On 17 January 1965, having finished with The Red and the Green, Iris recorded feeling rather lost and lonely without her characters. Shadows of another novel were about, but ‘such grim melancholy stuff’. ‘There seems so little choice,’ she mourned. There was as yet no unifying fire to the new novel, and she sought to stave it off, slow it down. Nonetheless she completed a first draft of The Time of the Angels between April and August, and the second by 17 October. Two weeks later she had decided to re-read the whole of Shakespeare, and studied the plays over four years. ‘I wish I could see what to do to write a masterpiece. I’ve written ten novels and that’s enough. If not a masterpiece now, no point in writing anything. Shakespeare, Shakespeare.’ The contrast between the choicelessness with which her own artistic daemon dictated what she wrote, and Shakespeare’s glorious scope and freedom, preoccupied her.
She sat in the newly enlarged Georgian-green-painted drawing room at Cedar Lodge reading the comedies, starting with The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Much Ado and Midsummer Night’s Dream. ‘An odd experience, not quite like anything else. The plays seem so exceedingly short. One has so filled them out with thoughts & imaginings there is a great aura round each.’ As You Like It had ‘a sort of lucidity I could fawn upon. If only, if only.’ She could sense a new novel waiting, but did not want to ‘whistle’ for it too soon. Henry IV Part I provoked an ‘oh marvellous!’, Troilus the child-like question, ‘With what purpose does Shakespeare have Achilles kill Hector in that sinister way?’
She had started to transfer The Nice and the Good from notebooks to loose-leaf, commenting dispassionately, ‘It looks as if it will be very long.’ The Shakespeare reading-programme continued into 1967 and 1968 when she studied the tragedies, and was, by contrast, ‘absolutely fed up … to the teeth’ by her own Bruno’s Dream. In February 1969 she read Lear and, again, The Tempest, noting, ‘Reading The Tempest immediately tears stream down. Why?’ She thought about that play throughout the spring of 1969. It concerned ‘power undoing itself in favour of love';1 ‘the triumph of spiritual (free) power over magical (obsessional) power’. It was about the ‘role of forgiveness’.2
In the same spirit of self-improvement that led her to study Shakespeare, she dedicated the whole of 1969 to the writing of plays – there would be four – forswearing fiction. She was trying to take seriously those critics who thought she wrote her novels too fast. It occurred to her out of the blue in May that all her novels concerned a conflict between two men. ‘Sometimes this is obvious, sometimes in the background. Jake and Hugo. Randall and Felix. Ducane and Biranne. Miles and Danby. etc etc.’ On 4 June 1969 she wrote in her journal: ‘Still infernally cold. Came out late evening into blue pink dark scene, the evening star shewing very chaste, blackbirds. Star at once vanished behind cloud, got message simply: WAIT. Yes, wait.’ The spirit who said ‘wait’ didn’t tell her whether or not she should work like a demon at something else while she was waiting. She waited, writing plays for a year. Though craving success, she feared herself untalented as a playwright;3 perhaps she hoped play-writing might also improve her fiction. The first play, The Three Arrows, materialised ‘straight on the line from the unconscious’, a place ‘absolutely hidden’ from her view. She abandoned one play – termed only ‘FN’ – in depression. Another, Joanna, Joanna, was (rightly) never performed, but the plot was stolen and improved upon in the novel A Word Child. On the last day of the 1960s ('What a decade!') she felt the shadow of a new novel, An Accidental Man. ‘What comes,’ she noted, ‘is always so very surprising.’ On 13 January 1970: ‘Odd how different the atmosphere of one novel is from another. This new one is a completely different world, an unexpected & somehow unrecognizable one. Where has all this come from?’ She decided simultaneously to write verses for one year before attempting a poem. ‘Now I think rather six months, and then try. That will be till March 9.’ In February she got ‘stuck’ with An Accidental Man: ‘A ghastly feeling of one’s mind deployed as a dreary broken down sort of suburb in some corner of which one is trapped and whining.’ If only, she entreated, ‘my obsessional period as a novelist could be over’. She invoked Shakespeare, praying for some spark from his genius to descend upon her.
Within months of resigning from St Anne’s4 in 1963, Iris was on the staff of the General Studies department of the Royal College of Art on Kensington Gore, with a starting salary of £515 per year, as a one-day-a-week tutor (Wednesdays), drawing a quarter of a tutor’s salary until August 1967.5 Early in their married life the Bayleys had met Lucy and Christopher Cornford while visiting Dominic de Grunne at his French château; Christopher Cornford, Dean of General Studies, invited Iris to teach in June 1963.6 Younger brother of the poet (John) killed in Spain, son of another poet (Frances) and of the great classicist and scholar of Plato (F.M.), at whose house outside Cambridge (Conduit Head) the Bayleys often stayed, he was tall, beautifully mannered, Peter Pan-ish, a wonderful talker without being a gossip, fey, libertarian, aristocratic, a good dancer and squash-player (he liked to win), a strong idealist, a painter.7 In 1958 Christopher and Lucy Cornford and John Grigg weekended at Steeple Aston. They played ‘adverbs’. Christopher, impersonating a Cambridge ‘skit’, told the story of Bertrand Russell coming to the staircase where G.E. Moore was residing and knocking meticulously on Moore’s door. ‘Come in,’ said Moore. ‘Very well,’ ‘Russell’ replied – at this point Cornford produced a masterly imitation of Russell’s excessively slow, precise and deliberate tones – ‘If that – is what – you wish.’ Cornford designed the covers for four of Iris’s novels, starting with The Unicorn.8 He was not a ‘solid administrator’ but an artist by temperament, which caused rows with his first-cousin-once-removed, Robin Darwin, then Principal of the RCA.* Not all agreed that Darwin was the rudest man they had ever met. Some who had known his father claimed he had been ruder. Many thought he did not treat Cornford well. ‘A curious personality. Minotaur, or Ass’s Head? A bit of both. Indeed they are perhaps the same thing,’ Iris commented, finding Darwin attractive.
The RCA in the 1960s was both maverick and small, with only thirty students in the largest department (Painting) and perhaps three hundred in all. It was a splendid anomaly. Funded directly by a Treasury official, it was independent both of local authorities (unlike normal art schools) and (unlike universities) the University Grants Committee. Other art schools were inspected by the Ministry of Education, and taught a centrally examined agreed syllabus: not the RCA. A non-residential postgraduate college, it was also a patrician club with sinecures for friends and relations. Darwin (great-grandson of Charles), who had taught art at Eton from 1933 to 1938, wanted artists and designers to have ‘amused and well-tempered minds’, a wording suggestive of the eighteenth-century clubman he partly was. The Senior Common Room, dear to his heart, moved from Cromwell Road to Kensington Gore around 1961. Fine wines and food were available, wearing a tie was obligatory for men. ‘Extraordinary Members’ included E.M. Forster, John Minton and Francis Bacon, whom Iris wished to meet: ‘I am probably too romantic about painters – I want to project my own dream life as a painter,’ she accurately noted.9 Now she would see the ‘sensual, physical, sexual world of painters and sculptors’10 at first hand. Darwin valued the input of visiting intellectuals. Isaiah Berlin lectured on Marx, Julian Huxley on Darwin and T.H. Huxley, George Steiner excited students with de Sade, Raymond Chandler spoke of writing for Black Mask magazine. Such luminaries as Kenneth Clark, John Betjeman, Elisabeth Frink, John Summerson and ex-student David Hockney visited, or were listed as doing so. As Hockney resentfully, accurately observed, Darwin wanted the RCA to be a university. Specifically, he wanted it to be Cambridge.
