There was never any good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he is any good,’ wrote Scott Fitzgerald.1 Iris, named after the goddess of rainbows, has many colours. Travelling by train in summer 19812 she was accosted by a stranger in the train-bar, who greeted her enthusiastically as Margaret Drabble. ‘How can you tell,’ replied the philosopher thoughtfully, ‘that I’m not Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, or even Iris Murdoch?’ The unperturbed admirer, putting a hand on Iris’s sleeve, reassured her, ‘Margaret, I’d know you anywhere.’ Confusion about identity was sometimes shared by Iris herself. Eleven years before she had mused, ‘I have very little sense of my own identity. Cd one gradually go mad by slowly slowly losing all one’s sense of identity? I know there is a body that moves about and some thoughts, memories – but it’s all scattered, & now more so.’3 A discontinuous sense of being shows when she rediscovers her early journals, and is always surprised by the protean selves she finds therein: and discontinuity itself is a theme that needs exploring.
She often spoke of having no sense of identity,4 partly subscribing to her own ideology, wherein virtue relates to ‘lack of form (interior being)’.5 Hence we are, in An Unofficial Rose, to prefer Anne Peronett, formless as a dog-rose, to her charming, rapacious husband Randall, an artist seeking self-definition. Iris was aloof and largely voiceless about her own life. Yet her ‘case’, unsimplified by belonging within a novel, is necessarily more complex: a good novelist escapes definition by shape-shifting, as Canetti knew. In her Who’s Who entry she gave ‘learning languages’ as her only recreation, and her shelves held grammar books in many languages, including Esperanto, which she learnt sufficiently to be able to write in it to her old college friend and Esperanto expert Dr Marjorie Boulton.* Her journals abound in quotations from Latin, Greek, Russian, French. She gave a lecture in 1968 in Italian,6 participated in a conference in French on the modern novel at the Centre Pompidou in October 1981,7 and the following month gave a short morale-boosting BBC World Service broadcast in Russian,8 a native-speaker translating and marking stresses for her. During the war she attempted Turkish, and for The Red and the Green she studied Gaelic. The inability to learn a language was for her the ‘perfect image of spiritual limitation’, and the Babel-like proliferation of languages on the planet God’s jest to show that ‘goodness is a foreign language’.9
Learning new languages is also a way of transforming or disguising oneself, of not being tied to a single identity. Perhaps being good – which shines through so much that Iris did and was – was a way of escaping definition too. ‘The good are unimaginable,’ James declared in The Sea, The Sea, and while none doubts the passion or urgency of Iris’s quest, the artist in her wanted invisibility as much as the acolyte longed for perfection. Both the saint and the true artist were equally, in her coinage, ‘unpersons’.10 The idea of others imagining her did not appeal. In 1971 she jotted memorably, ‘There are not many people whom one wants to know one!’11 A 1959 entry indicted a novelist-friend who had written a roman-à-clef. Small wonder that Honor Tracy wrote to Sister Marian: ‘there is little enough we can really know of any human being, however simple, let alone of a complex creature like I [ris].’12 Iris found the idea of autobiography ‘morally sickening'* and applauded the bitingly satirical scene in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot where Totsky invites his guests to disclose their worst fault. No one truly sees his own frailties. Under the guise of a pretended sincerity, each boasts competitively instead.
A friend noted in 1978 that in Iris ‘a highly organised analytical mind [was] at war with her warm, irrational Irish heart’.13 It is hard to relate the loving, practical common sense of her letters to the occasional emotionalism of her journals, the formidable energy and precision of her best philosophical essays, and the audacious inventiveness and power of the novels. Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince asserted that ‘We are tissues and tissues of different personae and yet we are nothing at all.’14
Encouraged by Frank Thompson’s enthusiasm, Iris wished, on 24 April 1942, to look for a volume by Bakhtin in the Bodleian Library.15 The sole work of his in print was his 1929 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, and it was available only in Russian. The book emphasises the ‘unfinalisability’ of Dostoevsky’s portraits – a unifying topic in Iris’s letters, novels, essays and journals. There is an unconscious echo between her January 1943 letter to David Hicks: ‘Human lives are essentially not to be summed up, but to be known, as they are lived, in many curious partial & inarticulate ways,’ and Charles Arrowby’s wise pronouncement in The Sea, The Sea in 1978 that ‘Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration.’16 In 1956 her essay ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’ praised moral attitudes which
emphasise the inexhaustible detail of the world, the endlessness of the task of understanding, the importance of not assuming that one has got individuals and situations ‘taped’, the connection of knowledge with love and of spiritual insight with apprehension of the unique.17
The same year she made the anti-art artist in The Sandcastle, Bledyard, ask: ‘Who can look reverently enough upon another human face?’18 In mid-February 1952 she attacked her quasifiancé Wallace Robson in the Mitre pub in Oxford for not reverencing people – ‘meaning me’. She treated friends with sympathetic care, patient loving attention, imagination, generosity. She gave little appearance of noticing your frailties. She cared as passionately about the privacy of others as about her own. Her friendship ennobled you.
