Critics had at first placed Under the Net, with its Dryden epigraph (‘’Tis well an old-age is out/And time to begin a new …') as the work of an ‘Angry Young Man’. Iris was neither a man, young, nor angry, and had not then read Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. Yet – and despite the fact that the relationship of her work with the political was not simple – politics always interested her. In 1958 she wrote an essay propagating Guild Socialism for a landmark collection of left-wing political articles entitled Convictions:,1 in 1962 she campaigned for nuclear disarmament;2 in 1964 she wrote a long article for the magazine Man and Society arguing for the legalisation of homosexuality.3 After homosexuality was decriminalised in Britain in 1967 she lent her support to Senator David Norris’s campaign to legalise it in Ireland.4 (Honor Tracy, who saw Iris as a liberal intellectual who ‘insists on feeling Responsible, and – as far as she can – Guilty’, joked heavy-handedly to Iris that she was herself ‘now working night and day to get bestiality recognized’.5) Iris campaigned against the Vietnam war6 and rowed passionately with Leo Pliatzky, who contested her view that American policy was wicked.7 She wrote twice to The Times in 1968, first attacking the British government for keeping the French student activist Daniel Cohn-Bendit out of the country ('What has happened to the nation in whose museum reading room Karl Marx worked unmolested?'), later opposing the Nigerian war against Biafra.8 She went on demonstrations for political prisoners in Russia* and helped agitate for, then delighted in the release of, the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky in 1976.
Bukovsky’s bravery made him an iconic figure for Iris, one whose life showed, like Frank’s, that ‘history could be made to bow before the sheer stubbornness of a human conscience’.9 Her friendship also mattered greatly to him. After smuggling to the West documented case histories of dissenters falsely classified as insane, he had himself been branded a mentally deranged criminal, spending fourteen years in Russian asylums and prison camps. He received a further twelve-year sentence in 1971, but was exchanged, after five years, for a Chilean Communist. Iris befriended him, noting how on his arrival in Britain he appeared, though only thirty-five, a pale and tense old man; he later regained his earlier beauty. In 1992 she wrote to her Member of Parliament requesting a copy of the Maastricht Treaty, of which, though broadly pro-European, she felt suspicious:10 ‘in France it was distributed to all electors’.11 She was also an advocate of the sadly short-lived Irish Peace Movement.12
Education engaged her most: ‘To stir people’s imagination, to explode in their imagination – a good teacher can do this so that the pupils are never the same again.’13 Such a teacher, she told a friend embarking on a teaching career, might utilise ‘a certain sadism but ideally this should be entirely veiled’. In 1960 she entered a Times debate about offering women a ‘softer’ education, which struck her forcibly as the wrong way to protect them from their current position as ‘second-class citizens’.14 It was the emphasis on visiting schools and colleges that caused her to agree to accompany Julian Mitchell, Adrian Henri and John McGrath on the second Arts Council Writers’ tour, to Lancashire, in March 1969. They made twenty-one such visits in a week.15 The comprehensivisation of secondary schools provoked first a letter to The Times defending selective education in 1973;16 then an article, ‘Doing Down the Able Child: A Socialist’s Case for Saving our Grammar Schools’ in the Sunday Telegraph17 (famously reprinted in Black Paper 3 on Education18); and helped trigger her voting Conservative in 1983 and 1987. She wrote a long article-review on education for the New Statesman in 1977.19 The Tory attack on the independent funding of higher education prompted in 1988 a four-page letter expressing Very strong feelings’ to Kenneth Baker, then Secretary of State, and helped bring her back to Labour, for whom she voted in 1997. She drafted notes ‘on the teaching of English in schools’, probably for Baker, in 1988, and gave to the one ‘saint’ of her books, Stuart in The Good Apprentice (1985), the profession of schoolteacher.
In 1968 Iris remarked that she wanted to write a novel about either Vietnam or the colour bar.20 Her daemon, however, had other plans. Politics were, she accurately saw, ‘not in her blood’. She felt ‘ordinary private things close, politics not’.21 Her unpublished trades union novel ‘Jerusalem’ had been a failure, never bridging private and public worlds. Mor’s pro-Labour views are unconnected to the life of The Sandcastle, a romance. The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), purporting to deal with the tensions between Marxism and liberal humanism, indeed gives us two ‘casebook’ welfare problems, in the chronic unemployment of Gulliver Ashe and the guilty misery of the potential single mother Tamar Hernshaw, who has her baby aborted. The first is cured by Ashe’s kindness to a snail, the second by a magical ritual dreamt up by a priest. Possibly one reason for Iris’s popular success lies in exactly this inaccessibility of the private to the public world. Post-war England increasingly rejected the good society in favour of the good relationship, isolating the self as the main site left for significant change. And criticisms here miss the point. Iris’s gift is poetic, mythological, fabulous. It is not sociological – as, soberly, she acknowledged: the patterns holding up her work were ‘sexual, mythological, psychological and not the great hub of society which a nineteenth century writer relied on’.22 As Siegfried Sassoon said of Walter de la Mare: ‘(S)he makes you see the world with “re-christened eyes".’
George Orwell had pondered whether a ‘merely moral’ criticism of society might not be just as ‘revolutionary’ as ‘politico-economic’ criticism, the defects of society being the defects of the heart writ large.23 But how to get society ‘in'? The modern novel, Iris agreed with Canetti in 1953, having lost the structure given by ‘society’ in the nineteenth century, must create its own structure by the ‘complete creation of a myth’. Her own rousing, brilliant early polemical essays – ‘Against Dryness’, ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ – pleaded none the less for a return to the strengths of nineteenth-century fiction, for a novel combining the social and the psychological, not separating the individual character and the type. These essays are a poor guide to her achievement. A.S. Byatt, impressed and puzzled by the singular ‘forms’ of the novels, found the essays while researching her pioneering study of Iris’s first seven novels, Degrees of Freedom (1965). Byatt later blamed any astringency in her study, which partly demonstrated the shortfall between Iris’s essays and her novels, on the influence of F.R. Leavis.24 The critic Christopher Ricks endorsed Byatt the same year, arguing that Iris’s novels ‘exemplify what she most deplores … her beliefs and intentions [are] admirable, relevant, and almost completely unachieved’.25 Iris condemned her inability to create memorable, free characters as a ‘spiritual’ failure.26 Ricks, on the whole, agreed.