Iris rented a small dusty, tidy flat11 at 59 Harcourt Terrace, SW10, off Redcliffe Square, and spent Tuesday and Wednesday nights12 there in term time, The flat was convenient for visiting her mother, now living two Tube stops away at 97 Comeragh Road in Barons Court, and groups of students could be invited for drinks.13 Iris associated London with a ‘holiday feeling’14 – a feeling John in no way shared; Iris alone was the ‘terrific London gadabout’,15 and joy in the city gets into many of her novels. She now had the first London base of her own since 1945. As in 1942, she picked up her Russian lessons, and appears to have thought of sitting Russian O-level.16 Leo Pliatzky, in the Treasury and soon to be Under-Secretary, had at work her identical wartime telephone number: Whitehall 1234. She found Leo at various times difficult, stiff, shy, amorous despite being married, and a useful source of current civil service lore. Such old valued friendships could now be picked up again.
London had greatly changed. Barriers of class and custom and discipline were coming down. The mixture of patrician staff and rebel-bohemian students at the RCA was novel. Ossie Clark and Zandra Rhodes were both students of fashion design; the former’s diaries (published in 1999) show the experimental and iconoclastic drug-taking, sex-obsessed lifestyle that was common to many. Though the students had not necessarily read Witkova’s Born Under Saturn, their lives could be appropriately Caravaggioesque. The rock bands Pink Floyd (studying at the Central School of Architecture) and The Animals (from Newcastle) frequented the student bar; some Film Department students startled Cornford by shooting The Who smashing their musical instruments; Charlie Watts (of The Rolling Stones) married a painting student;17 Ian Dury was another painting student. Reg Gadney, a later RCA tutor (in 1982 he would write a notable four-part adaptation of The Bell for BBC2) who had had a religious upbringing was as shocked, fascinated, delighted and appalled as was Iris by the amorality and anarchism of the students, and by the crackpot rivalries,18 unending scandals and fights, both emotional and sometimes physical, of the staff: the latter may have played some role in her decision, in 1967, to move on.
Cornford and General Studies were disliked equally – his department was seen as a closet of wayward left-wing intellectuals, when other lecturers were anti-intellectual and sometimes right-wing. The Schools of Painting and of Graphic Design were then adjacent to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Although their students – part idiots savants, part half-educated ‘sharp city boys on the make’19 – had to pass General Studies, they still needed an incentive to spend fifteen minutes walking up Exhibition Road to what they persisted in pejoratively calling the Department of Words;20 they had a genuine but mute inspired rapport with their given medium.21
Tutors had latitude as to how they taught. Each of Iris’s students came to a fortnightly tutorial. In 1964–65 she had four tutorial groups,22 working on Sartre, Gabriel Marcel, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and J.S. Mill’s Utilitarianism. Some students wrote dissertations under her supervision. The ‘blurb’ for her course promised exploration of the moral and political ‘mythologies’ which have often found expression in literary form. In 1967 she was looking for a postgraduate student whom she would pay to mark ‘about 40 or 50 I think’ essays on Sartre, as she ‘had to go away’. The person concerned, she wrote to Richard Wollheim,23 need not be a Sartre expert, suggesting no exorbitant expectations on either side.
The Coldstream and Summerson Reports from 1960 to 1962 had urged that all tertiary students have an examinable level of literacy. Gaining a diploma thus became contingent on demonstrating intellectual attainment in a 12,000-word dissertation in General Studies, which was of necessity partly ‘instant culture’, and partly remedial work, as students were of startlingly mixed ability. David Hockney, an RCA student from 1959 to 1962, wished to devote himself to painting without being sidetracked.24 R.B. Kitaj and Hockney had left the year before, Hockney almost failing because his illustrated, hastily written General Studies essay on Fauvism was chaotically argued. An Academic Board subcommittee conveniently found that all the dissertation marks were ‘un-sound’, and Hockney, who had won a Gold Medal for draughtsmanship, gained his diploma.25 The function of the General Studies Department’s courses was, as Iris put it on the RCA interview board to appoint Cornford’s successor in 1979,26 ‘to get artists to read books – to raise their gaze’. Some students, even when literate, had never read a book.
Michael Jaffé called General Studies a ‘home for failed geniuses’. Lance Beales, co-founder with Allen Lane of Penguin Non-Fiction,27 lectured on Contemporary Britain. Jan Hevesy taught two courses on the History of Science, and helped many students suffering with anorexia, for which he was later perhaps unjustly sacked. There were options on the Arts 1789–1918, and 1918 to the present day, and on European Cinema. Dominic de Grunne, teaching African, Polynesian and Chinese Art, and Poetry and Philosophy from 1968, found the students easily bored with the past, which he could bring alive for them only by showing its contemporary ‘relevance’.
Iris gave in 1965–66 twenty-four lectures on ‘Moral and Political Pictures of Man’. Some felt that attending these was like eavesdropping on a soliloquy. She communed aloud with herself, frowning a trifle nervously in a corner about a philosophic problem, while her listeners overheard. Her dissertation topics for 1964–65 are, reasonably enough, lists of her philosophical obsessions: ‘Compare and contrast Mill’s picture of “the good man” with that of Kierkegaard'; and, à propos the latter’s distinction between the ethical and the religious, ‘What are the merits and the dangers of the idea of going “beyond the ethical"?’ She supervised dissertations, gave lectures, group seminars and individual tutorials for extra-curricular discussion. The fashion designer Janice Wainwright found Iris very shy, but noted her interest in collecting details – for example of dress – for her fiction. Wainwright’s friend Sandra Keenan, whom Iris tutored for two years, found Iris ‘amazingly kind’, very good to run ideas past: their discussions ranged beyond her dissertation topic of Women’s Fashions. She was aware that Iris was researching her generation, and thought her too passionate and self-involved for sanctity, but a good person by whom she was not intimidated. The subsequently well-known painter Bill Jacklin’s work was lastingly influenced by a comment Iris wrote at the bottom of his essay on Kant: ‘What about love?’
The Observer wrongly ascribed to the RCA both Pop Art – in fact hatched by the ICA – and Op Art.28 But paradoxically Robin Darwin’s irascible leadership helped promote cultural innovation, partly by offering symbols of the English ‘Establishment’ for the students to attack; partly by supporting the experimental student magazine ARK, attributed with the development, in the 1950s, of a ‘post-modern sensibility';29 also by elevating the status of design for industry and breaking down the division between ‘useful’ applied arts and ‘useless’ fine arts.30 The RCA invented the term ‘graphic design’,31 and arguably also ‘liberal studies’. That the college in the 1950s and 1960s produced so many good painters – Bridget Riley, Kitaj, David Hockney – and talented fashion designers – Zandra Rhodes, Ossie Clark, Janice Wainwright, Hylan Booker – is a tribute less to the teaching (where, outside General Studies, the great names ran from Ruskin Spear to Hugh Casson) than to the fact that the RCA was the only postgraduate art college in the world. It could pick the very best students.
