Over a family Christmas in 1962 at Nettlepole in Kent, after John’s mother had cheerfully asked, ‘What’s all this about Felix Meecham [in An Unofficial Rose] and Michael?’ Iris, at once white and silent with anger, was later discovered upstairs in her room, upset. Drawing from life was taboo. Although she argued that people were generally far odder than they admitted to their psychotherapists, and that the novelist’s task was to ‘reveal the secret’ of this oddness, these were ‘imaginary secrets’, not real ones. Iris had written to Michael Bayley, then stationed in Singapore, while composing An Unofficial Rose, seeking advice over the question of how and when Felix might, as an Intelligence Officer in the Far East, have learnt French; Michael replied that he would have had prior knowledge of French to be so employed in the first place. She had similarly enlisted help from her St Anne’s colleague the historian Marjorie Reeves over medieval bells for The Bell, researched wine merchants with Rudi Nassauer’s help for A Severed Head, and would request help about woodcuts and engraving from Reynolds Stone for The Italian Girl1 and about the Treasury (where he was Under-Secretary from 1967) and (later) Jewishness from Leo Pliatzky for A Fairly Honourable Defeat ‘Don’t forget yr homewk. I want a) brief description of desk & in-tray covering coloured folders &tc b) one or two topics, names of committees – these cd be fictitious as long as plausible.’2 ‘I am practically a Jew myself,’ she wrote to him enthusiastically in 1977.
Both Michael Bayley and Felix Meecham, however, were solitary bachelor career soldiers – Michael rising to be Brigadier. The physical description of Felix reminded one family friend of Michael, who disliked Felix as a ‘stuffed shirt’. Others later thought the very different Polish ‘Count’ in Nuns and Soldiers recalled Michael. Felix and the Count differ widely, by nationality and temperament, which might suggest that, where Iris borrowed, it was ‘situational logic’ that she took, not ‘character’ as such. Asa Briggs believed that while Iris never copied people, reshaping life into art instead, she nevertheless never dreamt people up entirely either. The novelist, she wrote, is one who stores up and treasures particulars. Like many novelists, she might put ‘bits’ of friends’ lives or stories to work. Humphrey’s career in An Unofficial Rose is based on that of Sir Owen O’Malley,3 a slight acquaintance of the Bayleys who lived in Oxford from December 1958 with his wife the popular novelist Ann Bridge;4 like Humphrey, he had been ‘drummed out of the diplomatic’ for an indiscretion. Nor was Iris’s own life immune to plunder. Behind both Honor Klein’s unexpected return to marry Martin at the end of A Severed Head, and also Lisa’s equally surprising return – through a window – to marry Danby towards the end of Bruno’s Dream, lay that precipitate 1956 journal comment: ‘August 14. Married John.’ Julius and Tallis’s struggle for Morgan’s soul in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, moreover, mirrors Canetti and John’s two-year struggle for hers.
Dogs were fair game.* So were ‘details’, which she collected, as Eric Christiansen, John’s colleague at New College, recalled:
When told that A had thrown her drink at? and had then bitten C in the leg, she asked
– Now … at what point exactly did she say those words ‘I have been wanting to do this for a very long time?’ After the wine was thrown? Or it wouldn’t have been a surprise, and she might have missed. Would she not have said ‘do that’, rather than ‘this’, if the action were completed?
– Possibly. But it was after. I know it wasn’t during.
– Look here, this is not by any chance fiction is it?
But Iris stoutly maintained that she never drew her characters from life, a practice she held morally abhorrent – ‘bad form’ – which would inhibit her. When friends saw themselves in her books, she said, this was generally ‘vanity’ on their part.5
Since Iris did acknowledge Hugo in Under the Net as a portrait of Yorick Smythies, this is not the whole story. The architectural critic Stephen Gardiner, a friend from 1965, believed she made another exception to her rule when he inspired Danby in Bruno’s Dream, whom she told him was her ‘one happy character’. When Philippa Foot, dedicatee of The Red and the Green, identified the opposition therein between hidebound Andrew and the wilder Pat as reflecting a contrast between her ex-husband Michael and Frank Thompson, Iris replied (though the real Frank was unlike Pat Dumay) that no one else understood either her, or her books, better than Philippa. She also put an unmistakable portrait of her and Philippa’s friendship into The Nice and the Good. Perhaps the sin against the Holy Ghost was to use fiction – like Dostoevsky brutally parodying Turgenev as Karmazinov in The Devils – for purposes of hatred or revenge. ‘To touch another person’s past,’ a journal entry proposes, of a novelist-friend who had written a roman-à-clef, ‘is sacrilege … The attempt to circumscribe another person in this way inspires hatred.’ Hers, by contrast, were ‘characters of love’.
She did have cause for concern. No fewer than four people – Lord David Cecil, BMB, J.B. Priestley and Elizabeth Bowen – were separately offended by the old man in Bruno’s Dream, the differences of sex and condition between them suggesting that Iris had ‘universalised’ the condition of old age quite successfully. Of the four, BMB was ‘the most sporting’. Resemblances between the plot of The Sacred and Profane Love Machine and her own life offended Rebecca West, whom Iris scarcely knew. West, after a coldness at one or two parties for which Iris could not account, wrote saying that, from what she had recently learnt of Iris, she now doubted whether Iris had copied West’s life. Iris’s reply, hoping to be acquitted from ‘any such rotten act’6 – one she called unkind and disgraceful – secured a friendly conclusion to the contretemps. (Among the novelists in whose work West ‘recognised’ her life were, unbeknownst to Iris, Wyndham Lewis, Hugh Walpole, Storm Jameson, Muriel Spark, H.G. Wells, and one Phyllis Paul.7) More seriously, her already fragile friendship with Donald MacKinnon was dealt a death-blow when he believed he had been treated satirically as Barnabas Drumm in The Red and the Green, a characterisation in which she ‘nails’ the mixture of sexuality, religion and neurotic guilt which was arguably his least helpful legacy. Iris, reporting herself ‘sickened’ and ‘stunned’, denied the imputation with fury and distress:
I had not even thought of Donald in connection with Barney, except for there being one Tenebrae quotation which? used which D used too … if anything Barney is a picture of myself. How long these threads of responsibility stretch. Oh God … But I am so sorry for D & sorry he has been hurt, & of course human frailty … lies behind the whole extraordinary tangle.
Others ‘recognised’ and were offended by this characterisation. Barney is one of Iris’s gentle Dostoevskian holy fools as well as a whiskey-drenched self-deceiving seeker and failed priest; unhappily married, he acts as servile dog to the vamp-like Millie, whom he adores but will never gain. That Barney’s wife Kathleen is one of her ‘saintly’ characters, while in real life Lois MacKinnon and Iris were not friends, does not rule out the uncomfortable possibility that she had drawn an unconscious portrait – leading to an ‘open season’ for identifications. (Iris was not forgiven; she never learned that in 1992, two years before his death, MacKinnon denounced her to the effect that ‘there was real evil there’ at a semi-formal dinner to celebrate London University’s award to him of an honorary doctorate. Nor did the row of 1965 prevent her in 1983 creating Rozanov in The Philosopher’s Pupil, who reminded others8 of the magisterial and menacing aspects of MacKinnon.)
