7 arguing also that any novelist who is any good knows what is wrong with her work without being told. She was lucky in Smallwood, a thin, domineering, elegant woman with apple-red cheeks and dazzling ice-blue eyes,8 who was clearly both fond and very proud of her, and, perhaps, indulged her. Smallwood loved Iris’s ‘infinite capacity for listening’.9
Iris was fortunate in her American editor, Marshall Best at Viking, in a quite different way. Best always sent her a careful reader’s report on each novel, with praise for what had succeeded and also suggestions for changes, a practice Smallwood would later resent being criticised for defaulting on. ‘We seem,’ Best wrote to Iris in 1961, ‘to do more of this telling you how well your intentions come across than English publishers do.’ While irritated that Viking had changed Rain’s Riley into a Jaguar without telling her (American readers ‘could not be expected to have heard of the former car10), she was at this stage grateful to be published, and still biddable, thinking carefully about Best’s suggestions, sometimes giving ground, allowing cuts, for example, in the Lefty/Jake scene in Under the Net, but willing to stand her ground also. She was, wrote Gwenda David to Best, ‘a firm but delightful woman. A rare soul who knows her own mind.’11 Best thought the figure of the gipsy in The Sandcastle weak. Iris agreed that he was weak, and incongruous, yet, while ceding other cuts and changes, feared that the novel would be further weakened if the gipsy were taken out, since he is Rain’s ‘shadow’, relating Rain to Mor’s daughter Felicity, with whom Rain was also to be identified. She made changes that tried to clarify these points.12
These two letter-runs, from Smallwood and Best, also bring out Iris’s kindness, and conscientious impracticality. She apologises for constantly badgering Smallwood about manuscripts from hopeful author-friends – she read and criticised these first with utmost care – including her mother’s window-cleaner Christopher Hood, whom Chatto indeed successfully published (and whom Iris always encouraged), and also about jobs for friends ('Have you by any chance, now or in prospect, a possible job for an intelligent young woman?’13). ‘The business side is rather beyond me, I’m afraid … I fear I may cause you more and more trouble,’ she apologised, and indeed often lost contracts and records of royalty statements. Her depression at the thought of photographs of herself in a bookshop display suggests her shy absence of ordinary vanity. For one 1959 foreign contract requiring witnessing by a notary, she loses the form ('Please don’t be cross with me. Is it possible to send fresh copies?'), then sends it witnessed only by John, after four months finally getting it witnessed properly. She was only once notably angry, typically on John’s and not her own behalf, when the opening pages of his Tolstoy book were ill-set in 1966.
Iris’s fourth novel, The Bell, was finished in January 1958 and appeared that November. Despite tragic events, and a moving ending, it is also a comedy in which most characters survive and renew themselves. The central character Michael Meade, failed priest, failed schoolmaster and chaste homosexual, has left schoolmastering fourteen years earlier because of a love-affair, unconsummated, with his adolescent pupil Nick Fawley. Nick, probably influenced by an evangelical preacher, exposed Michael to the headmaster. Michael has given up his Palladian house, Imber Court, to become the centre for a lay religious community. Nick’s sister Catherine, with whom he is rumoured to have had a Byronic affair, is to enter the neighbouring Abbey as a postulant when Nick turns up, a tormented drunkard in bad need of Michael’s help. Michael’s clumsy inability to supply this is a factor contributing to Nick’s vengeful suicide.
Catherine and Nick, demonic siblings, contrast with two innocents: Toby Gashe, marking time while waiting to go up to Oxford, and immature, attractive Dora Greenfield – her first name referring to David Copperfield’s child-wife – bullied by her pompous, unhappy historian husband Paul, who is studying medieval documents at the abbey. Dora and Toby recover the legendary bell of the title from the lake (its having been cast by one ‘Belfounder’ links it with Hugo in Under the Net both stand in for the numinous) and substitute it for a new bell which is, like Catherine, about to enter the abbey. Nick now stages a second scandal by compelling Toby to expose Michael’s tenderness for him: like many Murdoch characters, Michael makes the same mistake twice. Catherine, who turns out to be schizophrenic and in love with Michael too, attempts to drown herself. Nick shoots his head off. The unstable world of Imber Court dissolves, swallowed by the abbey. Toby seems unscathed, Dora learns the confidence to leave her husband, to value herself, and to swim – almost in itself a sign of moral competence. Michael, romantic unfortunate that he is, faces up to the indignities of survival.