The number of persecuted maidens imprisoned in remote enclosures in Iris’s work* presumably lay behind Malcolm Bradbury’s perceptive argument (by contrast) that she had been wrongly taken for a ‘realist’ when she wished to explore romance-forms, and that her sense of the limitations to human freedom was far larger and more pessimistic than Byatt understood.27 It is a tribute to the rhetorical force of Iris’s essays that critics began by castigating her novels for their failure to live up to her own precepts: they trusted more the teller than the tale. To do so is to default on what Samuel Johnson argued was the primary duty of the critic: to ‘exhibit his manner of being pleased’. As the novelist Paul Bailey astutely observed, if many of Iris’s books appeared to function with the mechanism commonly associated with bedroom farce, so then does a supreme work of art like Cosi fan tutte.28
A.S. Byatt’s British Council pamphlet on Iris in 1976, by contrast, saw a conflict between her desire to have a strong ‘apprehensible shape’29 – leading to her writing ‘closed’ Gothic novels like The Unicorn – and an opposing desire to set her characters free – leading to novels like The Bell. Here Byatt suggests that the inspiration of Shakespeare helped Iris combine both satisfactions, learning to release her characters, but within plots as brazenly contrived as those of Shakespearian comedy itself. Byatt celebrated Iris as simultaneously bravely ‘mandarin and sensational’, implying that neither her seriousness ('mandarin') nor her popularity ('sensational') required apology. Iris Murdoch was that rare species, a serious novelist who was also genuinely popular. Like Shakespeare, she wanted, as John noted in 1955, ‘something for everyone’ in her novels.30
In 1968 Iris declared herself ‘profoundly bored with my thoughts, notably with the whole long (ten years long at least) train which led up to “The Sovereignty of Good". Not that I think this is all “wrong” but I just sense it as fearfully limited and partial.’ Christopher Cornford had written that her ‘account of human nature & the good isn’t apparently historical … it treats the situation as perennial’. It left out of account the evolution of consciousness. Iris’s journals explore her doubts throughout 1968, the year that she was writing A Fairly Honourable Defeat. She noted a number of friends, such as David Morgan and John Simopoulos, who lived ‘right outside my comfortable Platonism. What about them? Have I come to the end of the path which started many years ago when I first read Simone Weil and saw a far off light in the forest? The woodcutter’s house! Hardly an arrival.’
Although her 1982 Gifford lectures – published as Metaphysics as a Guide to Moráis – would still show the imprint of Plato and Simone Weil, her journals and fiction alike after 1968 criticise and test her own ideas. 6 January 1969: ‘I used to think Good was more important than free because political freedom cd look after itself, theoretically at any rate. Now – perhaps it is goodness that can look after itself?’ She wondered whether Bruno’s Dream enacted the end of her subjection to Weil’s puritanism; and of A Fairly Honourable Defeat she noted: ‘Deplatonisation … running the whole machine into the ground.’ She prayed to be able to ‘stifle’ her own high-mindedness.
Marcus, the Platonist of The Time of the Angels, lost his nerve and abandoned his monograph. A Fairly Honourable Defeat came out the same year as The Sovereignty of Good, and Rupert, its Platonist, has his work physically torn up by his son Peter together with the devilish Julius King. Rupert ends up drowned in his swimming-pool – dead, Julius comments, of vanity. Iris’s sacrifice of Rupert could be seen as symbolic. Rather as Rupert and his wife Hilda make monthly payments to Oxfam as a talisman against loss of their super-abundant good fortune, so Iris sacrifices the character whose views most closely resemble her own, as a safeguard against the hubris of publicising her own philosophical views.
A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which rewrites Much Ado About Nothing in 1960s South Kensington, is one of her most satisfying, inaugurating a period of artistic maturity. Its painstakingly slow first half establishes the relationships within the small court with a cast of characters who are interesting, believable, even memorable. Its second half, through Julius’s operatic plotting, blows these apart. (Detailed synopses of Iris’s plots are as embarrassing as those of opera, and give as little idea of the experience of the work as a dramatic continuum.31) The novel’s villain, Julius King, argues in front of the Turners in the Tate Gallery that:
Human beings are roughly constructed entities full of indeterminacies and vaguenesses and empty spaces. Driven along by their private needs they latch blindly onto each other, then pull away, then clutch again. Their little sadisms and their little masochisms are surface phenomena. Anyone will do to play the roles. They never really see each other at all. There is no relationship … which cannot easily be broken and there is none the breaking of which is a matter of any genuine seriousness. Human beings are essentially finders of substitutes.32
So Julius preaches to the flighty intellectual Morgan, who left her Christ-like half-ineffectual husband Tallis Browne and fell in love with Julius. He then wagers Morgan ten guineas that he can break off Simon and Axel’s happy homosexual partnership within ten days. This wager-scene also alludes distantly to Satan’s disputation with God in the Book of Job about the existence of one righteous man.33 The scene in which Julius and Simon spy, from behind a portico in a museum, upon the meeting of Rupert and Morgan borrows directly from the pleachèd bower of Much Ado About Nothing, Act III. Julius combines the roles of Don John – who tried to split up Claudio and Hero – and Don Pedro – who drew Beatrice and Benedick together. Julius steals letters to try to engineer an affair between the vain and foolish Rupert and Rupert’s fickle sister-in-law Morgan, and nearly succeeds. Both the novel and the play explore what Benedick aptly terms the giddiness of the human heart.
Life, Iris (like Dostoevsky) believed, is so fantastic that we instinctively mix in a little fiction to render it plausible. Life feeds the novel as well as literature. Iris insisted in interviews that she had witnessed without naming him an ‘alien god-figure’ whose entry into situations, with the collusion of his slaves, caused trouble.34 She further described Canetti as ‘a good man who could have used his [intellectual] power[s], had he wished, for evil purposes’.35 The satanic Julius in A Fairly Honourable Defeat is not Canetti (Iris’s disdain at the suggestion is easy to imagine). But she could not have created Julius had she never known Canetti,36 and she gave Julius some of his traits. Both Canetti and Julius are professional outsiders.* The trio of Julius and Tallis fighting for the soul of Tallis’s wife Morgan belongs to Christian psychomachia – Christ and Satan struggling for the soul of the Common Man. It is also based on the battle between Canetti and John over Iris in 1953–56; John commented that he had ‘wrestled spiritually’ with his rivals.37 Morgan’s dislikeable, naïve belief that she can love everyone with impunity, that love conquers all, is partly that of the careless, vamp-like young Iris who had felt that she could love everyone without cost, and who would note, in the midst of multiple flirtations, ‘Feel curiously detached, almost frivolous … as light as a feather, can’t ever see myself as bloody or in danger or a menace to others.’ Julius’s parents changed their name from ‘Kahn’ to King. A small ‘Kahn’ is a Canetti.
Tallis is partly inspired by Franz, grieving for a sister who died young, and symbolising the power of goodness.38 Frequently Franz, interrupted when drafting a new lecture, would find in his typewriter only the words ‘In my last lecture, I …’ written there.† Tallis has the identical habit. The revelation that Tallis’s sister was raped and killed by a sex maniac comes on the same page as the disclosure that Julius spent the war in Belsen, a symmetry, found sensational by some, meant to bear out Simone Weil’s hard-nosed belief that affliction degrades all but the saintly. Tallis absorbs his own suffering: Julius, a scientist researching germ warfare, passes his pain on. Where Fox’s evil in The Flight from the Enchanter is a ‘given’, never explored, his successor Julius’s is a more detailed portrait, albeit, like Iago’s, a mysterious one.
When the novel came out, the art historian John Golding, then teaching at the Courtauld Institute, was telephoned by friends who believed that his partnership with James Joll had inspired the depiction of Simon and Axel. Joll was eleven years older than Golding; Axel is older than Simon. This and his Courtauld background link Golding to Simon.39 Golding and Joll never raised the matter with Iris. The resemblances were superficial, and what Iris made out of them was new and strange. Unlike Axel and Simon, dominated by Julius, neither Golding nor Joll was in thrall to Canetti. They knew him slightly, and thought him bogus.40 Iris called the novel-in-progress the ‘Simon-novel’, and he is her most attractive gay character, with a promiscuous past, gentle, kindly, un-intellectual, and willing in the end to outface Julius.