When Victoria Glendinning asked Iris whether Hannah in The Unicorn was based on Lady Ursula Vernon, Iris fiercely replied that of course she was not. People refused to believe, she added, in the independent powers of imagination. To attest that power, she cited the way the Drumm marriage was said (by others) to be based on Elizabeth Bowen’s to Alan Cameron. But the fictional marriage was celibate. How, Iris asked, could she, who never witnessed Bowen’s marriage, possibly have made any assumption about it? (Quite recently a letter came to light showing that Bowen’s marriage was indeed celibate. Iris retained a child’s prescient ability to access her own unconscious intuition, together with an adult’s willingness to deny it.9)
To warn the American biographer Jeffrey Meyers off trying to trace them back to life, Iris wrote disingenuously that all her characters were aspects of herself, ‘which I suppose is rather boring’. In fact she hoped to absent herself from her novels too. To Harold Hobson she said in 1962 that of her novels she liked The Right from the Enchanter and A Severed Head best because they were ‘myths more organically connected with myself. They are full of me. They are for that reason less good.’10 Her essays warn against the lesser value of fictions presenting ‘puppets in the exteriorisation of some closely locked psychological conflict’ in the author’s mind.11 Art is not the expression of personality, it is a question rather of ‘the continual expelling of oneself from the matter in hand’, and Romantic writers externalising ‘a personal conflict in a tightly conceived self-contained myth’ are producing inferior art.12 Yet her identifying her characters as ‘imaginary siblings’ does suggest a relationship with the author, a quasi-genetic one. Her characters were company to her, like family; the novel finished, it was as if they had gone to Australia.13 Her novels’ capacity to wound friends, to be written ‘close to the knuckle’, however involuntarily, might be taken as a sign, for all their famous stylisation and contrivance, of their general truthfulness to life, regardless of whether Iris acknowledged (or recalled) where their inspiration came from; just as her general readers ‘recognised’ themselves and so came back for more. That her later characters are sometimes harder to trace back to real-life models might also connect with the fact that her last books are not always her strongest.
Even when a character or situation can be traced back to one in ‘real life’, this does not necessarily illuminate the book. The knowledge that Anna Quentin is based on a persona of herself that Iris wished to outgrow does not radically shift our original view of Anna; that Hugo is a portrait of Yorick Smythies may influence how we read Under the Net’s idea-play, but not how we read its fantastic invention, humour, witty observation, or love-plot. ‘No libel difficulties cd possibly arise,’ Iris assured Viking.14 The understanding that Mischa Fox is based on Canetti, by contrast, does redirect our attention to a darker Fox exercising power not always benignly.15 And Canetti’s influence both on and within the novels merits discussion. That he arguably helped inspire characters as different from one another as Fox, Julius King and Charles Arrowby,* as Franz Steiner helped inspire the equally different Peter Saward, Willy Kost and Tallis Browne,† underlines the truism that there can be no exact congruence between real life and fiction.
Iris, during her 1982 Gifford lectures, echoed Canetti in maintaining that ‘true writers encounter their characters after they’ve created them’.16 Exactly this happened after she had created Anne Cavidge in Nuns and Soldiers, then met Marjorie Locke (Sister Ann Teresa), who had left the Anglican-Augustinian convent of St Mary’s, Wantage, after fifteen years there, rather as Cavidge left her convent.17 Locke, unlike Cavidge, never lost her faith, but like Cavidge, found her Abbess difficult, and recognised the accuracy of Iris’s description of arriving bravely back in the world without friends or knowhow, like an ex-prisoner. She and Iris exchanged many hundreds of letters.18
John Bayley believed Iris’s characters could not be traced back to life for two different reasons: because the raising of the imaginative temperature is so intense and transformative; and because of the way that after 1960 she elevates her characters involuntarily – and comically – to so high a social pitch.
The social range of the first four novels had been unremarkable: bohemians and refugees in the first two, schoolmasters in The Sandcastle, motley seekers in The Bell. With A Severed Head there is a marked shift upwards, into what Angus Wilson irritably termed ‘expenses-sheet pseudo-elegance’, while the ‘civilised sensitiveness’ of its successor, An Unofficial Rose, struck him as false. Unlike Virginia Woolf’s, none of Murdoch’s characters regards their ‘way of living in its social, economic sense with any questioning whatever … [they] approach such things as the Boulestin Restaurant or a chateau-bottled wine with an awe … which suggests that their creator is not entirely at ease in her chosen environment’.19
Wilson missed the point that Iris’s naming of A Severed Head’s wines after roses suggested ironic distance; since he had published in 1958 a novel centring, like An Unofficial Rose, on a nursery,* rivalry may underlie his criticisms, which miss the point of that book’s title. This refers not to the ‘snobbish distinction between shrub and hybrid tea roses’, but to Rupert Brooke contrasting in ‘Grantchester’ the officious gardens of Wilhelmine Berlin with the wild ‘unofficial’ dog-rose that blows about ‘an English hedge’. The opposition is echoed between the forceful and mediocre artist Randall Peronett and his good, ‘formless’ wife Anne, with whom he stage-manages a public row to gain a pretext to leave her. What is most alive here is the believable weakness of the men and the different power of women-characters, the witch-like half lesbian Emma Sands, her lover Lindsay, the pert and obsessed Miranda, the ‘deadness’ of the good Anne, and the battle of wills between these. The snobbery Wilson detects in Murdoch can be a thoroughly useful vice for a novelist to investigate: we no longer blame James, Proust, Compton-Burnett, Waugh or Muriel Spark for evoking social worlds which delight or appal them because they were stylishly strange to their own authors. And Iris, like Elizabeth Bowen, saw England itself with foreign eyes.*
In August 1963 the dying Louis MacNeice, offered anything he wanted, asked for a novel of Iris’s.20 Although her sales in the 1960s did not suffer – British hardback sales were in excess of 20,000 for all her novels of that decade21 – and even her slightest fiction from that time has something of interest, the sixties did not, as critics noted, produce her best work. The decade bridges the brio of her early novels, in which she spreads her wings and tries out disparate novel-forms, and her maturity in the 1970s.
Angus Wilson accurately saw that Iris was now neo-Jamesian. James, she said, was ‘a pattern man too’. One point of the ‘high’ social world in A Severed Head was precisely to contrast the ‘primal’ appetites and impulses (violence/incest) that are unmasked within it. But Wilson was also right to think Iris had private investment in claiming such worlds. It is noteworthy that, following the death of her father, an identification with the old ruling order in Ireland gets into her fiction. She, John and Rene travelled to Ireland in summer 1958 and 1959, making their pilgrimage to Drum Manor. Martin Lynch-Gibbon in A Severed Head is Anglo-Irish on his father’s side; Grayhallock in An Unofficial Rose, whence the Peronetts acquired their eighteenth-century linen wealth, recalls the name of one house from which the Richardsons stemmed. The Unicorn is set in a fictionalised County Clare; while the plot may borrow from Lady Ursula Vernon, the names of characters, like many from The Red and the Green, stem from Rene’s family. Given the modesty of Iris’s background, this was seen by some as solipsistic fantasising.22 A running joke about upwardly mobile women links a number of the novels, from Madge Casement in Under the Net to Pinn in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, ‘socially speaking, in fairly rapid motion’. If Iris mythologised her background, Shakespeare too had fantasies about gentility. When in the 1970s, at a party of Anne Wignall’s (a friend they had met through David Cecil), Iris mischievously initiated a conversation about what social class the guests, who included Olivia Manning and J.G. Farrell, thought they belonged to – they boasted of being lower-middle class – she alone vouchsafed no reply.23 Most of her first-person narrators, from Jake in Under the Net to Charles in The Sea, The Sea, are from poor backgrounds. A number of her ‘saints’ are from rich ones – Old Etonian Bledyard in The Sandcastle, Wykehamist James in The Sea, The Sea.