The philosopher Dorothy Emmet, with whose thinking about the need for a rapprochement between religion and philosophy Iris was in sympathy, discounted George Steiner’s view that The Bell owed something to the ‘Epiphany Philosophers’14 who, led by Richard Braithwaite and Margaret Masterman, explored the possibilities of the religious life in a residential group at 11 Millington Road in Cambridge, but not until the 1960s. Such misattributions are compliments to the novel’s truth to its times – the Bishop of Ely finally permitted Braithwaite to be baptised without believing in God, and regarding the Church only as a useful vehicle for propagating ‘agapeistic morality’. The Bell concerns, in part, such hunger for the spiritual in a post-theistic age.
Some sources are clear. Michael, first of many muddled gay male ‘seekers’, is animated wonderfully from within: Iris’s own search for peace of mind at Mailing from 1946 to 1949 lay behind the troubled quests of her leading characters. Imber Abbey’s guest chapel, at right angles to and separated by an iron grille from the nave, was inspired by Mailing, which, precisely like Imber, combines Anglican Benedictine community and abbey. Mailing’s notable Abbess Dame Magdalene Mary Euan-Smith has a ‘marked affinity’ with Imber’s abbess, who describes Nick as a ‘mauvais sujet’. Three weeks after The Belts publication Iris thought of visiting Mailing but hesitated, perhaps concerned about Mailing susceptibilities.
On 1 May 1954 Iris’s old Somervillian friend the ‘wild’ Lucy Klatschko had been accepted as postulant at Stanbrook Abbey, and later assumed that The Bell drew on Stanbrook. Iris had written to her: ‘May it be all that you hope … Take me with you as much as you can.’15 Two months later she had gone to stay.16
18 July 1954. Dressed in her own clothes, black & white, & a veil & black cloak she looked like someone acting in a play as a nun. In the chapel in the morning I identified her, among several black clad figures with their backs to me, by her black gym shoes. Then she extinguished the candles on the altar. It was like being at a play.
Later we went for a walk, & we lay down in a hayfield. L. said she wanted to roll on the grass, & did so. (It was a secluded field.)
She asked if I had cigarettes. Fortunately I had – & she smoked one in a lonely lane, leaning against a gate & looking warily up & down to see if anyone was coming. It was all gloriously improper & very strange. She said that for the first month she wept continuously, her tears falling onto the altar rails & into the soup. Now, she said, she could not leave. She asked me how she looked, whether she looked like a nun – as there were no mirrors in the Abbey. (No mirrors.) I was moved to see her, sad to leave her.
Lucy, now Sister Marian, would, unlike Catherine, be happy in convent life, but may have suggested the figure of the reluctant or divided postulant. Iris told Honor Tracy, who reported it to Sister Marian, ‘that she was always against your leaving the world, “though not against idea as such” – so like Iris! … What a curious mixture she is of arrogance – for who is she, or anyone, to approve or not? – and warm understanding and sympathy. But she loves you very much and is always asking about you.’
One of the joys of the novel is the way its author, who later admitted to identifying, ‘a little, with the Abbess’, in fact animates all her characters, not least Dora, who discovers the joys of classical music at the end of the book. This new pleasure prefigures Iris’s own move from the emotional response to music she reported to the critic Harold Hobson, to a more comprehensive appreciation. The Bayleys acquired a cherished gramophone, and the growth of the titles in their record collection Iris transcribed on journal-page after page.
Iris claimed as donnée for the novel an involuntary vision of Toby approaching in the headlights of Michael’s Land Rover. In August 1954 she was touring in France with John Simopoulos, future dedicatee of The Bell, a sixteen-year-old Marlborough protégé of Simopoulos and the boy’s elder sister, who was about to go up to St Anne’s. She noted between Laon and Rheims a ‘picture in the headlights’ of the car: Simopoulos running to rescue a drunken, reeling cyclist who promptly gave him a crucifix. Iris denied that Nick and Toby owed anything to ‘real life’, and indeed her happy account of the journey is wholly remote from the Imber melodrama. The echo between the two ‘pictures in the headlights’, the real one with the crucifix, the other imaginary, is still of note. So is the echo between the innocent tenderness, in Iris’s mind, between her and Donald MacKinnon which threatened his marriage, and the intensity of a taboo being broken when Michael merely kisses Nick.