Iris bought an abstract by Christopher Cornford, four Op Art Bridget Rileys and a Roger Hilton. Friendships she made with RCA students were lastingly important to her. She paid for Hylan Booker, ex-USAF, black, from Detroit, to make his first visit to Paris and see collections by Chanel, Balenciaga and Yves Saint-Laurent, helping launch him in a successful career as a fashion designer; when, later, he and A.J. Ayer’s second wife Dee Wells fell in love, she and John stayed with them in New York. The sculptress Rachel Fenner, a rebellious, solitary, working-class ‘good child’ from North Yorkshire, wrote her dissertation under Iris’s supervision on ‘The Imagination as a Moral Tool’, with references to Plato, Jakob Boehme and William Blake. Fenner and Iris’s friendship was close until, in the 1970s, the birth of two sons increasingly preoccupied her. On 21 January 1966, a very cold day with an inch or more of snow with a ‘damp furry texture’, Iris went round to the Sculpture School on Queen’s Gate, watched two students assembling a fibreglass sea serpent, and was impressed.
I feel depressed and limp. Tuesday was good though … Rachel’s whirling bulging Rodinesque Samuel Palmerly forms seemed much more coherent and significant than what I saw of her work last year … The atmosphere of the sculpture school, the very bright lights, the half-finished objects, the debris, the fibreglass on the floor, all this disturbs and moves me.
David Morgan was in his final year as a student of painting during Iris’s first, seeing himself as a Birmingham rebel stuck among preciously genteel painter-tutors (apart from the genuinely eccentric Carel Weight and his protégé, the idiosyncratic Pop artist Peter Blake). He had not read Iris’s books, but as he opened the door of her office with its Goya print, on the top floor of the JCR building at 23 Cromwell Road for a tutorial in April 1964, they ‘recognised’ each other – something clicked. She was pleased by the tough way he at once treated with her ‘as one sovereign state treating with another’. An intense autodidact, Morgan had come through much, including breakdowns, to reach the RCA; Iris was, after years of secret reading, the first really intelligent person to befriend him, to see and speak to his intellectual hunger. The complications of his private life interested her – she was morally appalled and probably unconsciously excited by his treatment of girlfriends – as did the Dionysiac approach to art he shared with other students: a novelist’s voyeuristic frisson was mixed up with the real help she gave. He saw her as ‘feasting with panthers’, and her letter referring to the ‘paint so enchantingly entangled in [his] hair’ links him to Will Boase in Bruno’s Dream, while the subventions his situation then necessitated prefigure Marcus’s to Leo in The Time of the Angels. She came to apprehend his dangerous wildness less as something ‘charming’, increasingly as confused, needing patient understanding. She assured him that their entirely platonic friendship was ‘for life’.
Over successive decades their meetings declined, to his chagrin, from three times a year to a mere once per year. Iris was the main civilising influence in Morgan’s life – sometimes gentle; at other times, when she feared that his ‘delinquency’, which she partly loved, and which he partly acted out as an Iris Murdoch ‘character’ to keep her interested, might compromise her professional standing, very fierce indeed. She could, he felt, make ‘time stand still'; she could also ‘make things happen that only happened when you were with her’. Her admonishing but loving letters to him defend precisely that civility which the 1960s threatened, championing privacy, kindness, loyalty, mutual respect. Soon he was a college lecturer living by some of these values: he would tell her how his teaching was going, and she helped him get it right.
For Iris’s part, Morgan was one of the tiny band of human beings with whom she could ‘really talk’.32 She commented that RCA students were ‘utterly different from Oxford students, they don’t accept anything on trust, they question everything. They’re instantly suspicious of any name you hold up for commendation, religion means nothing to them … they’re wild!’33 She wailed when she felt she was not getting through to these students, and tried anew.34
Paddy Kitchen’s 1970 novel about the RCA, A Fleshly School, chronicles a ‘breaking down of moral responsibility … combined with the supreme will to attainment’.35 Iris’s novels of the later 1960s also employ the iconoclastic ‘wildness’ she encountered at the college as part of their rhetoric. Leo Peshkov, the unlettered, precocious delinquent of The Time of the Angels, actively trains himself in immorality, in lying and stealing. He is a cultural symptom of the collapse of Christian belief, a collapse Iris saw as the central drama of the age. How are we to keep our intellectual and emotional connexion with two millennia of Western art when we no longer understand the inner language from which they were constructed? The disappearance of the age-old symbiosis between art and religion threatened, in her view, the future of both; and imperilled ‘goodness’. Faith’s ‘long withdrawing roar’ is the novel’s topic. Those who cease to believe in God do not believe in nothing. As has been observed, they start to believe in anything. Carel Fisher, the Byronic priest who disbelieves in God, has driven his younger brother Julian to suicide, impregnating his wife from motives of revenge, and now commits incest with his own daughter. He argues that the ‘single Good of the philosophers is a lie and a fake’, and opposes his weak brother Marcus, whose Platonic treatise on ‘Morality in a World Without God’ – clearly echoing Iris’s The Sovereignty of Good – comes to grief, being surreptitiously dependent, like hers, on the theology it is designed to supplant. There is authorial glee in the defeat of the three liberal do-gooders who cannot gain entry to the Rectory where Carel lives, or correct what is wrong within it. Carel, like all Iris’s demons, is given the best tunes.
Suppose the truth were awful, suppose it was just a black pit, or like birds huddled in the dust in a dark cupboard? Suppose only evil were real, only it was not evil since it had lost even its name? Who could face this? … All philosophy has taught a facile optimism, even Plato did so … There is only power and the marvel of power, there is only chance and the terror of chance … All altruism feeds the fat ego … People will endlessly conceal from themselves that good is only good if one is good for nothing.36
‘It is always a significant question,’ Iris remarked, ‘to ask about any philosopher: what is he afraid of?’37 What frightened her was the possibility that Carel, not Marcus, held the truth.38 By giving Carel potent arguments, and also the most disturbing ‘poetry’, Iris partly confronts, even if she cannot outface, her own terror of the now unexplained multiplicity that survives.39 But she also uses him to assert a spiritual vision of the universe willy-nilly, even in the absence of God. Carel’s broodings on power recall Canetti’s disquisitions, just as his ‘dead birds in a cupboard’ – a recurrent theme – recall the Underworld in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a book Canetti favoured.40 Carel argues that ‘there are principalities and powers. Angels are the thoughts of God. Now he has been dissolved into his thoughts which are beyond our conception in their nature and their multiplicity and their power.’ The ‘angels’ of the title are the ‘psychological forces’ which, Iris commented, are now, in the absence of God, working loose, ‘as if they were demons or spirits’.41
‘Principalities and powers’, a phrase borrowed from Romans 8: 38, reappear in The Nice and the Good, pointing to aspects of our apprehension of other people which are not, as in simple realism, ‘inert’ but full of ambiguous power. Iris’s RCA years inspired the character of Jessica Bird, a primary-school English and painting teacher who started as a working-class art student as innocent of any knowledge of Christ as of Apollo, an ‘untainted pagan’ used to making love in the presence of third and fourth parties not out of perversity, but as a manifestation of freedom. This novel is a ‘Song of Innocence’ after The Time of the Angels’ ‘Song of Experience’, set partly in endless summer sunshine, where the earlier book had only choking London winter fog, a summer’s tale after a winter’s tale. While The Time of the Angels was patronised as merely ‘fairy-tale’, The Nice and the Good was greeted as a ‘true novel': Iris’s quiet recovery of Gothic was unfashionably far ahead of its time, years before Angela Carter. It was mainly classified as a diseased attempt at Tolstoyan realism.