Despite finding the teetotal existence of her Belfast relatives hard going, Iris was fond of these cousins, and gave introductions to them to friends such as Asa Briggs, who met the Chapman cousins in Belfast. Julian Chrysostomides met both Eva and Billy Lee, manager from 1955 of the Dargle and Bray laundry, and the Harold Murdochs with their two prosperous hardware shops in Dun Laoghaire. Iris took care in Ireland to visit family. Attending with Philip Larkin in 1965 a celebration for Maurice Bowra at Queen’s University, the Bayleys visited her Chapman cousins. When John gave a talk on Pushkin at Clandeboye House in 1980, Cleaver, Muriel and Sybil came, John borrowing his hostess Lady Dufferin’s car so that Iris could visit her Aunt Ella. When Iris was awarded honorary doctorates at Queen’s University Belfast in 1977, at Trinity College, Dublin in 1985 and at Coleraine University in 1993, cousins and connexions were invited, as they were to Steeple Aston and to the London flat. As late as 1964 she maintained crossly and implausibly that she had an Irish accent ‘you could cut with a knife … I may have misleading Oxford overtones – but the vowels are Irish.’24
She was capable of portraying a Dublin closer to that of her own childhood, especially that of her Bell first cousins, with whom she was rarely in touch.* Probably after her return from Glengariff in 1954, when she recorded childhood memories of ‘the postcards in Aunt Noonie’s shop with sentimental “I wish captions"’,25 she wrote the short story ‘Something Special’,26 about young Yvonne Geary who lives in her working-class Protestant mother’s Dun Laoghaire stationer’s shop on Upper George’s Street; Iris’s closest Dublin connexion Eva Robinson (later, Lee) lived with her foster-mother Mrs Walton in the latter’s newspaper shop on Upper George’s Street. ‘Yvonne’ resembles ‘Eva’, and the paternity of both is mysterious. The Anglican Mariners’ Church where Mrs Walton and Eva attended Revivalist meetings run by the ‘Crusaders’ makes an appearance, as do the rocks on Dun Laoghaire beach where young Iris and Eva sat during summer holidays.27 Iris distinctly downgraded Eva socially;28 young Yvonne Geary shares a bed with her shop-owner mother. She is courted by a tender-hearted Jewish tailor’s assistant, Sam Goldman, whose religion is no impediment. Sam would ‘bring the children up Church of Ireland’, says Yvonne’s mother. ‘It’s better than the other lot with the little priest after them the whole time and bobbing their hats at the chapel doors so you can’t even have a peaceful ride on the tram.’
The title, ‘Something Special’, refers to Yvonne’s fantasy of escape from poverty, and is repeated in the Christmas card she finds glamorous but her mother declines to order; in the diamond ring her mother feels confident Sam will tempt her with; in the surreal treat Sam procures for her after they visit a louche downstairs bar, Kimballs, where they witness a near-brawl. Sam takes Yvonne to see a huge fallen tree on St Stephen’s Green, which he finds poetic and she confusing. After running away she announces that they will marry. ‘And why, may I ask, did your Majesty decide it just tonight?’ asks her mother. ‘For nothing,’ she replies before a night of tears, ‘for nothing, for nothing.’ ‘The long night was ahead,’ the story ends. ‘Something Special’ recalls Joyce in its detailed, detached naturalism, but its lyrical unexpectedness is pure Murdoch. Yvonne has her author’s capricious longing to surrender yet remain independent. ‘How absurdly his small feet turned out as he stood there’ may recall Iris’s view of her future husband’s feet. Iris’s ambivalence about marriage in 1955 helps fuel Yvonne’s conflicting emotions.
Eva Robinson, born in 1912, would have reached Yvonne’s age in 1936, when her foster-mother Mrs Walton had moved from stationer to owner and manager of the nursing home at 16 Mellifont Avenue. The newsagent’s recurs in Iris’s work: Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince, born in a paper-shop, fantasises that he slept under the counter. Eva’s fate differed from Yvonne’s. She worked in 1936 as secretary to Jacob’s Biscuits advertising manager – the factory was an insurrectionary redoubt during the 1916 Rising – and married a fellow-Anglican, Billy Lee, in 1941. Together they took in the elderly Mrs Walton, and Iris’s grandmother Elizabeth Jane ('Bessie') Richardson, until their deaths.29 Planning a visit to Dublin in summer 1945, where she would soon be godmother to the second of Eva’s four sons, Arnold, Iris noted, in a reprise of Yeats,30 that she now felt not of any particular country: ‘There’s Ireland, there’s England – but if I have a fatherland, it would be something like the literature of England perhaps.’ She described Ireland as ‘island of spells, provincial pigsty. (“Little brittle magic nation dim of mind"; Joyce, of course).’31
Iris was proud, in October 1964, to be the first woman ever to address the ‘illustrious’ Philosophical Society at Trinity College, Dublin, her topic ‘Job: Prophet of Modern Nihilism’. She was interested to find how strongly she felt against Job and pro God, though finding God’s reply to Job questioning his sufferings magnificently irrelevant. The straight answer was: ‘You suffer, you are good. So what?’32 ‘It was odd and very moving to be thus feted in my native city.’33 Dublin looked beautiful in a slight mist. She finished her Irish novel The Red and the Green the week she returned to Steeple Aston.
Iris saw Ireland in the 1950s as ‘something of a dream country where everything happens with a difference’.34 The first draft of A Severed Head was set in the west of Ireland, the region Joyce’s Gabriel Conroy in ‘The Dead’ was bitterly rebuked for not visiting; where the young Yeats projected magic; and whose myth-like primitiveness Synge mapped in The Aran Islands. County Clare inspires The Unicorn: the Scarren with its carnivorous plants stands in for the Burren, the great cliffs are based on those of Moher. Its gentry may owe their whiskey to the worlds of Honor Tracy in Mayo or of Bowen in Cork, but their names are from Iris’s family. Effingham Cooper takes his first name from Iris’s grandfather, and ‘Cooper’ from his father: Denis Nolan’s surname is that of Iris’s grandmother Bessie and her sister, Eva’s grandmother Anna Nolan.35 But this is not a real, but a fantastical fairytale Gothic world, with a Platonic topography, a bog that floods at seven-year intervals, an ocean that kills, a megalith ‘seemingly pointless yet dreadfully significant’ and an imprisoned heroine out of a fairy-tale.