‘Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed,’ comments The Bell’s wise (abbess-like) narrative voice. Indeed the bossy and wrong-headed Mrs Mark – wonderfully ‘caught’ – continues the quarrels with her husband she entered the community to escape. The Abbess calls the Imber Court inmates a ‘kind of sick people, disturbed and hunted by God’,* who can live neither in the world nor out of it. Iris treats them with gentle irony. Her contemporary essay ‘A House of Theory’ champions a Morris-ite Guild Socialism sympathetic to ‘the vision of an ideal community in which work would once again be creative and meaningful and human brotherhood be restored’.17
While the abbess and her nuns are idealised pictures of the beauty of holiness, the bishop, like most of Iris’s churchmen, is worldly. The Bell is her first novel to be fuelled by Platonism, in which Good substitutes for God, and any authentic spiritual tradition, including appreciation of the visual arts – Dora in the National Gallery confronting Gainsborough’s portrait of his two daughters – provides a means of ascent. For Iris all spiritual pilgrimage entails the purification of desire. So the medallions of Imber Court bear the motto ‘Amor Vita Mea’ (Love is my Life), and the ancient bell is inscribed ‘Ego Vox Amoris Sum’ (I am the Voice of Love). Michael knows that his religion and his sexual passion ‘arose deeply from the same source';18 we are not being invited simply to collapse the former into the latter.
When Harold Hobson objected to Iris’s obscurity, she pointed him towards the clarity of the argument underlying The Bell. The second leader of the Imber community, James Tayper-Pace, preaches that the chief requirement of the good life is to ‘live without any image of oneself. This is only half-true, and James indeed lacks self-awareness. Michael’s sermon the following week argues, by contrast, for knowing one’s own moral level, and not attempting too much too fast. The quarrel between James and Michael is echoed in The Sovereignty of Good when Iris asks, ‘What of the command, “Be ye therefore perfect"?’ This is James’s line. To it she opposes Michael’s ‘Would it not be more sensible to say “Be ye therefore slightly improved"?’ She argues that the ‘idea of perfection’ can help mediate between these two positions. The Abbess in The Bell earlier proposed exactly such a mediation: ‘Our duty … is not necessarily to seek the highest regardless of the realities of our spiritual life as it in fact is, but to seek that place, that task, those people, which will make our spiritual life … grow and flourish.’
The Bell, Iris would say, was a ‘lucky’ novel. Here everything had come together and worked. Sister Marian worried to Iris that the ‘sex imbroglios’ of her novels reduced the characters, made them unreal and would be bad for people – meaning the nuns whom she felt needed protection. Iris, annoyed, said that her ‘more discerning readers would understand’, and created a character called Marian in The Unicorn who suffers from too much innocence. The Bell was welcomed and applauded. To the New Statesman it marked Iris as ‘the foremost novelist of her generation'; to The Times, it was a ‘joy … running over with purpose and intelligence'; to Frank Kermode in the Spectator it showed a ‘steady gain in power’ in a writer possessing ‘altogether exceptional intelligence and vitality'; while the TLS praised in it the rare conjunction of a ‘brilliant imagination and a passionate concern for conveying … moral concepts’.19 It brought her commercial success: Chatto printed 30,000 hardback copies within ten weeks.
It also brought fame. Iris judged the prestigious Prix Formentor (for two years running, first in Majorca, then Corfu), with its strongly leftist, anti-fascist and pro-third-world undercurrent, with the jury having the tough task of subjecting the literary output of each country to multi-national scrutiny. Yale University invited her for one month in the autumn of 1959, where she gave a talk on ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’, later published as an article. Lord Snowdon photographed her in college looking as if John had just given her a pudding-basin haircut. John himself was so disturbed and astonished by the imaginative intensity his outwardly placid wife had revealed in The Bell that he could not at first read its immediate successors, but pretended to have done so.
The Bayleys often did not bother to answer the telephone (which, from the kitchen with the door closed, was inaudible), and gave their mothers and close friends Canetti’s telephone-code to filter out calls from them – ‘We live entre deux mères,’ they would joke. Iris was soon painstakingly answering a dozen fan letters, by hand, every day; in less than a week in 1964 there were seventy.20 Given how sympathetically and adventurously she had treated homosexuality, she surely now had a gay following, as well as one interested in religious matters; the trials of Peter Wildeblood, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and Michael Pitt-Rivers rendered homosexuality newsworthy, as did Wildeblood’s brave book Against the Law (1955). Every novel she wrote after The Bell has at least one homosexual character. She had an unusual tendency to imagine that even some of her happily married men-friends must be secretly bisexual.