Although some thought Julius’s cruelty, boredom and Machiavellianism inspired, however distantly, by Kreisel,41 he owes as much to the mythomaniac and manipulative Canetti, who in the words of Friedl’s sister Susie, ‘loved creating and undoing human relations and toying with people, watching their relations as a scientist might watch his white mice’.42 Margaret Gardiner watched Canetti, on his return in 1948 from St Ives, talking into existence a relationship between her painter-friend Ben Nicolson and another friend, a woman-painter.43 Canetti choreographed not merely Friedl’s love-affairs but, after her death, that of her surviving partner Allan Forbes with Bernice Rubens, and then, for symmetry, that between Rubens’s husband Rudi Nassauer and his mistress. Rubens, ringing frantically on the latter’s door in the small hours in search of her husband, was distressed to uncover Canetti, masterminder of the affair, instead. Iris, a friend of both, would certainly have learnt of this. Nassauer, first in thrall to Canetti, later grew disenchanted. Julius is the erotic ringmaster, mischievous and malign, more than capable of the cruel practical joke Michael and Anne Hamburger saw Canetti play on Franz in 1952, of pretending that Franz’s poems were now in print.44 Susie, reading the novel in 1998, felt that Canetti’s influence ran throughout, ‘in particular in the long discussion about the fascination of evil and the boredom of good’ in Chapter 18, and noted the echo of Canetti’s fussy Jewish mother side when Julius cleans Tallis’s kitchen at the end. She doubted that the real-life Canetti would have relinquished Morgan so easily.45
One of many surreal yet authoritatively ‘seen’ and evoked scenes involves Julius cutting up Morgan’s dress and underwear in his Brook Street flat, then leaving her naked. The scene links variously to Canetti. His hero Kien in Auto da Fé dreamed of cutting up women’s dresses;46 and the theme ran through Canetti and Friedl’s story. The painter-dwarf Endre Nemes had raped Friedl and torn her clothes to ribbons before slashing his own pictures. Nemes turned up when Friedl was with Canetti in Paris, having ‘brought thirty dresses’ from Sweden; Canetti kept making Friedl put one on, ‘then tearing it off her and loving her, & making her put on another’.
Julius’s spying – he enters others’ flats and houses uninvited – is scarcely odder than Canetti’s, who entered Friedl’s house in Downshire Hill when she was out and read her private papers. Many recalled Canetti’s habit of ‘dropping by’ – which some bluntly called spying; while Anne Wollheim recalled his being invited to lunch in 1947 and staying an extra twelve hours. Julius has both habits. Once Marie-Louise von Motesiczky disconcerted a friend walking with her in Holland Park by explaining persistent rustlings in the bushes, ‘Oh, that’s just Canetti; he’s so jealous.’47
Iris gave the Satanic Julius the line, ‘Few questions are more important than: “Who is the boss?"’48 The Canetti of Crowds and Power underlay the question. But Julius, who, unlike Canetti, demeans both art and love and is wholly cold, is the Geist der stets verneint – the spirit that negates – alive only because Iris inhabits him herself, rendering him comical, fantastical and disturbing. Good fiction, against her tenets, is not made up out of ‘high-mindedness’, and she had succeeded in ‘stifling’ her own. Julius does to his puppets what Iris does to her characters: makes them fall in and out of love; and she here tests out the conventions on which her novels are based. She mentioned in a letter to Philippa that she was growing fond of her ‘demon’.49
Canetti was circumspect with letters. Not all Iris’s friends were so careful. One ex-lover acquired the reputation of giving readings from her letters to other girlfriends in California, and also to groups of interested listeners. Another kept Iris’s letters in the glove-compartment of his Mini, where they led a semi-public life of their own. It is no accident that the purloining of letters plays a major role in the plot of A Fairly Honourable Defeat. The novel tests out the premises upon which the giddy emotional promiscuity of the average Murdoch plot is based: that ‘Man is a giddy thing,’ and most human beings ‘never really see each other at all’. Here Julius is Iris-as-novelist, setting up a laboratory experiment on her own characters, and his manipulations are partly successful: Morgan and Rupert do start to fall in love, Hilda’s marriage fails, Rupert drowns himself. Julius disturbs because he carries so much of the truth of the novel. But he does not have everything his own way. Axel and Simon’s partnership survives and grows.
The Nice and the Good was dedicated to Lord David and Rachel Cecil, who lived, like the Grays in that novel, in Dorset, where ‘everything is … just the right size’.50 Although Cecil spoke of John as his best pupil,51 he taught him for only a term.52 But he would arrive unannounced at John’s digs after he graduated in 1950 and say, ‘Let’s get up and wander around the garden a bit,’ an Oxford habit of its period. John, like Isaiah Berlin, admired Cecil’s clear, straightforward, unpretentious way of looking at things, shrewd and commonsensical, and inherited both his mande as a critic unfussed by theory and his non-stop witty, agile speech-patterns, Cecil being articulate and audible, but speaking in such fast explosive bursts that not everyone caught what he said. This was contagious: Berlin copied Cecil to some degree. Rachel Cecil encouraged John to write his first novel, promising to do the same herself.53 Both Cecils were devoted to John and Iris, hoped for their marriage and were glad when it happened. Both Bayleys shared the Cecils’ benign and humorous interest in others.
The Cecils spent their weekends in an old pub, Red Lion House (to which they moved after David’s retirement in 1969), a sociable house restlessly full of what Henry James called ‘good talk’, in Cranborne in Dorset, a village the Cecil family more or less owned. The Bayleys were frequent guests. An elder politician-brother known as Bobbity (Lord Salisbury) had a red-brick Georgian house; the handsome manor house belonged to his nephew Lord Cranborne. David’s sister was dowager Duchess of Devonshire. Cranborne, where the comfortable secure class-conscious civilisation of the past lay about,54 probably introduced Iris to a more elevated social scene than either she or John had formerly known and helped prompt the difference of milieu in the novels of the 1960s. The title of The Nice and the Good echoes the cant phrase ‘the Great and the Good’ for the invisible decision-makers of the liberal English Establishment, and the novel’s children go to Bedales, Bryanston, La Résidence; their parents are ‘of course’55 all Socialists. Only Casie the maid’s Socialism, full of social envy, is comical or notable. Cecil cooking was famously bad, and Iris shared David’s aristocratic indifference to such matters.