The Nice and the Good is also the first of Iris’s novels to recall Shakespearian comedy, in its lyrical meditation, as in the late romances, on the themes of love, forgiveness and reconciliation. Its characters each wrestle with some unhappy past mistake. Paula has suffered the disfigurement of her husband by her lover; Mary Clothier the inadvertent death of her husband in a street accident after a furious row. Mary is given Iris’s figure: ‘Though not formally beautiful, Mary had as a physical endowment a strong confidence in her power to attract.’42 She loves and tries to console the Central European Willy Kost, who may come from Prague. Willy is given Franz’s slight build, his accent, and throughout the book the question Iris commemorated Franz with shortly after his death, ‘What ees eet?’ His face is small and brown, his nose thin, his hands dainty and bony.
Willy nurtures extreme guilt about his betrayal, out of fear, of two people, leading to their deaths in Dachau, a dramatisation of Franz’s self-reproach for abandoning his parents in 1938. Franz had invented the sociology of danger, and the reading of ‘taboo’ that relates it to the sacred. When his friends leave anxious gifts outside Willy’s cottage-door, they are unconsciously appeasing a source of danger, propitiating an ‘alien god’. Franz here is, in Willy, both sacred and taboo. Much about Willy and Mary’s friendship recalls Franz and Iris. When Mary brings him a posy of sweet nettles and arranges them in a wine-glass, Willy comments that, if only he were a poet, he would write a poem about that – a direct reference to the gentians Iris bought for Franz and he arranged in a wine-glass on his return from Spain in 1952, and the poem with which he commemorated this. As Franz did Iris, Willy teaches Mary German, which they read together. He has one habit of Iris’s RCA colleague Frederic Samson, that of jigging around the room to Mozart.43
All the characters are released into an Arcadian world in which love may have supernatural harmonising power, and the poignant mood, like that of Shakespeare’s mature bitter-sweet comedies, is poised between joy and a sad complaisance. Ducane’s expertise in Roman Law probably reflects Fraenkel’s. ‘By the way, since one or two people have asked,’ Iris commented sternly, ‘no one in the book is good,’44 though she had a soft spot for the lively inquisitiveness of the twins Henrietta and Edward with their serendipitous researches – why cuckoos are silent in Africa, how large a breastbone a human being would need in order to fly (fourteen feet, apparently).45 That we should need the novelist to pronounce on the goodness of her characters is remarkable. Why cannot her readers decide unprompted? This is the Iris whose end-of-term report on the human race appears to be ‘Could try harder.’ Sometimes she would announce that in her entire oeuvre, only Stuart in The Good Apprentice and Tallis in A Fairly Honourable Defeat are truly good, and even the latter’s goodness was qualified by his being allegorical. At other times the cast of good characters is longer, but resembles Froebel’s Knights and Ladies, an elect whose salvation is mysteriously earned, by grace rather than by works. The good done by the virtuous is magical overspill: Murdochian saints, like poems, need not mean so much as be. Their very mode of being is a rebuke to the error that surrounds them. Anne Peronett’s virtue in An Unofficial Rose is, we are to understand, guaranteed by her passivity and formlessness; Denis Nolan’s in The Unicorn by his remaining outside the action. The title of The Nice and the Good posed problems for translators (in France it mutated into Les Demi-Justes) and is glossed in the moving late vision of the sympathetic failed gay seeker Theo:
Theo had begun to glimpse the distance which separates the nice from the good, and the vision of this gap had terrified his soul. He had seen, far off, what is perhaps the most dreadful thing in the world, the other face of love, its blank face. Everything that he was, even the best that he was, was connected with possessive self-filling human love.46
‘Niceness’, which thus defines the fallen world we share, is the quality exemplified by Theo’s brother Octavian and his wife Kate, whose ‘golden life-giving egoism and rich self-satisfaction’ procure a measure of security and happiness for the denizens of their court. This echoes John Bayley’s argument about the importance of physical self-satisfaction (samodovolnost) to Tolstoy in the prize-winning book he had just published on that author;47 his argument influenced Iris profoundly, and complicated her rhetoric.48
Thus Bruno’s Dream is happily even more clearly Janus-faced than its predecessor. Frank Kermode noted that Iris expressed herself not only in terms of an ascetic vocation but also, like some of her characters, in terms of a self-interested hedonism. Here the high-minded Gwen, jumping into the Thames in an attempt to save a girl who swims safely ashore, has a heart attack and drowns. The comedy of the novel is at the expense of the stern vision, rendering it complex and satisfying.49 Written during 1967, the last of Iris’s four RCA years, its character Will Boase comes from the same stable as Jessica Bird and Leo Peshkov – a tough, sexy, occasionally violent photographer and house-painter bravely claiming to be working-class when in fact a ‘versatile Bohemianism had rendered him classless’. The book meditates on the Platonic Eros, and the consciousness of each major character is a ‘dream’, which is to say a state of Platonic illusion, not merely that of the eponymous Bruno. Since the novel debates the relations between Love and Death, it is bounded symbolically by Brompton Road cemetery and the Lots Road power station. Iris partly researched its city-scape with the help of Rachel Fenner and her car.
On 21 November 1964 Iris noted: ‘I have got very fond of Frederic [Samson] but he is so melancholic and moody. Refuses to have lunch with me next week. Well, I shall take Rene to the Yardarm.’ One year later she pondered, ‘What is Frederic’s trouble? I don’t know. Perhaps just being Frederic.’50 Soon Samson wrote to her that happy voices in the corridor filled him with anguish and horror. He was tubby, short, grey-haired, gnome-like, unattractive, dirty, a messy eater who took little care of himself, a most endearing loner. He taught European literature at the RCA, but at Cornford’s behest after 1962 also lectured weekly on the History of Ideas to the entire first year, followed by numerous tutorials. Each year he pronounced Kant with a ‘u’, complaining furiously when students laughed. Cornford valued Samson’s wit and wisdom, and published it.51 People confided in him; unshockable, he was a good confessor, calm and wise as well as fussy and touchy. One student recalls his helping her through a depression.52 Another refugee from Hitler’s Germany suffering survivor-guilt, Samson would never discuss what became of his family.53 (When informed of his death in 1981, Iris at once asked whether it had been suicide; possibly he had half-deliberately failed to take the medication for his heart condition.54) He was full of admiration for how he had been treated during wartime internment as an alien on the Isle of Man. On 15 January 1966 Iris wrote:? still find F “difficult” though he talks to me more frankly, talks almost too much, giving endless unclear mystifying panoramas of his past life.’ She noted that he lived in her ‘not with his own life only. He is the latest of my Jewish teachers, of whom the first was Fraenkel and the most beloved Franz.’