Journalists got at her, as she wrote to Vera Crane in 1957:
Press: Well, Miss M, do you intend to do so-and-so, such-and-such, and so-and-so?
Oneself: I don’t really know – maybe, but I haven’t made any plans at all …
Press report: Miss M told us that she intends to do so-and-so, such-and-such, and so-and-so.21
A journalistic scandal, as in Dostoevsky’s The Devils, had helped to finish off the lay community in The Bell; and there was no end, as she later put it, to the spite of journalists. Fame did not alter her; she hated always the idea of being taken for ‘a touchy grandee’.22 Most writers are rightly made happy by success. A few go insane with vanity. Iris differed. So far from her head being turned, she was ‘nauseated by the stream of imbecile praise for The Bell’. Three aspects of this response invite comment. Firstly, the great success of The Bell dispirited her. Secondly, she badly wanted to improve as a writer. Lastly, she wanted to be attacked ‘in the right way’. And she cast about for the right person to attack her.
Iris’s father Hughes had retired from his ‘personal grade’23 of Assistant Registrar General working at Somerset House on census returns six years before. He appeared to be carrying out private research for ‘devious’ Sir George North, as some colleagues thought him, but no one quite understood what he did.24 Both Hughes and Irene smoked very heavily – not unusual in those days. Irene probably smoked ordinary Players, the standard cigarette for the time, while Hughes was fond of the delightfully named Sweet Afton (in fact also made by Players), with a name out of a Robert Burns poem ('Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes …'). Just before Christmas 1956 they learnt that he had cancer in his remaining lung.
Rene told me, in my bedroom, late one night. I did not see how she cd manage. She wanted Doodle not to know. After some terrible days she has adjusted herself and now is bravely cheerful with him … a terrible sense of nightmare hangs over the time.
At first cheerful and not in great discomfort, Hughes soon weakened. Visits home became ‘very sad’, and Rene bravely settled into a routine of cheerful care. Hughes sold John and Iris his first editions as an ‘investment’, suddenly wanting them away, but unable to bear parting with them on the Charing Cross Road at low prices. ‘Sadness hangs over this time,’ wrote Iris. By January 1958 he was much iller, and despondent. One bore it, Iris noted, by a ‘curious averting of attention, almost withdrawal of sympathy … One lives deliberately at a trivial moment to moment level. Anything else would be too terrible.’ Rene expected every morning when she came in to find him dead – and then would see the bed clothes moving and know he was still alive.
Except for a curious delusion about a cablegram to come from New York about a horse running in a race, Hughes was lucid and even joking till the last. He died on the afternoon of Saturday, 1 March 1958, aged sixty-seven. Rene was talking to him, when suddenly he threw himself back across the bed, gasping, became unconscious, and died very quickly. After receiving a police message at Steeple Aston, Iris and John drove down at once through the fog, arriving around eleven. It was ‘a terrible arrival. Rene … frantic with grief.’ Iris went up at once and saw him, seeming ‘so small & wasted on the bed’. Among the six mourners at the funeral, near Syon House, the following Wednesday, were no ex-colleagues.25
He was so gentle, so quiet, so kind – so without pretensions & ambitions – few knew him or knew how good he was. He taught me so much.
Three weeks later John broke his leg – like Austen Gibson Gray in An Accidental Man he was subject to mishap – the first of three times. Trying to start the car with the starting handle when it was in gear, it jumped forward, pinning him against the garage wall. He called to Iris, upstairs, ‘Darling, come quickly, come quickly.’ When she got there he told her to put the car into neutral, and it moved back. She drove him to the Radcliffe hospital. It took months for his leg to recover, during which Iris had a happy unexpected meeting with her erstwhile lover Michael Oakeshott, to whom she gave, at his request, advice about the progress of an unhappy affair.
That summer John and Iris took Rene to Dublin to house-hunt, staying at the Shelbourne Hotel:
As we drove round Dun Laoghaire & Sandy Cove in a hired car, so many memories. Saw a lovely house at Killiney, with a view of the bay between palms & eucalyptus trees. But R. thought it might be too lonely, & the hill too steep. Everyone so kindly in Ireland, & Dublin so slow & eighteenth century.