Rachel Cecil was the daughter of the literary critic Desmond MacCarthy. Frances Partridge a great friend of both Cecils. Yet, while knowing many such Bloomsbury figures,56 and with humorous tales to tell of Virginia Woolf, the Cecils found the Bloomsbury world mildly absurd: both were very religious as well as pleasure-loving. Iris, ‘elemental and passionate and spiritual’,57 enjoyed working David up. He loved an argument – it was like sport, like fox-hunting. He once described to Frances Partridge himself and Iris shouting at each other, jumping up and down on the carpet.58 Rachel would try to calm him down, but the arguments would go on and on, often about politics. In one David defended capital punishment, while Iris insisted that an ideal society would not need even imprisonment. In another Iris vigorously maintained that both Khrushchev and his wife were good-looking and/or sexually appealing. David’s arguments were sometimes logic-chopping or for effect, Iris’s more emotional. The rows were wholly without acrimony. David’s son Hugh remembered his father stamping up and down the six feet between the sofa and the drawing-room fire, swigging quantities of watery whisky and choking angrily, Iris saying, ‘Yes, but dammit David …’ All four would go for walks together, David and John jabbering ahead about, for example, whether Tolstoy was really a hypocrite, Rachel and Iris bringing up the rear. Every so often David would pull up, like a cow or a horse, glued to the spot with excitement about the matter under discussion. Iris got him moving again by sheer force of will-power. More uproarious talk from 12 until 1 p.m., David’s ‘happy hour’, his favourite drink a mixture of sweet and dry Vermouth.
Frances Partridge noted John and Iris’s devotion to each other, and how his dryness, humour and effervescent vitality seasoned her charmingly unselfconscious solidity, good head, warm heart.59 She recalled Iris’s swift changes of mood: if told something sad, tears would stream down her face. Iris and John sang part-songs together in the middle of the night, and Iris was ready for any venture or outing.60 Partridge liked Iris’s high-mindedness. In a discussion about whether one would prefer to be executed in public or not, Iris put in a word for making an effective last speech.61 Probably she had in mind the official version of Frank’s death.
Janet and Reynolds Stone met the Bayleys in 1961 at a Cecil cocktail party,62 after which63 Iris wrote to ‘Dear Mrs Stone’ asking if they might call in. Soon they were amis de famille at the Old Rectory, the Stones’ beautiful house at Litton Cheney in its magical nine acres of garden, hidden in a fold of chalk hill in far west Dorset. Iris drove part of the hundred-mile journey from Oxford. Reynolds, countryman, craftsman, engraver and painter, and Iris got on ‘swimmingly’. Both were shy. John wrote a book on Hardy at Litton Cheney. There was a routine. Everyone worked in the first part of the morning. Reynolds then drove them the three miles down to the sea, perhaps showing them something he liked on the way. A quick swim, then lunch prepared by Winnie, who had been a Barnardo’s girl: generally shepherd’s pie and rice pudding. After a nap, and further work, Reynolds liked to read aloud around the hearth in the evenings – often Jane Austen. He read very well.
Janet, bishop’s daughter, singer, photographer, liked knowing well-known people in the artistic world – not socially well-known, apart from Kenneth Clark, with whom she was very close. ‘John Bayley,’ she remarked in 1963, ‘makes me laugh desperately long and too, too loud.’ She called him ‘the world’s most amusing man’, and loved the Bayleys’ sense of humour, the peals of laughter that would come from their bedroom.64 Reynolds would sit painting or engraving in one corner of the lovely drawing-room, inspired by looking out on one side onto the wooded garden where rushing streams fed a little lake, on the other to an unmown front lawn, full of daisies and buttercups. His work, descending from Thomas Bewick and Samuel Palmer, was ‘precise, visionary and spiritual’, and what Iris wrote of his art was also true of hers, that it ‘proceeded unselfconsciously from an intensely personal privacy’ to give that ‘shock of beauty which shows how close, how in a sense ordinary, are the marvels of the world’.65
Much of Janet’s energy went into creating an environment where a bewitched stream of summer guests, including many notable artists and writers, came to work and relax: L.P. Hartley, Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant, Frances Partridge, Quentin Bell, Julian Huxley, Benjamin Britten, Henry Moore, Frances Cornford, the Day Lewises, John Piper, John Betjeman e tutti quanti. ‘Janet’s a real artist of life,’ was often said of her; Hugh Cecil recalled that these gatherings represented ‘a higher peak of English civilisation, despite their modesty, than most of the grand aristocratic establishments of the period’.66 Iris dedicated A Fairly Honourable Defeat to Janet and Reynolds Stone, and noted that their hospitality kept alive the tradition of the reading-party.67
Despite Janet’s extraordinary Edwardian outfits, some acquired through mail order – Dorchester High Street observed her more than once dressed from head to foot in mauve gingham with a parasol, a look Iris described as ‘very summer-nymph’68 – she was essentially unconfident, vulnerable, highly-wrought, full of fun, yet practical too. She brought up four quiet and talented children, each bedroom had a roaring fire in winter, cream was supplied and butter churned from milk from their own cow. There were picnics on deserted Chesil beach, where Iris once nearly drowned,69 croquet, and a wild tennis-court – Iris and John would clap when the other contrived to hit the ball.70 Janet taught Iris to sew gros-point needlework cushion-covers, one designed by Reynolds of a trout with ‘JB’ and ‘IM’ in the corners. Though this was partly a social device allowing Iris a refuge from conversation, she enjoyed the activity too, and made many designs. Janet protected Reynolds, whose gentleness made him easily upset by any violation of things, ‘like a monk in the midst of worldly goings-on';71 he in turn loved and supported her.
The Stones also visited Cedar Lodge, and Stones and Bayleys made expeditions together, staying in a cottage on the Pembrokeshire coast in 1972 and in the west of Ireland in 1975, where a horse attempted a bite out of John’s appetising trousers with their exciting food-stains.72 They visited the painter Derek Hill near Letterkenny, and Honor Tracy on Achill Island. In 1978 they went, more ambitiously, to Assisi, where Reynolds was unwell. A home-body like John, essentially not liking ‘abroad’, he once said he would be content to paint for the rest of his life within his own garden.73 That year Iris completed twelve short bird-poems, one for each month, and Reynolds produced appropriate engravings: they were published as A Year of Birds in 1984. Reynolds died in 1979, after a massive stroke, at seventy. Iris missed ‘his welcoming smile and open arms’ and worried about Janet, who, devastated, lost the will to take her increasingly popular photographic portraits, whose publication in 1988 Iris encouraged and, indeed, helped oversee.74 Those of Iris are notably successful, and were selected by her for a collected edition of her works. One of John shows him trying out a new discovery: he bought in Bicester some agricultural trousers of a tweed so stiff they stood up by themselves, cut out a superfluous section and glued the rest together with Copy-Dex, thereby acquiring what passed, to him, for a pair of stylish trousers for £2. He resembled, he remarked with satisfaction, a silly bear in a story.