Humphrey Spender, tutoring in the Textile Department, observed that Iris and Samson’s friendship thrived on acerbic argument and squabble. Samson liked to challenge and provoke, and could be hostile in disagreement. Iris, too, loved to be challenged. His attitude to women was said to be patriarchal. Certainly he criticised the ‘modern’ music composed by his partner Thea Musgrave. In his top-floor, mysteriously rent-free, Pembridge Villas flat, where his cooking-pans were black, filthily encrusted, he conducted Mozart on an old-fashioned gramophone with a knife and fork.
Much that was going on in the arts filled Samson with despair. The presentation by a third-year sculpture student (for example) of four six-foot plastic elephant turds enraged him, was ‘symptomatic of the disintegration of modern society’. He saw the drooping, bulging, thin bookshelves in his room as another symptom of RCA decline: a student had designed them. During one such diatribe matters went awry with Iris. He had allowed her on 19 January 1966 to attend his class on La Nausée ('Very interesting and moving to see him in action'). During a pub-lunch afterwards at the bottom of Church Street he staggered her by saying – as she thought – quite casually and gratuitously that he thought her novels no good. The remark hit and hurt her much more in retrospect, seeming at moments unforgiveable: ‘I live so near to despair about my work: why go on?’ She wrote to him, and he explained, ‘necessarily truthfully, since he is Frederic’, that he had not said anything about her work specifically, and that she must have misunderstood – or misheard (she was partially deaf*) – some general remark about the unimportance of ‘culture’ and so on: ‘Any bus driver going about his work is of more importance than the whole work of Sartre etc. etc.’ She had heard him in this vein before, and was relieved. Frederic was soon conducting piano concertos for Iris, ‘flitting Puck-like about the room, his curious face all bright and jubilant’.
During the week before this reconciliation she found it hard to do anything but brood about Frederic.
23 January. I feel a total loss of confidence. My present novel isn’t yet strong enough to support me (though by the time it is it will be already ‘spoilt'). Of course faith in my work will return. It goes away often enough anyway for no reason and comes back. But I hope that my friendship with F. is not damaged. I don’t want to talk about my work to people & they don’t have to like my books, but at least they can keep their mouths shut. I must try to be rational about this.
24 January. I don’t really think that all my stuff is worthless, but there’s a large margin of possible error in my judgment of it. The thing I’m starting now will be long and take a lot of effort & thought. Why bother with it? A pain I am feeling I think is loneliness. Yet life here is happy and full of various joys & satisfactions. Puss fairly well at present I think. We have been on one or two good walks in the hard wintry sun, before the snow came.
If her confidence was fragile, her spirits still had resilience. She had told Frederic of the break in her friendship with Fraenkel after Fraenkel had criticised her work – conceivably The Unicorn, where he recognisably inspired Max Lejour. Frederic now suggested that she ‘make peace with the great old man’ – which after a humble letter asking to see him, she duly did. Fraenkel replied at once: ‘Dearest Iris … I thought you had given me up … Friday Feb 4 at 8.30 will suit me ideally. I am looking forward to it as if I were 18 years old and not nearly 78. Yours ever, Edward.’ This letter filled her with joy. The meeting, which she put to use when Gerard re-meets Levquist in The Book and the Brotherhood, happened in Fraenkel’s room in Corpus, where she had, in June 1953, tried to console him after his daughter, during an unhappy love-affair, coolly and courageously planned her (successful) suicide. He had said then that he knew Iris better than many who saw her more, and knew what kind of wisdom it was that she lacked.
There were, as usual, burgundy and cigarettes. Iris wept and Fraenkel embraced her. They talked of Shakespeare, Sophocles, his work on the structure of Greek and Latin prose. He read Cicero. He confessed that, spotting a copy of one of her novels, warmly inscribed, on the table of the person he referred to only as ‘the Regius Professor of Greek’ – Hugh Lloyd-Jones – he had feared she had abandoned him. She had not sent him this novel as it post-dated their quarrel; he had felt slighted that another professor had been so favoured. She laughed about this afterwards. She walked back with him to his house on Museum Road, feeling ‘great love for him, & shame and surprise at my senseless dereliction … When I am with him knowledge & ideas seem to flow from him & into me quite automatically. Great teacher, great man … I love him, & love him physically too. It was marvellous to touch him again.’ She sent him copies of two novels, and dedicated The Time of the Angels to him later that year.
In September 1969 Iris noted a ‘vacancy for a close woman-friend’. Neither Honor Tracy nor Esmé Ross Langley,55 founder of the lesbian magazine Arena 3 and for a while that autumn in love with Iris, fitted the bill. When Honor, eighteen months earlier, complained that Iris did not write her ‘real letters’, she replied with an enigmatic love-letter ‘ (more than she bargained for?)’, and awaited her reply ‘with interest!’. There was ‘eternally’ Philippa, who, Iris rather earlier noted, represented ‘a great reserve of good’ on which Iris had ‘never really called’,56 and who in December 1967 moved Iris by speaking of the importance to her of their friendship. Their relationship, Iris noted, had its own oddnesses. In May 1968: ‘Saw Philippa Thursday & stayed night. Time and space problems. I am still a bit afraid of P, I think. She is numinous, taboo.’ Iris long feared Philippa as a wise judge. There were ‘people who, though much loved, remain [ed] sinister witnesses from the past’.57 Their brief and tentative physical affaire in 1968 happened at Iris’s insistence – it was, Philippa saw, somehow important for Iris, who felt that only thus could remaining barriers be conclusively removed. Iris found it hard to explain to Philippa that Philippa’s ‘compulsion to act the tyrannical princess child’ where Iris was concerned satisfied her own ‘rather specialized love for the tyrant': it was as if Philippa presented an immovable object, was the one person Iris could never entirely seduce. This was not, it appeared, the way that they could best express their love for each other.