It has living sources too. Neighbours of Lady Ursula Vernon at ‘Fairyfield’, Kinsale, County Cork, saw striking parallels with the rotting house running on whiskey; her increasingly paralysed husband Stephen had a handsome valet, Gerard, who behaved like an adopted son and was widely supposed to be Stephen’s lover. Kinsale opinion accepted quite easily that the Vernons had ‘separate arrangements’. Stephen became more and more dependent on Gerard, upon whom he ‘doted’, and though Gerard married and had a family and lived in the gate lodge, when Stephen died Gerard inherited the house.36 Another donnée, well-known in the west, and a stock Irish-Gothic reference, was the thirty-year imprisonment in the eighteenth century of the wife of Robert Bellfield, later first Earl of Belvedere, allowed to see only servants as her great beauty decayed. She had either committed adultery with her husband’s brother or was bullied into a false confession by her husband in 1742. She had at first a good wardrobe and plenty of servants, but though a carriage was kept for her use, she was never allowed to pass the boundaries of the Park. After, like Hannah, an attempt to escape, she was confined to her room. She emerged only on her husband’s death in 1772, broken, white-haired, unearthly. Contemporary commentators like Mrs Delany took the view that all this was a reasonable enough punishment, considering the provocation.37
‘People can’t just be shut up. We’re not living in the Middle Ages.’ ‘We are here,’ runs one exchange in the novel.38 Iris advised Chatto against mentioning Ireland in any pre-publicity or jacket-blurb (as it is never named in Henry Green’s Loving). We are being invited outside society, the better to understand the forces – love and power – that govern it.39 ‘Such a swift passage; such an appalling mystery,’ Pip Lejour observes when he catches and kills a trout, while readers are invited to apprehend human existence as analogously fragile and mysterious. To say that Ireland seems here Iris’s chosen ‘spiritual home’ – and not, as Tracy liked to observe, her physical or material home – is not an idle metaphor.
A moment of earned shock, classically Murdochian, comes when we learn that Hannah’s gaoler Gerald Scottow regularly visits inter alia Marrakesh – a private resonance. Iris wrote on 27 January 1953: ‘What a joke if C[anetti] is in Marrakesh all this time, while I am writing letters to him every other day.’ All her power-figures somewhere echo Canetti. The frisson comes also from the contrast between the brooding, inward-looking, ‘timeless’ intensity the novel has created, and an aspect of modernity whose co-existence with this we are forced to acknowledge. Flying between County Clare and Marrakesh, or even New York, where Hannah’s husband courts his beautiful male painter-lover, in 1962 was feasible: Shannon international airport had opened. On watching an aeroplane descend, Effingham thinks, ‘There was life, indifferent life, beautiful life going forward.’40
The Bayleys famously had no television. The last musical they saw was Salad Days in 1956; the last film The French Connection in 1972. Yet William Golding praised Iris, especially in 1973 with The Black Prince, for achieving what he found hard: locating her work believably in the twentieth century. His testimony that her novels possess actuality is valuable. She colonised the century and gave it back to us as myth. She does this best in the 1970s, but the formula of psychological-myth versus modernity recurs throughout. Sometimes an aspect of the twentieth-century world is inserted, as it were within inverted commas, into the mythology. In Under the Net the cold-cure centre, Sadie’s smart hairdressing shop, the Hammersmith theatre. In An Unofficial Rose and A Fairly Honourable Defeat alike, sinister telephones, and in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine a tape-recorder playing the voice of dead Sophie, have disturbing roles. In The Nice and the Good the waste-disposal unit in which Kate Gray’s glove gets caught has its own ‘mana'; so does a disused railway line in A Fairly Honourable Defeat.41 In The Good Apprentice a hot-air balloon is sighted from claustrophobic Seegard. In The Green Knight the ‘solution’ to Joan Blacket’s intercontinental marriage problem is a fax machine. Such emblematically selected features of modernity seem as poetically mysterious as the ‘mythical’ intensity they enliven and contradict.
‘My novels are too full of thought,’ Iris had bitterly lamented to David Hicks in 1945; thought, as is well known, being something the British are not at ease with. David Pears had a long conversation with Iris about her developing Platonism at a St Anne’s dinner. They spoke of Plato’s myth of the Cave and the Sun (see Chapter 17), which she was coming to see as the central image of man’s pilgrimage away from egoistic blindness towards the Good; and discussed the old medieval ontological argument about God’s existence, which Iris maintained should now be reinvented for Good, not God. She announced that she would write a novel about these matters, accordingly dedicating The Unicorn to Pears. Teaching at Berkeley in 1964, he asked friends to explain the book. He was not alone in finding it obscure.*
Iris wanted a secular religion: The Unicorn concerns her theme that life is – or should be – a spiritual quest or pilgrimage. She projects herself into the heroine Hannah Crean-Smith, imprisoned for seven years in Gaze Castle by her husband for her infidelity and violence, and now attempting to ‘purify’ her suffering, a woman ‘much given to looking at herself in mirrors’.42 Iris ridiculed the famous critic who noticed that Crean-Smith is an anagram of ‘Christ-Name’ or ‘Christ-Mean’.43 Critical books about Iris have not lacked in high-mindedness, as titles such as Fables of Unselfing, Work for the Spirit and Figures of Good make clear. They perhaps take too literally that Iris who, of the cast of characters making up The Bell, identified ‘a little’ with the Abbess, the voice of wise counsel itself. In her journals, by contrast, she often charges herself with the twin vices of vanity and ‘silliness’, recalling, for all her formidable powers of intellect and imagination, The Bell’s attractive, emotionally muddled, silly Dora, bad-mouthed by James as a ‘bitch’. It is almost certainly because readers sense this Dora-Iris that they accept the Abbess-Iris too, without feeling that the author is, as George Eliot now sometimes reads, a conceited, governessy, talking head.
The ambiguities of Hannah, part-wise, part-silly, part-seeker, part-vamp, fuel the novel, which is again structured round a court. Where Hugo was the unconscious good centre of the court in Under the Net, Mischa the bad centre in Flight, Hannah is centre of another cult. Her gaolers are her worshippers, and she has the same mysterious ability to compel love from both sexes that Iris herself evinced, and which made, in June 1940, Paddy O’Regan’s present of C.S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love an appropriately emblematic gift. It is not Iris’s gentility that matters within Hannah so much as what she in 1952 termed ‘my slightly sinister ambiguous religious vein’, recalled both by the tarot card known as ‘La Papessa’44 and by her realisation, around 1949, that ‘all that for me lights up & gives grace to my attachments to people’ – she lists ‘generosity, gentleness, douceur, tendresse’ – are ‘dangerous’ (her word) ‘especially in their corrupted form in me’ (my emphasis). The temptation to see Hannah as a saint is given pause when she early ‘nuzzles’ her hand into Denis’s pocket while he cuts her hair. Hannah is given Iris’s habit of bursting into tears on hearing music;45 given, also, a wounded bat whose strange little doggy face disturbs Marian Taylor. Iris and John (who cut her hair, making it look chewed) discovered the bat while she was writing the first draft in August 1961: ‘A sick bat we nursed today I found dead. While it was crawling around it looked up at me and our eyes met – an odd sense of communion. If stroked, it opened its mouth and squeaked, shewing sharp little teeth.’ Hannah feels a strange affinity with the bat held in a box, like her, a prisoner. The word ‘vamp’ derives from ‘vampire'; the bat is Hannah’s kin.