As for Iris’s dress-sense, after marriage she gave up feminine impersonation. Before then she could disconcert at dances, wearing a velvet dress and full make-up including mascara and lipstick.75 John’s old English teacher at Eton George Lyttelton, an important influence on him, called her in 1959 ‘a tousled, heel-less, ladder-stockinged little lady – crackling with intelligence but nothing at all of a prig’.76 ‘I am very fond of clothes,’ Iris remarked to Deirdre Connolly, who with her husband Cyril met the Bayleys after 1962 at the Stones’, and with Elizabeth Bowen, and who was struck by her quietness. She appreciated the unique style Iris evolved – ‘pie-crust frill shirt, dirndl-type skirt, or artist’s smocks, but always nice colours & stuff & patterns’.77 John’s pupil Paul Binding, another Cecil and Stone guest, recalled Iris’s ‘Florentine haircut and paysanne skirts and (to an undergraduate) rather winning and subtly flirtatious manner’. Binding introduced the Bayleys to the novelist Barbara Pym, who recorded ‘a rather dumpy woman wearing trousers and a sort of ethnic tunic’, and was struck when Iris, much smaller than she had imagined, told her that she had to write things many times over, and that nothing came absolutely right first time.78
Iris visited Kingsley Amis and his second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard a few times at their house ‘Lemmons’ in Barnet – ‘How are you, old chap?’ she’d greet Amis, who despite doubts about the growing mandarin discursiveness of Iris’s novels, always none the less deferred to her superior intellect.79 Howard was always very shy and awkward with Iris, without understanding why. At a lunch à deux in Kensington, Iris said she was dining next week as guest of honour at an Oxford college, and felt unsure whether in her present clothes she would be suitably dressed. What did Howard think? Since Iris did not ask idle questions, Howard – appraising her black karate-like tunic and trousers lightly marked by what could very possibly have been scrambled egg – remarked that perhaps she would not. Iris nodded gravely and they discussed what she might buy. A week later a postscript arrived declaring, ‘I didn’t bother to change clothes and all was well.’
Although she could look bohemian or eccentric – as the tangerine-coloured plastic mac with purple outfit she wore in a filmed interview around 1970 suggests80 – Iris could also be stylish. At a dinner Frances Partridge gave for her on 30 November 1966 she arrived in a splendid antique military coat made of the finest black cloth with gilt buttons. Partridge noted, too, ‘her magnificent realism, her Joan-of-Arc-like quality, her way of attending to what everyone said, weighing it (to the accompaniment of a very Oxford “Yes, yes, yes”) and then bringing out her response’.81
Iris assented when John called her ‘not a boo-sayer':82 both Bayleys liked to please. By 1964 Iris was answering ten letters a day.83 A busy social life generated its own mythologies and household expressions: an ‘Antrim Boat’ (borrowed from Rachel Cecil’s family) described an arduous journey to a social occasion at which one’s presence had been declared essential, only to find oneself invisible and unnoticed. A ‘Gore’ (also Cecilian) occurred when two parties politely participated in an event neither wanted, each out of a mistaken desire to oblige the other. ‘Shooting someone down’ happened when your invitation was declined: you gained all the merit for having offered, with none of the bother of fulfilment. ‘Alibi cards’ were, by definition, sent when away as an apology for more general non-communication. ‘Now we can be animals again,’ adapted from The Wind in the Willows (which John read aloud to Iris), was a formulaic utterance of relief at having survived a pretentious or otherwise disagreeable gathering. Such coolness Iris, who simultaneously wished to satisfy all requirements, could share, though she made no record of these usages. Social events are ranked, on Michelin principles, ‘very good’, ‘good’ or ‘very OK’, ‘not good’ and (more rarely) ‘horrible’. Iris spoke of Shakespeare as a wordsmith trying to practise his craft while continually distracted by needing to bow and scrape and ‘keep the grandees happy’.84 She was proud of inventing the verb ‘to porlock’ to describe interruptions;85 and learnt to hide her own fury when friends ‘dropped by’.86
Some friends, they decided, were ‘elephants’, others ‘angels’. John’s brother Michael was Iris and John’s premier example of the great category of elephants; later friends – Stephen Spender, George Clive who farmed and entertained in the Welsh Marches – were others. The defining characteristics of an elephant included quietness, secretiveness, impenetrability, small eyes, being kind and easy to be with, someone who might, in the pleasantest of ways, under an always polite exterior, be pursuing their own ends: kindness combining most happily with egoism. (John and Iris would frequently discuss whether there could be female elephants, and finally decided: definitely, no. How elephants propagate their species remains therefore a mystery.) ‘Elephants’ cannot be ‘angels': angels have the wonderful capacity of never belonging entirely to themselves: there were not many angels. Elephants definitely do belong to themselves. They lead, however, unexamined lives, and don’t desire self-knowledge.
‘Parties and dinner parties. I always look forward to these, but often am disappointed,’87 wrote Iris, not in her teens or her twenties, but shortly before her seventy-second birthday; a token of what made Victoria Glendinning memorably describe her as one who saw life, always, with the eyes of a ‘wise child’. After a lunch party in 1987 Iris noted, ‘Mysteriously, there is sometimes wonderful communication and camaraderie,’ but ‘sometimes social scenes are, for me at any rate, dead, I become speechless, utterly awkward, like I used to feel long ago’.88 Her reserve was legendary. In 1969, after days at Litton Cheney and Cranborne, where she had recorded so much happiness, she wrote ‘I am fond of these people but never quite communicate with them. Went to Dancing Ledge, to Reynolds’s wonderful rock pool by the sea. I was afraid to go into the sea’ – probably a reference to her near-drowning on an earlier visit.89
On 18 September 1969 she wrote: ‘Happiness: to be utterly absorbed in at least six other human beings. (Provided these are not miserable or in some moral muddle involving oneself.)’ Yet if she could sometimes feel awkward even among those she loved and in houses where she was secure, it is not surprising that others recorded her occasionally as being ‘hard work’. Norway’s best-known war hero, Max Manus (DSO, MC and bar for mining German warships in Oslo harbour), recounted that he found sitting next to Iris at dinner frightening: ‘She looks so hard, and gives away so little.’90 A.S. Byatt, ‘frightened’ at their first meeting, was still alarmed twenty-five years later, finding her ‘very hard to talk to because she is always very scrupulous and just and is watching’.91 Tony Quinton, who knew her for fifty years, described conversation with her as a ‘pursuit of intimations’, recalling Christmas 1914 when English and German soldiers played football in no-man’s-land: ‘armed truce’ indeed. Iris never gossiped. Frank Kermode, who also knew her from 1947, noted that she could be both intellectually formidable and morally intimidating. Chitra Rudingerova, a friend from school and Oxford, and Mary Warnock, a friend after 1950, both used the same word of Iris – ‘unearthly’ — endorsed differently by Olivier Todd, who around 1947 had the sense of someone both present and elsewhere, and by Kreisel, who in 1968 wrote to her that such an impression (of being partly elsewhere, in the past and in the future, not here) ‘produces a nervous & … touching atmosphere';92 a sense of presence-cum-absence the painter Tom Phillips would ‘catch’ in his official portrait in 1986.
Her journals suggest how hard it was for her to express a simple sense of need, partly because, as she pointedly expressed it, ‘there are not many people whom one wants to know one!';93 also because she liked to be one who looked after others.
19 September 1966. Too anxious, not virtuous enough. The ‘nobody understands me’ feeling. Nobody understands me, nobody. This is idiotic, but I feel it dreadfully. Well, usually it doesn’t matter. Pain & restless haunted yearning.
17 June 1967. I feel I have been handing out a lot of affection lately to a lot of people who don’t really give a damn.
18 July 1969. Very few other people’s happiness is an end to one.
11 October 1969. I am getting old and want real committed friends not people who blow hot and cold, & play hard to get & so on.
December 1969. We gave din[ner at] New Coll[ege] really for Janet [Stone] to meet Berlins [Isaiah and Aline] … R[eynolds] came. Din[ner] success, I think – the niceness of people one has known for ages.