There was a discontinuity between the serene and Buddha-like stillness others increasingly saw in Iris, and the questing spirit within. ‘Being is acting,’ said Bradley Pearson, and it is not accidental that the young Iris was renowned at Oxford for her acting ability, nor that her tutor Mildred Hartley and her Dublin ‘cousins’ Eva and Billy Lee alike thought her often in fancy-dress. Her first novel, Under the Net, and her penultimate one, The Green Knight, enact key scenes within theatres, and The Sea, The Sea is narrated by a theatre director with a cast of actors, one of whom wished to play Honor Klein from J.B. Priestley’s adaptation of A Severed Head, while another actor mentioned in The Sea, The Sea – ‘that ass Will Boase’ – returns from the cast of Bruno’s Dream. ‘Of course a novel is a drama,’19 Iris remarked. The puritan who Priestley accurately noted did not really like the theatre, none the less craved theatrical success. She would say that a novelist’s life is lonely, a playwright’s sociable. She craved company, and liked actors, who resembled ‘nice animals, or children’.20
While writing original plays she corresponded with the theatrical agent Peggy Ramsey,21 who generously complimented her ‘extraordinary talent’ for the theatre, a compliment qualified by Ramsey’s observations that the naturalism Iris had chosen for her play Joanna, Joanna made for complicated set changes; that representing a student riot by ‘noises off’ was a method not seen on stage for fifty years; and finally advising in exasperation that ‘you should be able to see your plays, if necessary, out of town, and after seeing about two staged, and occasionally going to the theatre, you will very soon become a master.’22
Two of Iris’s plays were performed – The Servants and the Snow in 1970 at the Greenwich Theatre and The Three Arrows in Cambridge in 1972. The failure of the first hit her hard. She saw it twice during its four-week run, the second time with ‘extremely nice’ Cecil Day Lewis. ‘The play seemed terrible. It had been full of magic on the first night, for me anyway … It’s clear the play won’t go to the west end, after all those rotten notices.’ She was grateful when the director Alun Vaughan Williams rescued her at Greenwich station after she dissolved into tears. She thought the play, which explored the relations between ‘Eros’ and political power, ‘such a potent object … just not seen’. Its later adaptation by William Mathias as an opera called The Servants, staged in Cardiff in September 1980, consoled her. ‘Wonderful. The music moves inside me, moving and surging like sea among rocks.’
The love-hate affair with the theatre continued. Priestley had adapted A Severed Head in 1963, James Saunders The Italian Girl in 1967, when she noted that staging always revealed which were weak characters in a novel (in this case the Levkins). In 1975 she wished to canvas American managements to see whether they would put on The Three Arrows.23 Two of her novels were adapted for television, one for radio.24 Her radio-opera The One Alone, which concerned the spiritual struggles of a brave opponent of political tyranny subjected to solitary confinement, with music by Gary Carpenter, was broadcast on Radio 3 in 1986. Inspired by the novelist and impresario Josephine Hart, she adapted The Black Prince for the stage, and it premiered at the Aldwych Theatre in 1989: since its narrator Bradley Pearson survives (in the novel he dies), its blackly tragicomic note was compromised. Iris had earlier adapted The Sea, The Sea, but found no one to stage it; she vigorously objected to Chatto including the adaptation in a collected edition of her plays, arguing that it should not be published before it had been performed. Possibly because she wrote reluctantly, or rebelliously, for the theatre25 her efforts, she knew, had ‘the formal stiffness of the juvenile work of a painter’.26
Theatrical success in 1970 would, she believed, have ‘opened ways which now are much harder to enter upon’ supposing, for example, her arthritis caused her in future to have to give up writing by hand and work with a tape recorder instead: arthritic pains in her right hand and arm that year were bad. On 20 April (writing with her left hand): ‘I am not supposed to write with my right hand for a week. What a bore!’ On 21 April (writing with her right hand again): ‘Damn that.’ The Bayleys even considered moving back to Oxford, to a house less damp (patches of green mould now adorned certain walls at Steeple Aston). Of course, at once the garden and countryside became ‘bewitchingly beautiful … golden leaves & apple trees out of Samuel Palmer’. They looked at a house in Davenant Road, but screaming children next door decided John against it. This Oxford prospect thoroughly unsettled them, Iris scorning her weakness of nerve: ‘The thought of moving to Belbroughton Rd as a major crisis in one’s life! God!’ In due course a drug (Voltarol) helped her arthritis, and the move was postponed for fifteen years.