Back at Steeple Aston, Iris was writing throughout 1958 a novel entitled ‘Jerusalem’, about an old man, which ends with a Dublin episode; four of her next five novels have an Irish connexion. The garden absorbed and delighted her and she measured how happy and lucky she was. By November, and publication of The Bell, her mood swung. On John’s advice she completed ‘Jerusalem’, but thought it – rightly – a work ‘without a heart’. This was the ‘Trades Union’ novel she would refer to in interviews. The Utopian Jerusalem Socialists of the title believe in Guild Socialism of the kind she had advocated in ‘A House of Theory’, which was republished in Partisan Review. But their theories about taxation, community and equality do not engage with the fog-bound reverie of the narrator, perhaps the most solipsistic of all her first-person narrators. He is a world-famous and sexually potent eighty-year-old architect who designed the Utopian ‘Shakespeare House’, which memorably burns down and is, at the end, to be rebuilt by a Jerusalemite Labour government. The other characters remain, like the narrator’s complex love-life, too remote to engage the reader. Iris tied the manuscript up with string early in February 1959, writing on it: ‘Abandoned. Not on any account for publication ever.’ ‘Few regrets now, because I feel quite clear about it,’ she wrote in her journal. She recycled a number of the names – Lynch-Gibbon, Georgie Hands, and so on – giving them to quite different characters in A Severed Head.
As well as feeling nauseated by praise of The Bell, Iris was generally fed up with her work, and ‘sunk in a sort of mush of insincerity and imprecise thinking & facile success … If I could only see how to get, in my writing, out of the second class and into the first.’
Her hopes of Yorick Smythies, who had been helpful during earlier difficulties, were disappointed. He displayed his absolute and exhilarating seriousness, producing a typescript concerning ‘headings’, the ‘forms’ of speech which divide us from what is supposed to be being described: ‘How very like Hugo Yorick remains. I am deeply impressed by the way he stays with the same problems.’ John tried drawing a picture of her ‘spiritual crisis’, making it look ‘just like a friendly old crocodile’. This cheered her up, but she also wanted ‘the reality of being profoundly attacked’. Brigid Brophy had written ‘rejecting’ her work, Iris noted, but Iris felt that Brophy’s motives were ‘not pure enough … also she distinguishes between me and my work, and the person who is to help me must not do that’. Harshness only helped, she reflected, when accompanied by love, or at least affectionate respect of some sort. Or when it came from something impersonal, such as a religious institution: ‘Very few people can give one in a way that invigorates a sense of one’s second-rateness.’ She needed ‘a foothold to get into a completely different region. A new discipline.’ She could not stand ‘this smell of success’.
She considered making a religious retreat. ‘Religion gives one a machinery here,’ even though she disbelieved in God. ‘At Stanbrook? Not Mailing.’ She went to neither. It was infernally cold. They had the east end of the house redecorated. John was in bed with a bad ear. Snowdrops and aconites were in flower, and she noted the beauty of the snowdrops she placed in John’s room ‘with the pale clear green mark at the edge of the bell’. Having abandoned the Jerusalem novel she was attempting a poem-series which she had typed up, writing ‘To those for whom these poems were written, they are now dedicated’ on the front page. One, above which she wrote the initials of both Frank Thompson and Franz Steiner, ends: ‘Precious dead,/I cannot follow there where you go on/Nor love you quite so finely as I did once. My love lacks in detail now. Forgive/To grieve for little matters is to live.’ Although she had mysteriously appeared in a Spectator leader in 1954 linked to two ‘Movement’ poets where, presumably, a token woman was required,* she accurately noted that hers was ‘not really bad poetry but mediocre. I wish I could write poetry.’ Her odd frame of mind persisted; she felt an ‘unutterable longing for what is not’. Though there were ready tears she diagnosed her mood as not altogether depression. Sometimes it felt
more like being utterly possessed by some sort of blind love, love of everything, the birds, the trees, the logs in the fire, the pieces of coke. And such a feeling can’t help being somehow sad. Yet at the same time quite stuck in work. Extraordinary inward agitation with no apparent cause. At a time like this I see and know that all art is ultimately love but this knowledge lies dark in me and I have not the courage and the goodness required to do anything with it …
In fact her diagnosis that ‘being stuck in fiction-writing’ underlay her depression sounds exact. She would later say that she would ‘hate to be alive and not writing a novel’,26 and when asked how long she paused between completing one fiction and starting to think about the next, reply, ‘About half an hour.’27 She now, most unusually, found herself between novels, and resembled an addict suffering withdrawal symptoms. She wrote to Canetti, asking him to help her find fresh possibilities of self-knowledge. Although they seldom met now, she felt the need to go back and ‘try again to understand and feel the impact of things which I find only in him’. She sought the ‘lively grasp of a standard … the bite of truth’.