Philippa, like other friends, would read each of Iris’s novels once, fast, and with varying degrees of recognition. There was a passing resemblance between the predicament of the steel-corseted Elizabeth in The Time of the Angels enduring the incestuous visits of her father and her own distinctly more prosaic plight in 1942, corseted in plaster-of-Paris with suspected abdominal TB, having tutorials in her digs from Thomas Balogh and Donald MacKinnon. Paula in The Nice and the Good is a portrait of Philippa, divorced, foxy-faced, revered college friend of Mary/Iris, an uncompromising person whom Mary experiences as an unconscious prig. The strength and clarity of Paula’s being, her meticulous accuracy and truthfulness operate as a reproach to the mediocrity and muddle which Mary feels to be her own natural medium. (Verisimilitude is soon exhausted: details of Paula’s marriage, divorce and remarriage do not correspond to Philippa’s life.) The symmetrical exchange of lovers between Lisa and Diana at the end of Bruno’s Dream has clear echoes of Seaforth: here was the dragon-myth eating its own tail whose compulsive takeover of her plots Iris would from time to time complain about. That Diana and Miles take the altruistic Lisa in as a ‘bird with a broken wing’ recalls Michael and Philippa’s taking Iris in at 16 Park Town after the failure of the David Hicks engagement; Diana’s pained witnessing of Lisa and Danby’s final happiness echoes Iris watching Michael and Philippa’s happiness in 1945. (This account presents Lisa/Diana as doubles: probably how Iris sometimes saw Philippa.) Iris further noted to Philippa her own resemblance to Morgan, the ‘swinish’ emotionally obtuse heroine of A Fairly Honourable Defeat, of whose censorious elder sister Hilda Morgan is afraid.58 After 1970 Philippa took visiting posts in the United States, at Cornell, MIT, Princeton and UCLA; Iris and John stayed with her twice. The friendship was sustained by meetings on Philippa’s frequent return trips to Oxford, and by regular correspondence. There was no decade of her adult life in which this friendship was not important to Iris, or celebrated by her as such. Philippa, unlike some of her needier women-friends, ‘never needs cheering up’, and could give as well as take.
Iris’s ‘vacancy for a close woman-friend’ had arisen when Brigid Brophy fell in love with the writer Maureen Duffy: drinking champagne in early May 1968 with Brigid and Maureen ‘was like conversing with two amiable strangers’. Iris had met Brigid Brophy and her husband Michael Levey, then Assistant Keeper at the National Gallery, at the 1954 Cheltenham Literature Festival when Under the Net was runner-up to Brophy’s novel Hackenfeller’s Ape, which won the prize for a first novel. Brophy was Irish-descended, a brilliant, coolly witty novelist, typified by the Observer as a 1960s enfant terrible, a campaigner against marriage, the Vietnam war, factory farms, hunting and fishing, religious education in schools; and for Greek in schools, bisexuality, vegetarianism and Fanny Hill. She fought successfully with Maureen Duffy for a Public Lending Right, which would entitle authors to a payment each time one of their books was borrowed from a library.59 With much of this (apart from religious education in schools, which she favoured), Iris would have concurred, especially the shared love of Greek; both supported Harold Wilson’s Labour Party in the 1964 general election. This was, both intellectually and emotionally, an important relationship, complicated by Iris’s skill at blurring the line between love and friendship. Not everyone could figure out exactly what it was that she wanted. Levey suspected that Brigid found Iris ‘strangely secretive … Whom she might be seeing later in the day, for instance, was often shrouded in mystery: “a person” was about all she vouchsafed. Such things made Brigid laugh a lot.’60
In November 1955 Brophy sent Iris ardent, witty letters and telegrams. Soon they exchanged verses pastiching Marvell’s ‘To his coy Mistress’. In 1956 Iris recorded calming Brophy’s urgency, vividness, wildness with ‘great generalities about love. There is a place for them here.’ Brophy’s gift that year of her novel The Grown Princess was, inscribed ‘For Iris with regret’. In 1962 Brophy made Iris dedicatee of her novel Flesh, making a collage of the cover of the copy she gave Iris so that it read, skittishly, ‘Flash, a navel by Brigid Bardot’. In 1964 Iris reviewed Brophy’s The Snow Ball; she disliked reviewing, now did it rarely, and always as a favour to friends: ‘There are novels one inhabits and others one picks up in one’s hand. Perfection may belong to either. Miss Brophy’s very beautiful new novel … belongs to the pick-able-up class'; she admired its ‘sheer artistic insolence’.61 Since her journals never normally record her well-attested pleasure in reading John Cowper Powys and Yukio Mishima, or mention contemporary fiction in general, ajournai note praising Brophy’s Firbankian Finishing Touch – described by its author as ‘lesbian fantasy’ – suggests real admiration, not propitiation.
On 8 July 1964 Brigid wrote: ‘I am not determined to do anything except create that monument which our two extraordinarily opposing geniuses are designing. (It will be a regular baroque monster of the interpretation of opposites.)’ In May 1965: ‘I will bloody conduct the moon and stars in your praise!’ Iris made a gift to her of the manuscript of Under the Net, which Brophy, with Iris’s agreement, sold for the small sum of £500 to Iowa University in spring 1967.62 Iris’s later manuscripts were accordingly also sold to Iowa. When Brophy later succumbed to multiple sclerosis, Iris managed the tricky business of bedside visiting with ‘instinctive tact'; Michael Levey could not forget his debt to Iris.63 In 1985, not long before Brophy’s death, Iris nominated her Palace without Chairs in the TLS as deserving to be better known,64 and dedicated The Good Apprentice to her.
The friendship grew when Leveys visited Bayleys at Steeple Aston, and Iris saw both in London; for years Brigid and Iris would go away for a weekend break. Neither husband felt excluded. This friendship was neither without astringency nor without resilience. ‘We writers are a strange crew’, Iris wrote in The Black Prince – ‘strange’ meaning jealous, touchy, vain. Francis King met the Bayleys at parties given by Olivia Manning, who felt Iris to be overpraised, while she herself was underpraised. To King’s pleasantry ‘In the house of literature are many mansions,’ Manning retorted, ‘But why do I have to be accommodated in an attic while Iris is always given the Royal Suite?’65 Possibly resentment of ‘overpraise’ lay behind Brophy’s 1958 letter accusing Iris of producing each year one more clay foot after another; also Brophy’s ‘very beastly’ letter awaiting Iris in mid-April 1966 on return from a West Country visit with John, aborted by a blizzard. This was two months after the misunderstanding with Samson was resolved. If the pangs of disprized love also played their part, the immediate trigger was Iris’s joking about Brigid’s ‘destructive’ work-in-progress with Michael Levey and Charles Osborne – Fifty Works of English and American Literature we Could do Without:66
Pages of violence in return accusing me of dishonesty etc. & having been a ‘poor girl who just made it into a rich girls’ school’ and who consequently wants to, I forget what, conform or something.
Iris, who found such outbursts ‘just vile, & terrifying’, pondered whether ‘real full-blooded hate’ underlay Brophy’s apparent devotion: ‘I dislike her so much at the moments when she is malignant – & that dislike is depressing & awful.’ The following day she felt rotten, shivery, as if with ‘flu.
Trying to work on philosophy. Feel sure it is all in Plato. Yet – Idiocy of my annoyance with BB. I recognize this as evil. My absolute Luciferian pride is hurt. That anyone cd call ME dishonest. Can one recognize the comparative (partial) injustice, & yet not resent at all? How is this done?