17 October 1970. Further: I feel neglected and in need of love. (Maybe even in need of fun!) This is of course irrational, or largely so. I spend time and energy being a little ray of sunshine to many people but it occurs to nobody to spoil me … I saw Philippa, who never needs cheering up, & cd have talked to her about things, but she was (and why not) too full of her own adventures packing up the Old Hall … and we talked of that all the time.
June 1971. Uneasy relations with people I love, and feeling of there not being enough of them. (This is tosh, I am very lucky.) Desire to be spoilt, praised, sent thousands of flowers. (This ungrateful: Elliott [Kastner94] and Tessa sent huge bouquet recently.)
The October 1970 entry followed the failure of her play The Servants and the Snow (see Chapter 19), suggesting that an old link between desire for artistic success and for affection had not languished. A number of friends spoke ‘only of their own affairs’, or wrote ‘plaintive letters’. Usually she was ‘enough bucked by feeling [that others] are glad to see me – and they are glad, and I am lucky’. On 21 July 1971: ‘A human being’s craving for love is infinite. Most people realise this only in the context of being in love when the idea of the desire being fulfilled is present.’ Like other writers she could best exercise her sense of self in the act of writing – letters, novels. Much loved by her friends, to whom she was unfailingly and fiercely loyal, and to whose tales she listened with seemingly endless patience, she remained a strangely isolated consciousness, whose genius for relationship – like a therapist – did not always involve mutual exchange: ‘I find it rather hard to communicate with other members of the human race at the best of times.’95 Perhaps her gift was to mirror each of her friends’ different needs, and thus to differ herself within each friendship. She liked ‘being told things’.96 If she had simultaneously an only child’s hunger for intimacy, she also understood, Proust-like, that intimacy is always partly illusory, solitude the common fate. ‘Go alone, stay alone. Alone is good,'* she noted. She was also a passionate puritan who could lower her defences, chiefly when in love.
Despite a starding tendency – certainly out of shyness, and increasing with age – to begin conversations with total strangers, ‘Do you believe in God?’97 Iris was increasingly in demand. At a Royal Academy dinner in May 1968 she flirted with Yehudi Menuhin and had her hand kissed by Ralph Richardson. ‘Do I now belong to the establishment?’ she teased herself, and later Leo Pliatzky.98 Lunching at the Connaught in 1971 she met Noël Coward, who announced, ‘I’m a screaming Murdoch fan!’ ‘Unfortunately’ this conversation was cut short by the arrival of Princess Margaret. Diffidence always accompanied Iris. In 1966 she sighted Samuel Beckett at a Bonnard exhibition but lacked the nerve to accost him.99 Two years later she was thrilled to shake Hergé's hand in Hamley’s toyshop – John Simopoulos had made her a Tintin fan. Lunch at Buckingham Palace provoked the single word ‘Corgis’.100
Of her Jesuit student John Ashton she noted, ‘Ultimately one loves unworldly people';101 later, ‘one likes people who are humble: and everyone has a reason to be’.102 Conversely a gossipy 1977 dinner depressed both Bayleys, and Iris more than John, who was lighter of touch:
People who shrink other people … And some terrible loss of freedom, brought about by a forced complicity in malice. (Ubiquitous nature of malice.) It occurs to me in this context how much a sense of freedom is connected with fundamental shared moral attitudes … Freedom and goodness as experienced e.g. in David Cecil. Puss so evidently expresses this freedom in his being and I perceived this at the very start. Malice: a wrenching of everything into a belittled relationship to oneself.103
‘Most friendship exists in a state of frozen and undeveloping semi-hostility,’ says Arnold Baffin in The Black Prince,104 a novel written in pain and about egotism. Like Under the Net it concerns relations between two writers. Jake’s feelings about Breteuil in Under the Net are (very loosely) based on Iris’s for Raymond Queneau. Translating Breteuil gives Jake the courage to publish his first novel – as translating Pierrot mon ami gave Iris the courage to publish Under the Net. In The Black Prince the blocked writer Pearson is the ‘discoverer’ of the facile best-seller Arnold Baffin. If Iris had a ‘discoverer’, A.S. Byatt might merit the title, having written the first academic monograph in 1965, after Iris had published nine novels, Byatt one. Byatt attested her indebtedness at the end of her 1994 reissue of this study, Degrees of Freedom, by including a critical essay proclaiming Iris as her ‘literary mother’.105 Byatt thought Iris the greatest living English novelist, and the person whose mind had done most for her own. In a 1970 journal entry Iris compared Byatt with Brigid Brophy, Esme Ross Langley and ‘the Chumman’ – whose relationships were important to her yet complex. By contrast with these, ‘Toni [i.e. Byatt] has touches of greatness. Her tense tough intellectual fibre, fabric … This is just homage to Toni.’106 Murdoch helped Byatt through a number of crises, coming to London in 1968 when Byatt had a health-scare, breaking other arrangements in the autumn of 1972 to be with her after her young son was hit and killed by a car, listening weeping to the things Byatt could say to no one else, and, when able, helping over the years in many ways. Byatt noted that, though ‘dailiness’ – the things most of us struggle with and sink under – was an imaginative exercise for Iris, the ‘big things, the best and the worst’, she understood and looked steadily at.107
Iris understood how literary discipleship involves unique indebtedness. In 1945 she had noted that she sometimes wanted ‘to be’ Queneau, sometimes Thomas Mann. After 1953 Canetti took Queneau’s place as (literary) master. The ‘discovery’ of an older artist’s talent or genius may give rise both to a sense of ownership of that artist’s mind, and of having one’s own ‘stolen away’. To have one’s talents unlocked by an older artist engendered special claims. Harold Bloom memorably pictured the literary master-disciple relation as an Oedipal – or cannibalistic, à la Canetti – drama: the jealous acolyte’s secret wish, beneath public admiration, is for a diminution of the reputation of the older artist so that the younger can more effectively appropriate his ‘mana’ – prestige or power. The older artist can then be turned into a John the Baptist heralding the significant arrival of the younger.108 The creation of a Mischa Fox or a Julius King may be a secret act of revenge on or acquittal with Canetti. In any case The Black Prince concerns the jealous, implicitly murderous hostility that underlies the friendship between a facile artist-protégé and his serious-minded discoverer-patron. Both parties, Arnold Baffin and Bradley Pearson, are aspects of Iris herself.
Pearson, the blocked writer, represents that ‘chaste and strict’109 mind that produced the eloquent and compressed rhetoric of ‘Against Dryness’ and A Severed Head; Baffin the ‘journalistic’ discursive self that in the 1980s would churn out shapeless novels of over six hundred pages. The titles of Baffin’s books – Essays of a Seeker, Mysticism and Literature, The Maid and the Magus, Inside a Snow Crystal (close to one working title for The Time of the Angels) – parody Iris’s own, as does the sole account of a Baffin plot, with its ludicrous scenes of an abbot felled by an immense bronze crucifix and a Buddhist nun with a broken ankle rescued from an overflowing reservoir. Baffin’s daughter Julian, another writer, describes him tellingly as living ‘in a sort of rosy haze with Jesus and Mary and Buddha and Shiva and the Fisher King all chasing round and round dressed up as people in Chelsea’ – satirising earlier Murdoch novels such as Bruno’s Dream and A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Pearson typifies Baffin’s novels as a congeries of amusing anecdotes loosely garbled into racy stories with the help of half-baked unmediated symbolism. He empties himself (memorably) ‘like scented bath-water’ over the world, seeing significance everywhere. Pearson, who hates his ‘enthusiastic garrulous religiosity’, his propensity for seeing life as ‘simply one big gorgeous metaphor’, physically tears up Baffin’s books, and is falsely condemned as his murderer.