‘How mysterious day and night are, this endless procession of dark and light … I think such sad thoughts – of people in trouble and afraid, all lonely people, all prisoners,’46 Hannah announces. Such urges towards sympathy and rescue figured with an analogous sinister poetry in The Flight from the Enchanter, where Mischa felt such intolerable compassion – ‘a sort of nausea’ – for creature-kind that he had as a child killed small animals, including a kitten. The Iris who was unable to have a home-help or secretary though well able to afford them, because ‘you end up running their private lives and doing everything for them’,47 lies behind such creepy moments as much as Canetti. She was always susceptible to the twin sentiments of protective anxiety and desire to rescue. ‘May I not harm so-and-so’ is no accidental journal-refrain. Fox drowning a pitiable kitten is echoed by Monty in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine strangling his hostile wife Sophie, dying of cancer, because of a tormented ‘wild awful pity’ for her suffering.48 Among the most memorable moments in Iris’s novels are attempts to free birds, animals, fish: Jake and Finn releasing the dog Mr Mars; Dora rescuing a butterfly and forgetting Paul’s valise; Morgan’s frantic surreal attempts to liberate a pigeon from Piccadilly Circus Underground station’s escalator; Gabriel’s purchase of a live fish49 (based on a real fish Iris bribed children to release while staying with the Griggs in Spain in 1974). Such animals recall her trapped women: Annette in the cupboard; Hannah in her demesne; Hartley in Charles’s inner room.
Iris’s journals have their own rescue-sagas, some quixotic. Carolyn Ste Croix, daughter of Iris’s friend the ancient historian Geoffrey Ste Croix, had been a St Anne’s student and was a friend.50 Her suicide, a carefully planned operation on 31 January 1964, was not discovered until 9 February, and Iris spoke memorably, unscripted at her graveside. Iris saw Carolyn as ‘slim, pretty, beautifully dressed’51 – others as small, mousy, bespectacled, with an unsatisfactory relationship with an amiable Turk whom she called ‘my wog’. Iris had taken her to Paris to try to cheer her up in April 1957, and got her a job as temporary research assistant to J.B. Priestley. In August 1963 Carolyn stayed the weekend at Cedar Lodge, ‘very gloomy and suicidal, worse than ever. She has dyed her hair gold and now has a sort of pale doomed look … my love for her is too feeble, it struggles to reach her but is soon tired.’
One false alarm occurred when Iris in a panic rang up ‘about a dozen people in Cambridge’ and had the police break into Carolyn’s house using a ladder. Carolyn was out at a cinema. Following this she had promised Iris that ‘"Suicide is out” … in that curiously cheerful way she had. I ought not to have believed her, ought to have organized people to watch her, ought to have gone to see her often, loved her better. But I did love her and am so appalled and wretched now, and so terribly sad and full of regrets.’ Carolyn kept fifty of Iris’s and John’s many letters and cards to her, in a gold gift-box, during her long depression. Suicides in Iris’s fiction are usually caused by the sheer inattention of those surrounding the stricken one. When John defended Carolyn’s right to take her life, suggesting that it was the right course for her, Iris was coldly angry. She reproached herself bitterly for not having ‘taken charge’ more, wished she had introduced Carolyn and Donald MacKinnon, who sent a priest to the funeral to say, ‘Professor MacKinnon knew about Carolyn. He said he thought you’d be here today.’ Iris noted: ‘She cd have been saved by love, a great deal of love, whatever the psychiatrists could or couldn’t manage – I feel sick and stifled with misery about this.’ ‘One could,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘be damned for such failures.’52 Later, she thought her sense of guilty responsibility a form of vanity: ‘Some people just cannot cope with life “manfully". This is hard for the healthy ones to understand.’53
The Unicorn, like so much of Iris’s fiction, concerns itself with the nature of ‘goodness’ in a post-Christian age. Its apparatus borrows from Simone Weil’s view of Plato. Chapter 12 is the heart of the idea-play. Max Lejour, observer of Hannah’s drama from Riders – named after the good and bad horses who compete for government of the soul in the Phaedrus – is based on Fraenkel, who lamented to Iris his lack of wisdom in 1952. Max too says he has ‘never done a hand’s turn’ in practical morality. Like Fraenkel he sings to a plainsong chant of his own the Chorus from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon: ‘Zeus, who leads men into the ways of understanding, has established the rule that we must learn by suffering. As sad care, with memories of pain, comes dropping upon the heart in sleep, so even against our will does wisdom come upon us.’ He says to Effingham:
Recall the idea of Até which was so real to the Greeks. Até is the name of the almost automatic transfer of suffering. Power is a form of Até. The victims of power, and any power has its victims, are themselves infected. They have then to pass it on, to use power on others. This is evil, and the crude image of the all-powerful God is a sacrilege. Good is not completely powerless. For to be powerless, to be a complete victim, may be another source of power. But Good is non-powerful. And it is in the good that Até is finally quenched, when it encounters a pure being who only suffers and does not attempt to pass the suffering on.
Most critics rightly decode this poetically dense passage through Weil’s Aeschylean ideas on ‘affliction’, which degrades all but the good person – and ‘good’ to Weil does not mean what we normally mean by it, but approximates to saintliness. Whether Hannah is such a being or not is one topic of The Unicorn. Canetti is here too. In 1953 he spoke to Iris about giving orders: ‘How every order leaves a stachel [thorn, barb or sting] in the spirit, of the exact form of that order; how the primitive form of the order is the roar of the hunting beast that makes others flee…. He said of religions – the great religions represent this hierarchical need for orders. Of Christianity: its centre – apart from the question of resurrection – is the transformation of the hunting pack into the wailing pack – the pack that laments the loss of one of its number. We are all of us both hunters and tormenters.’
Such ideas had in 1962 been published in Canetti’s Crowds and Power, to which Iris gave one of only two favourable reviews.54 The provocative idea of victim-guilt was topical in 1963, the year of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, with its scandalous implication of Arendt’s fellow-Jews in their own sufferings.
Iris completed the final draft of The Unicorn in 1962, convinced it was ‘no good, a nightmarish claustrophobic little book’.55 Indeed, there is too much plot, too little comedy: it remains more interesting than it is good. The progressive revelation that what rules the stylish world, once more, is sexual slavery, is formulaic. No one but Denis is free of the chain of sexual power-and-victimhood. Such freedom, for Iris, would resemble being free from the chain of Buddhist karma, the good man alone being neither bully nor victim.* The book’s real power and fascination lie in its poetry, its evocations of place and person and time of day. The Hymn to Zeus from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon which Max sings, in Iris’s own translation, contributes to the elegiac mood, as does ‘Le vent se lève. Il faut tenter de vivré'† from Valéry’s ‘Cimetière Marin’ (a favourite poem, alluded to in three novels56), and Landor’s Imaginary Conversations yields an unascribed, edited quotation on the last page: ‘There are no voices that are not soon mute, there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echoes are not faint at last.’