Nine days later, returned from Bristol with Brigid, she heard, in the early hours, the year’s first cuckoo. On ringing Little Grange the housekeeper announced that BMB’s life-companion Miss Rendali ('LJR') had just died. It had been absolutely sudden, a great shock. Iris went round the next morning to see BMB, who was approaching ninety. She was almost crippled with rheumatism but otherwise wonderfully herself, and very steady about LJR: ‘such force and lucidity, such sheer virtue – a marvellous woman’. During this trip Brigid’s eye was taken in the market of a West Country town by some small object, which Iris bought for her as a keepsake.67
The disjunction between the apparent aggression behind Brophy’s letter68 and the peaceable West Country visit is striking. Friendships have foundered on less, especially between writers, and Iris had then, not least where rudeness from a woman-admirer was concerned, a short fuse: her eyes would flash, her fists and teeth clench, even if there were no audible explosion. A propitiatory letter might follow. The friendship with a ‘devoted’ painter who portrayed Iris unflatteringly was said to have been damaged in this manner. Iris had wondered how to recognise the comparative (partial) injustice of Brophy’s attack, and yet not resent it at all. How was this done? Unlike the many who make out of jealousy and hatred a career, Iris found the experience of dislike not just theoretically wrong, but also deeply disturbing and un-aesthetic. One’s ego is often engaged, she accurately wrote, ‘with sorting and filing damage done to its vanity';69 she sought a way of not dwelling on grievance, indeed of transmuting it and finding a larger perspective. She had had a waking vision of ‘the great void’ of Kant’s Categorical Imperative* while lying in bed the previous month on 13 March.
One knows nothing except that the command is empty and yet absolute. An emptiness which lies beyond anything one knows of as love. Love as possessing, or grasping, or filling of self must be passed beyond. What lies beyond is scarcely recognizable as love. Yet love is the way & the only way.
The search for such self-transcendence is, in her fiction, philosophy and journals alike, a recurrent theme.70 For those sceptical about – or repelled by – such high-minded rhetoric a 1983 novel offers alternative descriptions: ‘Thus Tom enlarged his ego or (according to one’s point of view) broke its barriers so as to unite himself with another in joint proprietorship of the world.’71 Proust would habitually take out to dinner at the Ritz the hostile and uncooperative. It was his way of never relinquishing the upper hand. Iris, as we have seen, hated what she called ‘mislaying’ friends; and all release of spirit, she observed, is necessarily ambiguous.
In the summer of 1967 Brigid fell in love with Maureen Duffy, and talked of her and Iris’s friendship in the past tense. Iris began to take in that she had really cut the painter. Brophy wrote, ‘You and I are such a network; we’re three-dimensional chess.’ Iris had persuaded Brophy that a ‘sufficiently diffused eroticism’ might last forever. Brophy had now decided that biology was not to be cheated in this way. Iris felt ‘a certain pain but mainly a kind of shock of relief, a sense of liberation & larger new possibility. The feathers are off Cherubino’s hat.’ She noted feeling ‘rather lonely & full of hungry affections’, relieved at the disappearance of a ‘rather reluctant tied sense of responsibility I had about? – need to see her every week etc.’
Rummaging in an old chest in the autumn of 1968, Iris discovered a set of her diaries, running continuously, it seemed, from 1945 onward. As far as she could see she had kept up her journal-writing with remarkably few gaps. She hardly dared look at the references to Philippa, Elizabeth Anscombe, MacKinnon, Wallace Robson, etc. etc. ‘Christ. Rather awful actually, this continuity of one’s life. When seen all together, that business of falling in love with A, then with B, then with C (all madly) seems a bit sickening. The idea of being somehow “faithful” to it all seems a bit abstract – and thoroughly out of date!’ November was a depressed time of year. ‘The garden is dulled. First damp cold days.’ The diary-discovery shook and saddened her.
Why? Just passage of time, perhaps, sense of growing old, of being less beautiful than on the morning when Michael O[akeshott] kissed my feet. The passions which have just gone away and the things one has forgotten.
She remembered her ‘world-renewing’ struggles to free herself from obsession with Balogh in 1947, three years after that affair ended, and from ‘the Chumman’ in 1963. She did not feel too much identification with
the ass that I was, yet this judgement is just as unimportant. How little work figures in this record – except for philosophy as I used to do it, and that very boring. The things which deeply sustain – puss, the novels – get little mention. Of course there is less obvious drama now & the tone has changed a bit.
Marriage and success had attenuated the drama. During 1966 – and what she later termed the summer of ‘the three Ss’ ('A warning: one is irrational in summer’72) – she underwent the revival of an old attachment to the philosopher Stuart Hampshire, and the inauguration of two newer ones, to the architectural critic Stephen Gardiner and to Scott Dunbar, Canadian and gay, writing his thesis at King’s College on the philosophy of religion even though, like Iris, not a believer.73 (Though so frequently in love, she tried to apply a ‘strict set of rules’ for putting on the brakes which John, ‘the kindest man I’ve ever met’, approved, never wanting to hear details; rules honoured in the observance as well as, sometimes, in the breach.) She noted that ‘I think Stephen has his own troubles. Stuart prefers to remain an enigma.’ Though all these friendships were durable, only Scott in 1967 looked then like proving ‘something like a permanency, a real friend’. In December 1966: ‘How lonely I was all those years [ago] … Now, such good friendships: Frederic [Samson], Richard [Wollheim], Stephen [Gardiner], Dominic [de Grunne].’
Richard Wollheim invited Iris to give three lectures at University College London on ‘good’ and ‘will’ starting on 3 November 1966, surprising her ‘pleasantly’ by the schoolmasterly authority with which he dealt, after she had already agreed, with her subsequent ‘craven indecision’ and ‘funk’. A characteristic card before the first lecture enquired ‘where exactly I’m to be at 11 am. (it is 11a.m.?) on Thursday (It is Thursday?) … Feel awfully nervous.’ Though she wrote the lectures out and read them verbatim with her head down, they nonetheless went very well.
She was asked to Cambridge to give the Leslie Stephen lecture exactly one year later, in November 1967. The subject she chose was ‘The Sovereignty of Good over other Concepts’. This was to form the third essay in a hundred-page monograph D.Z. Phillips commissioned for the series Studies in Ethics and Philosophy of Religion, which he edited for Roudedge & Kegan Paul. He wanted her to include the essay ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’ from 1956, which he thought would make the book more various, but she refused. The Sovereignty of Good, as it was entitled, was never conceived of as a book, and such coherence as it has is fortunate, not designed. This may account for the fact that while it pleads for what has since been called ‘Virtue Ethics’, it pays no tribute to the pioneering work already done towards that end by Elizabeth Anscombe or Philippa Foot.74 It is nonetheless rightly Iris’s best-known work of philosophy, and its influence has grown since publication in 1970. It was fiercely original. To ‘come out’ then as a Platonist in morals seemed as bizarre as declaring oneself a Jacobite in politics.75 The book was a passionately argued attack on both Anglo-Saxon and French orthodoxies, the fruit of a thorough professional involvement with the school of thought to which it was opposed. It also lucidly proposed a powerful and interesting ‘rival soul-picture’.76 The Sovereignty of Good was said to have returned moral philosophy to ‘the people’, those ‘not corrupted’ (sic) by academic philosophy: lay readers gained illumination from it, as well as philosophers. Like Iris’s immature philosophies – Marxism, Existentialism, Anglo-Catholicism – it was a call to action, a programme for human change, this time by the lonely individual herself, with no help from party or priest. It located value, perhaps unusually for so passionate a Platonist, within attention to good things in this life, as well as in the spiritual quest itself.