Last Thursday I saw EC in London, day of dreadful fog (memories of our original fog). We talked of my work and this was very helpful. C. said the stuff I have written so far is weak and sentimental. I avoid unpleasant things, do not ‘let rip’ enough. I should let things come out from much deeper within me. Let the cutting edge of my mind come out in my fiction. At present, I am afraid of offending and hurting people. (True: this is the basis of much that is wrong in my life too.) Nothing I write draws any blood. C’s talk was invigorating. I feel unutterably tired and limp at present, but things will live again.
Soon she had the idea for a new novel, which would deal with a topic that fascinated and alarmed her in equal measure: incest. ‘Too upsetting & dangerous? The theme of loving one’s sibling, always near to my heart – but to attack it directly-?’ She started reading up on it. By Easter she was working well. On 29 March, Rene’s birthday, the house at 4 Eastbourne Road in which Iris had spent her childhood was sold. John and Iris, since Rene could not bear it, saw the furniture out for her. Iris rescued an old teak garden-bench Rene had nearly sold to the neighbours. She installed it at Cedar Lodge instead.
A 1955 poem about the pain of Iris’s frozen friendship with Philippa and Michael Foot – ‘Musical Evening for Three’ – lamented that ‘the structure of the past remains intact’. On 28 April 1959 came ‘almost incredible news': Pip and Michael were parting. The past was frozen no longer.
I had thought of them as so indissolubly connected & somehow of that part of my history concerning them as so completely ended. (How immediately one falls into egoism.) I feel extremely disturbed. M. has apparently fallen in love with his secretary in London … & is going to marry her … An extraordinary sense of time rolling backward. And honestly a certain sense of relief at the removal of the barrier between P. and me which M. constituted. I wrote at once to P. saying I sent my old love – & she replied quickly saying this meant a lot. How hard it is to take in … Such a strange sensation … of seeing P. as it were alone.
Over the next three weeks Iris thought a lot about Philippa, and at once a flurry of letters began. Somehow she ‘trusted P’s mind, & knew myself safe in it, even when I thought I wd not ever speak to her frankly again’. Iris sent ‘all [my] old love … a long time in store but … scarcely diminished … Losing you, & losing you in that way, was one of the worst things that ever happened to me … I have thought of you so much in these years & dreamed painfully of you too.’ In two remarkable letters Philippa
could not think of seeing me without being frank, that to ‘find’ me again meant very much to her … She spoke here very directly to my heart. I replied that I had not hoped to speak frankly to her again, and I was filled with joy at the prospect. 14 years since I talked openly with P. A strange sense here of reconquering my past. That old desire for ‘justification’. Yet not just that, for the main thing is joy at the prospect of discovering and loving? again … My heart founders with concern.
Before they met Iris had anxious dreams. They drank Chianti and, unable to eat lunch, discussed recent events. ‘If you want to leave someone, the need to do it ruthlessly, leaving no place for discussion etc.’, Iris reflected. They reminisced about Seaforth, and wept. Philippa too had grieved over losing Iris and had dreamt persistently of seeking her in vain. Iris was torn with love for her ‘& a terrible inability to speak & manage’. It was, for Iris, ‘strange & overwhelming to recover a whole area of one’s being one thought was lost’.
How strong the old structure is of my love for her. In some way, the parting of those two reopens my own past. It is as if they, together, closed a door for me, ended a certain piece of my history, & closed the book. Now that they are parting that force is no longer exerted.
In October she wrote to Philippa: ‘I’m very glad the future contains you. It makes a lot of difference to that tract.’
A quasi-mythical view of Iris’s working methods has the new novel gestating for between nine months and a year, a time she would describe as tormented, with a terrifying, dizzy-making sense of myriad possibilities and of floating unrelated fragments, after whose resolution she would announce triumphantly to John, ‘I’ve finished it!’ At this point she had blocked out an elaborate scene-by-scene plan detailing each successive conversation and piece of action. All that then remained was the pleasurable part, the mere writing of the novel itself, always longhand with her Mont Blanc fountain pen. John read the novels only once they reached galley form.