When Baffin answers these criticisms, Iris again speaks directly through his mask: ‘Most artists understand their weaknesses far better than the critics do … Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one only has one life … any artist has to decide how fast to work. I do not believe I would improve if I wrote less. The only result would be that there would be less of whatever there is … It would be unthinkable to run along beside it whimpering, “I know it’s no good".’ That the two writers are ‘doubles’ may be gleaned from the fact that Pearson’s narrative suffers itself from Baffinesque frailties: solipsism, religiosity, allusiveness.
While his name came from a Bayley household joke – a typist had mistyped ‘pearson’ for ‘reason’ throughout one of Iris’s essays – Pearson is given Iris’s worst self too. She created him partly out of self-awareness, and the novel is one of her dark comedies of justified paranoia. Like many of her first-person narrators he is given both her humble social origins and her comic horror of contingency (which is to say a strong ego). Above all he is given Iris’s puritanism – both her censorious recoil from certain situations, but also her Platonised belief in the possibility of transcendence; Iris elsewhere noted that ‘Puritanism = Romanticism’.110 Pearson finds trains (to take one instance) an object-lesson ‘in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children’. He is familiar with the unpleasant experience of arriving very early for a train, and finding himself comically catching its predecessor with only a minute to spare111 (in August 1943 Iris and Philippa were split up while travelling to the latter’s family home exactly because Iris’s ‘train-fever’, as they joked about it, caused her to arrive just in time to take an earlier train than Philippa – who had the sandwiches*). In no other novel does Iris take such exquisite revenge on her own romantic puritanism.112 The rush to indict her for over-plotting has obscured her own tolerant delight in the messy and contingent which, almost alone among critics, Lorna Sage always celebrated.113
Iris’s essays defended a human ‘difference’ that her 1960s novels had not always implemented. She had, she would complain, only half a dozen recurrent types in her books, and could ‘do’ only two voices (educated English and Irish). The Black Prince explores why. ‘The unconscious delights in identifying people with each other. It has only a few characters to play with,’ Bradley instructs Julian.114 The scholarly reference is to Ernest Jones’s famous Freudian reading of Hamlet in which Hamlet identifies Ophelia with his mother and Claudius with his father. An intensely private reference is to Iris’s own love for her father. During the composition of the novel she dreamt of telling Julian Chrysostomides that her father was dead, and wept about this, as if it had happened anew, not fifteen years before. Julian Baffin’s love for Bradley Pearson, whom she late on discovers to be nearly forty years her senior, has parallels in Iris’s beloved father-figures: Fraenkel was born in 1888, Michael Oakeshott in 1901, Thomas Balogh and Canetti in 1905, Arnaldo Momigliano and Franz Steiner in 1908 and 1909 respectively. Julian substitutes Bradley for her own father. Iris had pleaded in her essays for ‘the individual and the type’, as in the best nineteenth-century fiction, to come together. In The Black Prince she succeeds. An illusion of depth and space results. These characters are ‘alive’.
There are further complexities. Although she objected in public to John suggesting that she experienced herself as a man,115 Iris told Rachel Fenner that she inwardly identified with male homosexuals, and one journal entry adds the adjective ‘sadomasochistic’. 11 December 1966: ‘Q. What am I? A. A male homosexual sado-masochist. (See Bruno passim.)’ None of her novels is narrated in the first person by a woman. Those given to male first-person narrators are often her best. Apart from Mary Renault, few women novelists write with as much conviction from the point of view of male homosexuals, and no other woman writer so well impersonates men. Iris’s love of male or androgyne names for young women characters was famous: Georgie Hands, Julian Baffin, Morgan Browne. One crisis in The Black Prince comes when Bradley is able to make love to Julian, whom he on first sighting mistook for a boy, only when she dresses as Hamlet. It would be perversity if literature alone aroused him: androgyny helps too. A girl hiding behind a man’s name (based on the female mystic Julian of Norwich) dresses as a man and is made love to as a woman by a male narrator inhabited by his woman-creator. This recalls the erotic casuistry of As You Like It Act III, scene ii, where a boy-actor dressed as Rosalind, doubly en travestie first as a girl, then as a boy, shows Orlando how to woo. Small wonder that Iris called literature ‘close dangerous play with unconscious forces’.116 ‘A lot of old nightmares have got inside this novel,’ she commented.117
Iris wanted to create memorable characters, and in three 1970s novels – A Fairly Honourable Defeat, The Black Prince and The Sea, The Sea – she succeeded. All show the inspiration of Shakespeare, by whom she so longed to be touched. ‘Any high theory about Shakespeare is no good, not because he is so divine but because he is so human. Even great art is jumble in the end. Should we grieve?’ The sentiment recurs.118 Shakespeare, called in her journals the ‘cheerful nosepicking whoremaster’, created not out of simple high-mindedness but, genius apart, out of an intimate and humble understanding of base emotions, of lust and rage, hatred, envy, jealousy and the will-to-power as well as astonishment at ordinariness. That we are all scandalously (and comically) emotional, no matter what we publicly pretend, is one secret Iris’s novels joyously and painfully reveal. Neither sanctity nor high diction,119 but intimate humanness, makes these novels live. Here she defeats her own romanticism and puritanism, which she rightly equated.
That ‘living personality’ differs very widely from ‘literary character’ may be seen in the ways Canetti helped inspire types as radically different as Julius and the small-minded, self-absorbed and un-self-knowing tyrant Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea, whose blind, paranoid, rapacious egoism is painfully real. Julius’s manipulativeness was cool; Charles’s will-to-power masquerades as sexual desire. Near the start of the novel we discover that Charles can never let go of an intimate. He tortures the gentle Lizzie Scherer by toying with her love for him, jealous of her platonic relationship with the effeminate old-stager Gilbert Opian, willing neither to release nor to satisfy her. In 1953 Canetti had told Iris of how Susie, his mistress Friedl’s sister, had turned against him after he had spoken frankly about ‘giving up’ Friedl to Allan Forbes.120 Susie reviled Canetti to Allan, telling him that ‘Canetti never really let go of Friedl, wanting both Friedl and Allan within his power, to treat Allan like a little dog, etc – that Canetti was a demon-like destructive person.’ Allan duly reported all this to Canetti, who told Iris, who noted it down. Just so Charles at one point nominally awards Lizzie to Gilbert, while willing both to remain his ‘slaves’. The desire to let go – and the difficulty of doing so – are major themes in The Sea, The Sea.
Charles and Canetti share misogyny: ‘How did I know so certainly that C[anetti] could never bear to spend a whole night with anybody?’121 Charles cannot since ‘in the morning she looks to me like a whore’.122 Charles has been hurt by feminine rejection, Canetti by his tyrannical mother. Both Charles and Canetti take their revenge – for life – by punishing a masochistic female harem. Charles’s fear of women singing – ‘the wet white teeth, the red, moist interior’123 – is textbook Freudian alarm at the vagina dentata. Canetti, in Forbes’s view, for all his womanising, had – like Charles – low libido. Canetti haunts The Sea, The Sea variously: Iris’s own lifelong meditation about him is echoed demonically in Charles’s lifelong obsession with Hartley.