To the biographer, one interest lies in how Freud is enlisted to deck out Plato’s ‘great Allegory’ of the Cave and the Sun, which becomes in Iris’s handling of it an account of how the lonely human soul struggles towards enlightenment. In this fable the unreconstructed human soul is imprisoned in a cave, deluded by the shadows dancing on the wall, shadows which are thrown by puppets manipulated between the prisoner’s back and the fire. There are stages in the path to liberation.* Learning to turn around to see the fire, a first step, means – for Iris – discovering the ego. This casts its own heat and light, but by it she thought the ‘moral pilgrim’ might be detained on her ascent towards the sun – the ego being a false sun. Freud, whose demonstration that we are fundamentally un-free since enslaved to unconscious impulse she thought ignored by a facile liberalism, wanted to make men workable; Plato wanted to make men good. Hence Iris’s growing antagonism towards psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, which might delay the pilgrim. This hostility, David Pears believes, may have started when Harold Solomon, a postgraduate student at Oxford, gassed himself whilst in analysis, in 1959. Her journal entries before 1960 are sympathetic (in 1953 the economist Paul Baran, ‘since he is Jewish, ex-communist and has been psychoanalysed … can’t but have some wisdom!’77).
Stuart Hampshire had a serious row with Iris at All Souls around 1960 about the depth of her understanding of evil, at a time when he was entering psychoanalysis, of which she by then theoretically disapproved, a disapproval which gets into the novels. The psychoanalyst Palmer Anderson in A Severed Head is a demon; the psychotherapist Blaise in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine a temporiser, sexual cheat, and poor listener who reduces experience to formulae; while only Thomas McCaskerville in The Good Apprentice, having given up all faith in his subject as a ‘science’ and turned to Buddhism, is a good therapist. In The Black Prince Freudians are reducers, simplifiers, diminishers, and indeed the Freudian Francis Marlow’s epilogue offers a fatuous reduction of the novel’s events. At the Psychoanalytic Society in London in April 1988 Iris duelled remorselessly with the writer and analyst Juliet Mitchell on this subject, and would allow analysis only demerits: the analyst had illicit power which he might abuse, and abuse sexually; only a ‘saint’ could be a therapist (and there are no good men or women). She felt that psychoanalysis generated self-concern, gave too abstract and crude a picture to account for human variousness, left the spiritual out of account. She disputed Hampshire’s view that a ‘perfect analysis’ could ever make us wholly self-aware. Our energy should in any case be turned outwards in close loving attention towards the quiddity of the world, not inwards, which tended to reinforce habitual pattern.
In practice Hampshire was one of many friends whose progress under analysis Iris took an interest in; nor was she so foolish as to fail to see that, when miserable, there are worse fates than employing a decent therapist. In an unpublished interview with David Pears78 she got unconsciously close to another and interesting objection: analysis might ‘solve’ an artist’s conflicts, without which she would lose the need to create. It is paradoxical that to a number of close friends Iris acted as mother-confessor or wise counsellor – which is to say roughly a therapist – making no objection to any love-'transference’ entailed. It mattered to her that she be worthy of the role. Elsewhere, ‘If you are a writer, you psychoanalyse yourself anyway.’79
Richard Wollheim, Frank Kermode and Iris agreed in May 1968 to express solidarity with the rebellious French students in a joint letter opposing ‘Les Sclérotiques’.80 Francophilia presumably played a part here, for in Oxford two years later, shortly after a party at 10 Downing Street, John, Iris and lecturer in German David Luke went to a sit-in at the Clarendon Building. Students were occupying university buildings as an act of protest.81 They were let in.
(Cries of Yes! for puss. I think they didn’t recognize me at first.) I talked briefly to the meeting but not eloquently. It felt frightening (mob-rule, however polite) & somehow nasty. Stupid people exercising power.
She put a student riot into her play Joanna, Joanna, written during 1969, and had surely been influenced in the interim by student treatment of Fraenkel, about whom she and Hampshire had a furious row. Hampshire saw Fraenkel as a frail human being, with ordinary imperfections (which he believed she overlooked), as well as a great scholar. She complained that the undergraduates did not ‘respect’ Fraenkel. Hampshire entirely saw why. For him, if you wanted a professorial adversary to challenge, you could not choose a better: ‘pompous, Germanic, show-off, dominant, boastful, embarrassing, oppressive, humiliating those who were bad at writing Greek prose …’. He feared that Iris could not see the human being at all, just this ‘golden figure’. (She had, it was said, nonetheless been affronted when Fraenkel harassed a student she sent to him.) There was an analogous row with John Simopoulos, who objected both to her piety about Ducane in The Nice and the Good merely because he was an All Souls’ scholar, and to his anachronistic use of schoolboy slang. ‘No one has said “What a terrific ass I am!", for forty years!’ he objected. Iris was very angry. Both Hampshire and Simopoulos feared – as did Samson – that she was growing reactionary.82 Indeed, in Sovereignty she argued that ‘we cannot be as democratic’ about moral philosophy ‘as some philosophers would like to think’.83 While welcoming the liberalisation of the law against homosexuality, and (presumably) the abolition of hanging and the easing of the divorce laws, Iris feared the erosion of authority the 1960s represented.
Two weeks before the sit-in at the Clarendon Fraenkel’s wife Ruth, who had more tact and a greater sense of humour than he did, died. He took a large overdose of barbiturates in order to follow her. He was eighty-one. ‘There was no doubt about his intentions.’84 Fraenkel’s work always came first: indeed Ruth, despite having a Ph.D., had given up a promising academic career on marriage to act as his secretary and research assistant. Yet he would save up and list items for discussion with her, indicating love as well as pedantry. Maurice Bowra85 wrote to Iris, ‘How wise of Ed to follow his wife so soon. I saw him on Wednesday and he looked very old & shrunken.’ She also had seen him, earlier that term, on the opposite side of the High. Fearing that he did not like sudden encounters in the street, she had not crossed. She felt so sad at this passing ‘- and sad for myself as one always does’.
* Darwin was Principal from 1948. In 1967, when the Royal College of Art acquired university status, he became Rector.
* Iris had been diagnosed as partially deaf in March 1954. She wrote in her journal: ‘It is “real” deafness, failure of reception. Likely to get worse, & no cure except amplifiers & lip-reading. I went for my first lip-reading lesson yesterday with a comic woman in the Radcliffe.’
* ‘The formal moral law in Kantian ethics, based on reason … opposed to hypothetical imperatives, which depend upon desires.’ Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. T. Honderich (Oxford, 1995), p.125.
* ‘The first reorientation is from pure fantasy to self-knowledge. The second (emergence from cave) from self-knowledge to a confused other-regard. In the cave, the shadows come to be seen as shadows, but without a sense of the outside world.’ Journal, 1 October 1968.