The Times was mystified by The Unicorn. The Tablet thought it her best novel, liking its improbability; so did the Month. It should not be surprising that the American critic Robert Scholes read it as Christian allegory. But The Unicorn is neo-Platonic. To Iris’s Hungarian postgraduate student Nicolas Veto, writing his thesis on Simone Weil under her supervision, she acknowledged that ‘Unicorn is full of Simone Weil, tho’ few (apparently) are those who spot that greater source of my “wisdom".’ Her philosophy, she said, always turns into theology, which is ‘awkward for me as I don’t believe in God’.57 The co-existence in the novel of the willed and the quaint, combined with the deliberate absence of social or historical elements, made it hard going for some. Although it was later a set text for the Agrégation (teachers’ exam) in France, Continental European publishers were reluctant to bring it out in translation.
The romance of marriage, the narrator of ‘Jerusalem’ observed, is based on a sentimental fallacy – ‘One can love, be in love with, more than one person at a time.’ Iris had married John for laughter as much as passion, he declaring himself willing to live in any contradiction ‘indefinitely’. It was never uncommon for her to become fascinated by someone new, but he trusted her scrupulousness, in turn providing unfailing background support, ‘earthing’ her. (Perhaps, he wondered, Shakespeare often fell in love while being, like Iris, inwardly self-contained.) Their partnership was seriously threatened once, leading to her resigning her Fellowship at St Anne’s. In 1962–63 the college magazine announced that ‘Iris Murdoch has resigned in order to devote more time to writing,’ and had been duly elected Honorary Fellow.58 She had indeed felt divided between teaching and writing for years;* one reason her early novels were set in summer was that she had only that season free to write. The reason she resigned,59 however, was to free herself from a mutually obsessional attachment to a woman colleague that threatened scandal, and that alarmed Lady Ogilvie – John believed – enough for her gently to warn Iris, to which she did not take kindly. Far from writing full time, she soon took up teaching in London at the Royal College of Art, albeit of a less time-consuming kind.
Since the Irish for ‘Club of Women’ is ‘Cumarin na mBan’, Iris and John would lightly refer to this Oxford colleague as the Chumman. She was exceptional, original, able, a brilliant cook, passionate and dogmatic, with great magnetism, bossiness, possessiveness, and capacity for being wrapped up in her students. Extremely left-wing, she would threaten periodically to resign. She was thought by some to have inspired Honor Klein in A Severed Head. Aggressive and difficult people, John observed, liked Iris, because she relaxed them, taking their ‘stuff’ on board.
Their acquaintanceship went back to 1952. In February 1959 Iris wrote:
In the same line of thought: I am becoming very attached to -. She said to me the other day in her brisk manner ‘There are no hidden depths. Everything I have is on view!’ How untrue this is. I have no idea whether [she] has any physical apprehension of me comparable to mine of her, and whether when our hands touch when she lights my cigarette she too trembles.
Three months later Iris feels ‘precariously emotional’ about her, and by the summer of 1961 a note about ‘anxiety and arranging’ suggests matters had gone far. That August Iris had a dream John found significant. The Bayleys, playing on a railway platform, saw their toy train fall underneath a real train: the world of drama and passion outside was menacing the innocent Cedar Lodge play-world. By now the woman reviled Iris for not leaving John and setting up home with her instead; if Iris would not do that, she should at least have a ‘proper relationship’ with her. It was probably at this time that a number of students were moved at their own request to another tutor; one found Iris’s habit of ‘looking out of the window and talking about love’, or lying mutely on the floor for the statutory hour with her eyes closed, less than fully helpful.
4 November 1961. I meet [her] in the Lamb and Flag after the class on Fridays … She is calmer in some ways, but there is despair.
26 June 1962. It looks as if [she] and I are through. I can hardly write for misery and tears. How true it was, what she said on Day one, ‘We have let a destroyer loose.’ Yet I can’t believe it. I left hysterically last night after the New Hall dinner. She wanted to drive me back, I was so drunk, & I wouldn’t let her. Her face as the door … slowly closed. I just don’t know what to do or how to manage without her.
5 July 1962. Of course we aren’t through – but can we go on like this? I wish I were not so decisively and hopelessly divided from my chance of ordinary happiness …. exiling myself from it.
6 August 1962. A moment of curious peace, or not peace exactly … but silence … she came to Steeple Aston for the first time and we read … in the garden. We were both very much on edge and – obviously hated it. She was very hostile and bullying when we next met, spoke contemptuously about ‘English homes and gardens’, and generally treated me with harshness and contempt. Not unusual of course … I have told [her] I must resign … Yet I have not ‘decided’ for her anger [6 pages excised]. Puss is very dear.
Soon, the decision to leave St Anne’s achieved, Iris records her joy in being able to ‘see’ the world again, ‘being able to look at things. A sense of freedom & looking, and the whole world, given again, one’s consolation. Also everyday life with puss.’ ‘There is no substitute,’ she wrote in A Severed Head, ‘for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for granted relationship.’ On 9 December 1966: ‘How lonely I was all those years with [her].’ When she met the Slovene Jože Jančar again on 15 May 1967: ‘If I ask what I have been doing for 16 years I suppose the answer is getting married, getting used to being married, & getting away from -.’ On 17 November 1968: ‘How awful the business with – was. Reading of my sufferings I think it quite scandalous that I survived them!’
Liberation, however, obscured in her memory wonderful things they had shared: this saddened her. She dreamt, in May 1976, of a joyous reconciliation in a Dublin cellar-bar. In waking life she religiously avoided, always, those parts of Oxford where a chance meeting might occur. Her depictions of same-sex love between women were, in the 1960s, unpredictable. Violet Evercreech in The Unicorn is lonely and predatory; Emma Sands in An Unofficial Rose sinister yet winning; in A Severed Head Martin’s secretaries, Miss Seelhaft and Miss Hernshaw, have the only happy relationship in the novel.
‘The Italian Girl is A S[evered] H[ead] in reverse, the spell repeated backwards.’60 In the 1960s Iris was sometimes repeating a formula, as well as trying to transmute her Platonism into intelligible public rhetoric. In 1963 Marshall Best was dissatisfied with The Italian Girl and warned Iris that she might this time annoy her readership: ‘I think you come near to justifying the charge sometimes made against you … that you are playing games with your reader, deliberately holding back your meanings until he wonders if they are really there.’ The character of Maggie baffled him at the end. Norah Smallwood agreed, and was very interested to see how Iris would react, writing to Best: ‘between you and me, in our experience we have in the past made suggestions, and while she has received them very charmingly, she has seldom … taken them into account.’ Iris agreed that the book was flawed, and Maggie was weak, but did not now want to go back to it. ‘Much as I love and admire her,’ Best wrote to Smallwood, ‘I hate this lack of professionalism and this unwillingness to take herself seriously as a novelist. She does say, and apparently means it, that she wouldn’t mind a bit if we skipped this book and waited for another.’ Smallwood agreed that it was odd that someone as good as Iris ‘is not interested in making good better. Can it be that she is so bursting with ideas that there is little time to do all that she wants?’61
Smallwood accordingly wrote to Iris lamenting that, while she liked and admired the book, ‘I’d like it even better if you gave that final re-touching’. Anthony Burgess, who would later name The Bell as one of the best novels of its epoch,62 thought The Italian Girl showed that Iris’s reputation was grossly inflated. P.N. Furbank blamed Oxford for the book’s disappointments.63 Iris’s friend Honor Tracy’s hostile review in the New Republic caused a temporary rift;64 Tracy’s question therein as to why ‘Miss Murdoch chose to set The Unicorn in Ireland when she so plainly is not at home there’ may also have stung.