And Iris, like Canetti, was herself a ‘mage’ who attracted, fascinated and enchanted but expressed an ‘anxious morality about not hurting’124 acolytes and friends. She too called herself ‘naturally a jealous person’.125 The novel’s strength is that Iris is everywhere and thus nowhere: in Charles’s disgusting recipes ('But this is what John and I eat all the time,’ Iris riposted to the psychologist Anthony Storr); in Charles’s meditations on his father Adam Arrowby, a detailed portrait of Iris’s father Hughes; in the gentle, beautifully-breasted, enslaved Lizzie, recalling the Iris of 1953; in the plump, elderly, drably be-mackintoshed Hartley whom the boy Charles loved, lost and now finds again; in the mysterious adept of white magic James Arrowby, a Tibetan Buddhist and Wykehamist soldier-saint distantly recalling Frank.
Charles, actor and theatre director, is imitating Prospero in The Tempest, Iris’s favourite Shakespeare play,* in finally trying to give up power. Lizzie is Prospero’s servant Ariel, a part she has successfully acted; Gilbert, still lustful for boys in his sixties, the earthbound Caliban. Both are Charles’s half-willing slaves. But The Sea, The Sea can no more be resolved back into The Tempest than can The Black Prince into Hamlet. Just as The Tempest sets the good magician Prospero against his bad usurping brother Antonio, so The Sea, The Sea sets the questing James Arrowby against his egotistical cousin Charles. The magical aspects of Tibetan Buddhism interested Iris, and she commended a study emphasising these in 1981.126 Charles has for forty years been obsessively in love with Hartley; James (though commentators missed this) has been all his life in love with his cousin Charles. Charles, when he rediscovers Hartley, kidnaps and coerces her; James by contrast returns to Charles to try to release them both from ‘attachment’.
James’s is ‘the triumph of spiritual (free) power over magical (obsessional) power … Power undoing itself in favour of love’, and his, too, the lesson that ‘Forgiveness, inter alia, is this’ – lessons above Charles’s moral level. His use of magic ('tricks') belongs inside the tale, reflecting as it does Shakespeare’s Prospero as a Neoplatonic mage conjuring with spirits. James at one point practises levitation to save Charles from drowning; is recalled as having created a ‘tulpa’ – Tibetan for a magically projected non-existent being paradoxically visible to others; and chooses the moment of his own death, finally released, Iris insisted, from the wheel of suffering. Some readers rightly intuited Iris’s own interest in magic. She objected vehemently to the supernatural aspects of religion, feeling that the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection were not merely lies, but that insistence on their literal truth was helping to kill off Christianity, which needed to learn from Buddhism to demythologise itself. Yet, while denying the supernatural, the paranormal fascinated her. She had the rare power of ‘lucid dreaming’, the ability consciously to guide a dream.127 She consulted a tarot pack in the 1950s and 1960s. Flying saucers in The Nice and the Good are succeeded by bi-location in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, there is further levitation in The Good Apprentice, and she attempted telekinesis while writing The Green Knight. Sternly sceptical in so many ways, for example about psychic research, which she deemed dangerous ‘rubbish’,128 she was enthusiastically credulous in others. It seems apt that, when Stephen and Natasha Spender called on a water-diviner in Provence in the 1970s, the willow switch jumped violently out of Iris’s hands at the very spot for a well. ‘Madame a la fluide,’ observed the diviner reverently.129
The Sea, The Sea does not depend upon its paranormal elements. Iris noted in 1969 the paradox of ‘Shakespeare’s farewell to his art’,130 and the theatre in this novel stands in for the great world itself, ‘with all its trickery’.131 So the conjuring of spirits can also be taken as the novelist’s rough magic, creating an intensely ‘seen’ imaginary world reflecting the one we share, but more memorably peopled. Creating magically projected nonexistent beings paradoxically visible to others is, after all, what novelists attempt too.
The Sea, The Sea is diminished by synopsis. Not the least of its absurdities is that Charles has fortuitously retired to the exact spot where the woman he so obsessively loved now lives with a fire-extinguisher salesman. But it has also extraordinary strengths and felicities, patient powers of description of place – the sea of the title, in all its moods – of emotion, of character. Malcolm Bradbury praised it as ‘merciless and painful’ as well as poetic and truthful;132 Gabriele Annan, always an astute Murdoch-critic, saw it as a ‘comedy with portholes for looking out at the cosmos';133 Francis King noted passages that ‘simply take the breath away';134 Susan Hill thought it ‘among her best’, intense and moving.135 The novel’s mixture of pain and comedy reaches some high point.
The Sea, The Sea was nominated for the 1978 Booker Prize, which had that year doubled in value to £10,000. AJ. Ayer chaired, without great diligence, a panel of judges including Derwent May, a strong enthusiast for the novel. The debate, after the usual liveliness, was resolved equably, and Iris was awarded the prize.136 A.N. Wilson’s picturesque claim that Ayer, crowing ‘about not having read any of the novels … gave the prize to his old friend’137 is poetic licence. As for Iris, she did not, unlike Prospero, abjure her magic. She wrote seven more novels after The Sea, The Sea. None sold as well, or arguably was as good.138
* See, e.g., journal entry, December 1976: ‘Yesterday, at the Russian dissidents demo, and glad I went. Held poster for man I’d never heard of: Zshverdlin.’
* From Annette in her cupboard in The Right from the Enchanter, through Catherine in The Bell and Hannah in The Unicorn.
* Pamela Field, who met Canetti once (C1952), and never forgot it, recounted his comic alienation at the Athenaeum, where he compared the elderly clubmen behind their newspapers to crocodiles. English club life made him feel alien, an outsider; compare Julius’s ‘Clubs are not for such as me', A Fairly Honourable Defeat, p.8o.
† See Iris’s journal, 6 June 1977: ‘Rainy for jubilee – so sad. Memory: Franz with his typewriter always stuck at “In my last lecture I …” ‘
* Iris’s journal, 12 September 1982. The quotation continues: ‘Milarepa. (So I gather.)’ After her marriage, her journals increasingly show her contemplating, rather than ways of escape, the necessity of solitude. e.g. 3 February 1968: ‘"Perhaps you are alone, my friend” is the message, & all my sense of company, the “transcendent scene” is utterly bogus?’ 16 April 1971: ‘You can’t win. Either you live alone with your daemon – or you don’t.’ 8 October 1979: ‘Thinking is done in solitude. When are women ever alone?’
* According to Iris’s memory they were separated within the same overcrowded train.
* In the draft of a list of works by which she had been influenced, it is the only Shakespeare mentioned. Journal, 4 July 1976: ‘For B[ritish] C[ouncil] etc: a list with comments of books and authors that influenced me? … Iliad, Symposium, Tempest, Sir Gawain, Mansfield Park, Wuthering Heights, Our Mutual Friend, The Golden Bowl, Fear and Trembling, L’Attente de Dieu, Brothers Karamazov. Proust?’