Iris’s manuscripts show how carefully she planned each fiction.28 Loose-leaf pages may include elaborate background research, such as notes for young Penn’s Australian background in An Unofficial Rose, which built her confidence, though little of this ‘local colour’ appears in the published book. In the dozen or so holograph notebooks that comprised the first draft she would write only on the right-hand page, leaving the left free for later head-girl-like observations, such as ‘Curtail this rot!’ when a conversation had gone on too long; ‘Make more Kafka-esque’ of Book 2, Chapter 10 of A Fairly Honourable Defeat, or, with engagingly painstaking dottiness, considering that that novel is more a romance than a piece of realism, ‘Check visibility of Milky Way in Hammersmith’ for Bruno’s Dream (results of careful research: ‘Stars visible in Hammersmith, not Milky Way'). ‘Shax’ (Shakespeare) is often invoked. She discovered the anonymous choric part-voices in An Accidental Man experimentally, halfway through the second draft. Sometimes she instinctively chose incidents or sense-details, only later worrying about how to motivate and render them plausible. When she is dissatisfied with a passage, she scores it through diagonally and rewrites it on the following pages. Finally she would write out, in a hand clear enough for her typist, a loose-leaf second draft, which might differ in substance as well as in detail from the first.29 A remark of John’s scribbled in the margin of ‘Jerusalem’ makes clear that she did (if rarely) solicit his help; he also contributed a paragraph on Dora to The Bell.30
Iris lent currency to the idea that she devised her novels on a deterministic plan, ruthlessly executed. She would accordingly lament lacking the courage at a late stage to take out the central characters and leave only peripheral ones, as if this could open up the book and liberate its characters from her puppet-mastering. In fact she left herself considerable freedom of manoeuvre throughout. She decided halfway through a late draft of A Word Child to ‘kill off’ the Impiatts’ twin children, who until then had playfully challenged Hilary Burde to guess the humorous or sinister contents of a box they presented to him on each of his visits. The Impiatts metamorphosed into a ‘childless couple full of good works’. There were other false starts. The Lynch-Gibbon family first appear in ‘Jerusalem’, abandoned in February 1959. From June she put new Lynch-Gibbons into what became A Severed Head, with most relationships as we now know them, but set in the west of Ireland in what was later to become the landscape of The Unicorn, with peat fires, a bog that periodically floods, and three country houses containing Anglo-Irish neighbours who ‘uphold, in a hostile country, their religion and their class’. Palmer is Martin’s partner in the wine trade, which has a Dublin office. Georgie is Martin’s secretary, a Catholic peasant girl from County Mayo whom he pleasurably beats. Her disreputable land-agent brother Theo blackmails Martin. Alexander ‘Fielding’, in love with Antonia, is not yet Martin’s elder brother. There are Catholic and Protestant priests, a debutante called the Hon. Sybil Aston-Greene, and Honor Klein is an anthropological expert on ‘taboo'; Franz’s book of that name was posthumously published in 1956. Franz’s theme, later picked up by Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger, is the relation between what is forbidden and what is sacred. Many characters spend their weekends in the west of Ireland, natural home of the primitive forces Honor studies.
On her return from Yale at Christmas 1959, Iris abandoned this as a false start, writing on it ‘Never for Publication’. Discarded characters were recycled: Theo recurs as Fivey in The Nice and the Good; the biddable maid Kathleen as Adelaide in Bruno’s Dream and as Patsie in The Time of the Angels. During 1960 she compressed the action within a narrow segment of London – Knightsbridge, Chelsea – with excursions only to Oxfordshire and Cambridge, and told the story dramatically, so that the reader and fall-guy narrator Martin Lynch-Gibbon alike suffer the same appalling narrative surprises together. A Severed Head is the best of her intensely stylised Restoration comedies of manners. It took a familiar contemporary theme – the mandarin educated by passion – and made of it something different from Thomas Mann’s high aesthetic drama in Death in Venice or the nihilistic farce of Nabokov’s Lolita. Martin Lynch-Gibbon is an intelligent, priggish, forty-one-year-old wine merchant with a frustrated interest in military history which he reads and, a little, writes. John furnished relevant details, and his old school-friend the historian Michael Jaffé was cited by some as one model for Martin, who describes his state of mind at the beginning as one of ‘degenerate innocence’. He has stayed in business to support his fashionable, extravagant wife Antonia. Acquaintances sometimes mistake her for his mother. They occupy separate bedrooms.