Perhaps she wrote too fast. When Viking queried the kitchen scene at the end of The Red and the Green, Iris conceded to Smallwood, ‘They’re right of course and it worried me a lot.’ She ‘might try to rethink the end of the book’, and perhaps tried, but it was ‘pretty old hat by now and I’m involved in something else’. Late in 1965 Best noted that this criticism – that her taking insufficient pains with her books prevented her full realisation as a novelist – recurred more frequently. Smallwood shrewdly hypothesised that Iris, always ‘seeking and thinking’, clarified something to herself in writing, and was therefore unfussed by critical reception. Nor were her sales affected. Smallwood noted that Gwenda David knew of one unnamed ‘considerable influence’ on Iris who, if run into, might be very helpful. But Canetti – it was certainly he – did not then materialise. As for Iris, she well knew that she was as much the victim of her creative daemon as its mistress. She wondered gloomily when her ‘obsessional phase as a novelist would end?’65
Meanwhile a triumphant, uproariously successful adaptation for the stage, with J.B. Priestley, of A Severed Head opened at the Criterion Theatre in June 1963. It was strongly cast, with Robert Hardy as Martin and Paul Eddington as Palmer. This was by far the best of the three stage adaptations of Iris’s novels, running for 1,111 performances, and brought her nearly £18,000 in its first two years. ‘You don’t really like the theatre, do you Duckie?’ Priestley, however, sagely noted. Before long Iris was in a position to meditate making what she tactfully called ‘some loans’ to various impecunious friends and relations. ‘Don’t forget, before you give it all away,’ Smallwood had cautioned as early as 1962, ‘you have still got to pay tax on it.’
In February 1964 Iris and John began big alterations to Cedar Lodge, putting in a new staircase and enlarging the hall. This produced a large space for entertaining in, which was even colder than before. Soon they bought an adjoining cottage and old barn, and could boast more than six acres. It was going very cheap, they had large ideas at that time, hoping that friends might stay in it, and here was a way of ensuring good neighbours. They never did much with this acquisition, feeling uneasy about the added responsibility. People used to graze their horses uninvited on the land; the barn remained unconverted; an amiably unscrupulous student dumped spoil, John and Iris, complaisant as ever, agreeing. An eyesore resulted.
Iris researched The Red and the Green hard, even learning some Gaelic.66 She described the novel as a good textbook to learn Irish history from, and was pleased when the Irish historian and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote to her praising it. The action takes place during one week of April 1916, leading up to the Easter Rising. Chapter 2, a seminar on the history of Ireland, gives the January 1801 Act of Union as its major disaster, since it demoralised the country’s ruling class. ‘Ireland’s real past is the ascendancy,’ ventures one character, who reminds us that, the early-nineteenth-century leader Daniel O’Connell excepted, the great Irish patriots have all been Protestants. Doubtless Iris is mythologising her own family here, as at Oxford in 1939 when she first referred in print to the Anglo-Irish as ‘a special breed’. Following Yeats and Bowen, she appears to have adopted the historian W.E.H. Lecky’s idealisation of the eighteenth-century Ascendancy.67 This chapter, too, idealises the Protestant landlords, ‘those aristocrats who think themselves superior both to the English and to the Irish’, while Anglo-Irish writers have ‘always written the best English’. The family name of Barney Drumm recalls that of the original Richardson demesne, Drum Manor, and Barney’s mother was indeed a Richardson. But those who reduce the novel to that particular mythologisation68 miss others as potent – the book in effect explores many aspects of Iris’s inheritance – and ignore the fact that the only character with social pretensions – the betrousered, cigar-smoking Lady Millie Kinnard, who conducts target practice in her boudoir – is also bankrupt, highly promiscuous, and bad. Millie is (presumably) partly based on Countess Constance Markievicz, grandee and rebel. She is the earthiest of all Iris’s projections of the ‘vamp'-figure. Her lively exoticism is opposed to the dullness, provincialism and occasional stupidity of the English cousins.
At Oxford in 1940 Iris had given a paper to the Irish Club on James Connolly, a Marxist praised by Lenin for fusing, during bitter social struggle, class militancy and revolutionary nationalism. Connolly is a background figure in The Red and the Green, but righteous pity for the plight of the Dublin poor is shared even by ‘English’ Frances as much as by her Catholic Dumay cousins. The Easter Rising had in Connolly a Socialist presence, as well as, in Padraic Pearse, a mystical and martyrological wing, which of course won out in the end. There are glimpses of real poverty throughout the book – one in Chapter 7 borrowed directly from Mrs Marmeladov’s death in Crime and Punishment. The action, despite forays to Millie’s two smart houses, in Upper Mount Street and ‘Rathblane’ in the Wicklow mountains, is set mainly in middle-class Dublin; genteel and ‘English’ Dun Laoghaire (then Kingstown) once more, with the Mariner’s Church and salt-water baths familiar to Iris from visits to Eva Robinson; and Blessington Street. W.L. Webb in the Guardian noted the author’s love showing in the ‘vivid and exact descriptions of Dalkey and environs and the clear wet evening light in Dublin streets’.69
Iris invents an Anglo-Irish cousinry of some complexity, with branches on both sides of the Irish Sea, and cousins both Anglican and Catholic, a family dramatising within itself Ireland’s historical tensions, making them immediate and personal. She said that the book concerned ‘the awful tensions involved in being Irish’,70 and claimed Catholic relatives herself.71 The most interesting autobiographical reference is that she places the novel’s ‘representative’ Catholic ‘rebel’ family, Kathleen and Barney Drumm, and Barney’s stepsons Pat and Cathal Dumay, within the seedy gentility of the house on Blessington Street where she was born, a street Eva Lee recalled being raided in 1921 by the Black and Tans. This suggests one quixotic main thrust, pro-Nationalist, pro-'rebel’.* Doubtless gentle Willie Pearse’s fate – shot in 1916 because he loved his famous, fanatical brother Padraic enough to be at his side wherever he went, whatever he did72 – lies behind Cathal’s fatal love for his fanatical elder brother, named ‘Pat’.
Chapter 4 opens with Andrew Chase-White – like Hughes a Second Lieutenant in King Edward’s Horse, born in Canada rather as Hughes was in New Zealand – observing an evangelical meeting with a hundred youthful voices and their boisterous mentors singing, ‘Over and over, like a mighty sea/Comes the love of JESUS rolling over me!’ in a marquee with a large red banner above it reading ‘Children’s Special Service Mission’ and ‘Saved by the Blood of the Lamb’. Iris and her parents probably attended the Crusaders’ Revivalist meetings at the Mariner’s Church in Dun Laoghaire; her journals recall evangelical hymns. Andrew laments that religion in Ireland is a matter of choosing between one appalling vulgarity and another, meaning the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland, more ‘Low Church’, as it was, than Anglicanism in England. He does not mention the famous third term in Lyons’s Irish historiography – the dissenting tradition of (mainly) the North – to which Hughes’s family belonged. Since the novel is set in Dublin, the Non-Conformist tradition is less relevant.
The epilogue to The Red and the Green, set in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War, creates another echo, between the martyrs of Easter 1916 and those of the Spanish war, in which Iris and Frank had taken such interest.73 Frances and Millie might be seen as respectable and louche sides of the same ‘plump’ girl,* both of whom are nearly attached (sexually; or maritally) to Andrew, while secretly loving Pat. Millie wickedly destroys Andrew, and her character is just as interesting an element of the novel as the Easter Rising itself, although some found the crisis, in which four of the book’s menfolk visit her during a single night, ‘just like comic opera’,74 improbable.
The contrast between Millie’s promiscuity and Pat’s fierce chastity – resembling that of the revolutionary Rakhmetov in Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done? (1863) — was overlooked. Irish reviews were generally good. Sean Lucy in the Irish Independent noted how painstakingly Iris had researched, though he quarrelled with the novel’s ‘sometimes intense blend of fantasy and realism’. (The weekly Hibernia, of a later novel, found precisely this blend, which Iris had defended to Harold Hobson,† ‘highly Irish’.) Sean O’Faolain in the Irish Times admired her courage and venturousness, while caring less for her taste for baroque melodrama. He praised the way the ‘twisted poetry in all her work flowers from the reek of common life’.75 Her sometimes uncertain grasp of Irish speech-patterns passed without remark.76
The Easter Rising mistook its enemy. The British government had been ready to cede Home Rule to Ireland. Ulster Presbyterians – often strongly radical in 1798, when Murdochs and Richardsons were conceivably on the same ‘United Ireland’ side – objected to Home Rule in 1912, and should logically have been the target of Nationalist anger in 1916.77 Indeed, while the Murdochs would have been anti-Nationalist in 1916, some Protestant Richardsons, especially after the British executed sixteen ‘rebels’, were pro-independence.78 Within four years of The Red and the Green’s publication, the Troubles recommenced in Northern Ireland, and Iris’s loyalties swung violently. It became the one novel she felt equivocal about.79 It had romanticised violence, idealising the Catholic Nationalist cause, investing in that self-perpetuating mythology of blood-sacrifice on which the IRA fed.
The Troubles were the one topic that could move Iris to tears of anger and distress: ‘One’s heart is broken over Ireland.’80 On that subject she was able henceforth wildly to lose her temper, even with old friends. 12 June 1983: ‘Mary Scrutton [Midgley] here, after being in court in Banbury for breaking the peace at the demo [against Cruise missiles] at Heyford Base! Very good indeed to see her. Argument about Ireland, however.’ She wrote to Midgley defending the hardline Protestant leader Ian Paisley: ‘That he is emotional and angry is not surprising, after 12–15 years of murderous IRA activity … All this business is deep in my soul I’m afraid.’ She now evinced the laager-mentality of the Ulster Protestant who, she felt, unlike Northern Irish Catholics, had no hinterland. No occasion is recorded on which she allowed that Northern Catholics had, in 1968, distinct and legitimate grievances. Honor Tracy, though Catholic, agreed: ‘It is the Stone Age ferocity of the native Irish Catholics in the north which brings these atrocious deeds about.’81 Iris’s brother-in-law Michael Bayley was stationed in Ulster from 1969 for two years; there was a disturbing level of alleged support within the Irish Republic for the IRA. Her cousin Sybil’s husband Reggie Livingston, specialist in vascular surgery at Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital, often operated on and helped save victims of terrorism. One terribly injured visiting notable required fifty-eight pints of blood. His car had had bricks thrown at it; and paramilitaries fired into the operating theatre.
In 1982 Iris remarked, ‘It’s a terrible thing to be Irish.’82 In July 1985, after receiving an honorary Litt.D. at Trinity College, Dublin, ‘I am always disturbed by visiting Ireland – demonic island, so charming & so mad.’83 The pro-IRA attitude of the American Irish she found ‘particularly sickening’.84 Labour Party policy on Northern Ireland was a leading cause in her voting Tory in the 1980s. For her Ireland became ‘unthinkable’. After The Red and the Green it was certainly unwriteable. She tried while gestating The Book and the Brotherhood to oppose within it an Irish Catholic and an Irish Protestant,85 but failed. Her later attitude is prefigured by The Red and the Green’s epilogue, where Ireland in 1938 is bitterly called a ‘provincial dump living on German capital which cannot even make its own cheese'; this is echoed by the Irish Peregrine Arbelow in The Sea, The Sea when he mordantly compares how the Jews suffer – ‘wittily’ – how the Poles suffer – ‘tragically’ – and how the Irish suffer: ‘like a bawling cow in a bog’. Being Irish is so ‘awful’ that even being Scottish is better. Anti-Irish wit is itself an old Irish tradition.
* Tadg in The Unicorn was the Griggs’ golden labrador Crumpet; the papillon Zed in The Philosopher’s Pupil was based on Diana Avebury’s three-legged, shrill-barking Zelda; Anax in The Green Knight on my and my partner Jim O’Neill’s blue merle collie Cloudy.
* In The Flight from the Enchanter, A Fairly Honourable Defeat and The Sea, The Sea.
† In, respectively, The Flight from the Enchanter, The Nice and the Good and A Fairly Honourable Defeat.
* The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot.
* Even her anglophilia, it could be argued, has an outsider’s passion, as in the references in Jackson’s Dilemma to ‘the beauty and nobility of [England’s] history’.
* Although during lean times in the 1960s Iris would, if alerted, send a generous and welcome gift, Victor’s widow Connie recalls meeting her only once; while Rose, widow of Iris’s youngest Bell cousin, and Iris never met.
* Ivy Compton-Burnett remarked (undated) of Iris to Francis King, ‘I do wish that she had not got involved in philosophy. If she had studied domestic science or trained to be a Norland nurse, I’m sure her books would have been much better’ (Francis King, Yesterday Came Suddenly, p.227).
* Mischa Fox killed the little animals he pitied; Iris, who often spoke of how she ‘loved’ all her characters, sometimes ‘coerced’ those characters, like Mischa’s little animals, in patterns that she, not they, have willed. Thus, too, her plots chastise the characters she cherishes.
† ‘The wind is rising; we must attempt the task of living.’
* Marshall Best of Viking wrote to Iris on 16 October 1956: ‘We were all glad to hear from Gwenda David that you are serious enough about your writing to want to give up the University work. I hope you succeed in breaking loose and that other books will burgeon as a result.’ Iris wrote to Vera Crane on 23 November 1957: ‘I will stop lecturing from next summer, & teach a smaller number of hours – which will leave more time to write.’
* Although Iris’s two younger Bell cousins both married Catholics, it might be objected that for an Irish Protestant to identify with a Catholic is itself a patriarchal Ascendancy posture.
* Iris acknowledged her identification with Frances: see Iris Murdoch Newsletter, no. 14, autumn 2000, p.12.
† ‘If fantasy and realism are visible as separate aspects in a novel, the novel is likely to be a failure. If you ask how they are divided in Shakespeare you recognise how meaningless the question is [that Murdoch alternates fantasy and reality]. In real life the fantastic and the ordinary, the plain and symbolic are often indissolubly joined, and I think the best novels explore and exhibit life without disjoining them.’ Harold Hobson, ‘Lunch with Iris Murdoch', Sunday Times, 11 March 1962.