Martin’s younger mistress Georgie Hands now lectures in economics at the LSE, and loves him with so intelligent a restraint that with her he can put himself greatly at ease. Antonia and Georgie are opposites, Antonia a bossy, ageing, predatory society beauty, self-dramatising, frivolous, fascinated by powerful men – which Martin, to her, is not – using her sexual will to extend her territory. Just as Antonia takes Martin for granted, so Martin does the same with Georgie, who has had an abortion at his request and whose desire to see New York he has out of cowardice frustrated. Antonia is inside ‘society’, Georgie ‘outside’. Martin plays father (or master) to Georgie, son (or slave) to Antonia.
This analysis of human relations in power-terms reflects what Iris owed to Canetti and Simone Weil alike, those oddly similar thinkers.* Martin fears meeting his sister Rosemary who, divorced herself, has a sharp appetite for news of other failed marriages and may feign a distress that secretly hides a ‘glow of excitement and pleasure’ analogous to that ‘felt at the death of acquaintance’: this is pure Canetti (as is Martin’s avowal of atheism as he ‘cannot imagine an omnipotent sentient being sufficiently cruel to create the world we inhabit’,31 a view Iris on occasion echoed). The novel abounds in emotional realpolitik, which also exemplifies Iris’s view of Weil: ‘Until we become good we are at the mercy of mechanical forces … All beings tend to use all the power at their disposal.’ Honor, the book’s interpreter of totem and taboo, who is indeed only half-human, connects spirit not with love, but with power. The book opposes the polite and the primitive. Power drives the plot as much as love.
Iris feared the novel might be ‘just a quite private thing which others will regard with surprise or dislike’.32 Yorick Smythies thought it ‘foul'; at some point, too, she quarrelled with Fraenkel about her fiction. It is hard now to recall that her erotic imbroglios and willingness to confront ‘incest’ were then found pioneering, hence provocative. John Updike has recorded the excitement with which A Severed Head was passed around in the early sixties ‘as a species of news: it revealed that anyone could love anybody, and frequently did’.33 Reviews were mixed. The Spectator thought it her most masterful so far, consigning the earlier novels to juvenilia. Dan Jacobson in the New Statesman wrote most perceptively, finding its virtuosity less satisfying than that of The Bell, but recognising that Honor is to this novel what the Abbey was to the former, and what Hugo and Fox were to Under the Net and The Flight from the Enchanter respectively: central images of spiritual power. He admired Iris’s simple moral intensity, pointed out that ‘simplicity is what only the greatest writers achieve’, and singled out for attention the sculptor Alexander’s exchange with Martin, who speaks first:
‘I envy you,’ I said. ‘You have a technique for discovering more about what is real.’
‘So have you,’ said Alexander. ‘It is called morality.’
In the Observer Philip Toynbee, deeply uneasy about Iris’s talent – he had priggishly found the pub-crawl in Under the Net ‘deplorable’ – found A Severed Head both immensely readable and preposterous. He wholly missed that the book is, as others saw, ‘almost unbearably funny’.34 Iris’s worst novels are indeed sentimental melodramas written in high diction. But to miss the comedy in the best is to miss not a detail, but their heart. Small wonder that Toynbee was reminded of the worst of Charles Morgan’s self-indulgent affectation, and chivalrously hoped her later novels might improve. The TLS found all the characters except Georgie dislikeable, noting, as did Rebecca West later, that this ‘brilliantly enjoyable’ book resembled Congreve’s comedy The Way of the World, but ended with the ‘familiar feeling’ after reading Murdoch that there is some ‘central, large, and simple meaning which one has, somehow, just missed’. And Barbara Everett in the Critical Quarterly, sympathetic to Iris’s contention that reality could be precisely apprehended by giving up selfish illusion, thought the novels so far progressively illuminated this, while wondering whether this highly stylised novel had not so fully achieved her purposes that it was hard to see ‘how she could effect any further, new crystallisation’. A prophecy other critics would soon endorse.35
* Recalling Karl Barth’s description of the Jews as ‘Krank an Gott.
* Spectator, 1 October 1954. The poets were Donald Davie and Thom Gunn; three novelists were K. Amis, IM and John Wain. See Blake Morrison, The Movement (Oxford, 1980) pp. 1–2.
* As Susan Sontag pointed out in ‘Mind as Passion', New York Review of Books, 25 September 1980.