Iris’s experience of the film world, whose comic, crass traducing of historical truth Jake acidly noted in Under the Net, was no happier than her theatrical ordeals. In 1962 a film company attempted unsuccessfully to shoot Under the Net in Earl’s Court. The producer and director Tony Richardson bought an option on The Unicorn in 1964, but did not proceed. In 1968 the Swedish director Bo Widerberg showed interest in The Sandcastle, but once again it came to nothing. (Earlier, Iris had been advised that MGM’s 1965 film The Sandpiper might have been plagiarised from The Sandcastle; after some confusion and depression she accepted an out-of-court settlement. She wondered whether this had scared Columbia off.) She wrote: ‘There seems to be, for one reason or another, a persistent jinx on my cinema prospects.’ The cinema, Peggy Ramsey replied, was indeed ‘a nightmare of plots and counter-plots’.27
The only film to be made of one of Iris’s novels to date is A Severed Head, directed in 1969 by Dick Clement. On 7 May she went to Paddington station to watch the shooting of the scene in which Honor arrives in London and is met by Martin: ‘It was quite unexpectedly moving. As I came up the steps from the Underground I thought it’s all a dream, there’ll be no film unit really. But there they all were. I talked to Claire Bloom [who played Honor] later in her hotel room at the station. She was touchingly keen on the part.’ Judging from her handwritten marginal addenda, Iris had reservations about Frederic Raphael’s screenplay; and when she saw the film on its release a year later, in May 1970, she noted: ‘Terrible’.
In 1971 Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward bought the rights to A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which Iris declared ‘thrilling’, but she and Ramsey disliked Peter Ustinov’s script, and the project came to nothing. Ramsey, recognising Iris’s hunger to be adequately filmed, recorded that Iris had (curiously) been unhappy with Priestley’s adaptation of A Severed Head. Of an enquiry about the rights to The Black Prince in 1977 Iris wrote to Ramsey, ‘I’d like to see a decent film of one of those books, in any language, before I die … tell them to do it.’28 An option was sold on The Flight from the Enchanter, but no film was made. She wrote crossly to Ramsey after the latter had relayed Iris’s unease about James Saunders writing a screenplay of The Italian Girl – ‘please do not send my letters to you on to other people … my letters to you are to you’. She wanted Edward on film to be more serious than he had been in Saunders’ stage adaptation. In 1978 she left Ramsey for another theatrical agent, Robin Dalton.
Iris signed her cheques and passport ‘Iris Bayley’. Blessed by a happy marriage herself, she writes well of unhappy marriages – ‘the bootless solitude of those … caged together – hell in a pure form';29 ‘every persisting marriage’ in The Sea, The Sea is partly based on ‘mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear’.30 With John – like her father ‘a man entirely without the natural coarseness & selfishness of the male’31 – she had freedom to explore the world as she would. Philippa Foot observed that this partnership was totally necessary for her, and John’s memoirs of Iris well evoke its absolute mutual taken-for-grantedness. She burdened no one with her creative (and seasonal autumn) depressions. John periodically materialises in her journals – half-puer aeternus, half-friendly Domovoy or house-spirit, a vision of whom gladdens and touches — glimpsed as a separate being, acknowledged, loved, indispensable, mysterious. When he improvised a paragraph at her request about the capacity of Dora in The Bell to save herself by hiding, disappearing like some small animal into a hole, it was partly of Iris herself that he was thinking. The paragraph appears in the first chapter of the novel.
25 October 1969. Dear puss walking at the bottom of the garden looks so sad.
7 June 1970 Puss, with red braces, going down the centre path between tall grass. Very hot evening.
24 April 1971. Puss brought in one afternoon when I was sleeping a bunch of periwinkles in the pink & whiteish Venice glass vase. So pretty. I woke and found it just beside me. It made me so happy.
4 January 1978. Puss singing in kitchen below. He is a good man.
31 May 1979.
Strindberg had a little skunk,
Its coat was white as mink,
And everywhere that Strindberg slunk
That skunk was sure to slink.
… quoted by Puss. Of such is the kingdom of heaven.
She chronicles his serendipitous expertise ('Etruscans used false teeth'), his mowing in the vivid summer evenings, his surreally detailed and lengthy dreams – about a procession of cats, dowsing; about being with Pushkin, on whom he was writing a book, at a military college. Pushkin, in answer to a query about some dirty socks on the floor, replied coldly: ‘Those are Bayley’s socks.’ Like the good Denis entertaining Marian in The Unicorn with rescued animals, John appears helping shrews ('little moles, short-sighted & long-nosed, with tiny hand-like paws'), toads and insects ('a very tiny red spider on his fingertip to shew me'). He sights birds, badgers, a silent vixen lying on the twilit scythed grass ‘like Madame Recamier’ while her four cubs play; is dashed when a favourite frog one night is not on duty. He paints her ‘sea-lion’ pool blue-green, is a ‘sweet kind marvellous nurse’ when she is ill, pours cooling water over her when she sunbathes, sings and dances with her on a Dorset beach.
Above all, he calms her down, and cheers her up.
12 February 1978. Feeling depressed and very tired and in eclipse … Puss, very very sweetly trying to cheer me up (and succeeding) says he will ‘hop in my walks and gambol in my ways’.
She ‘would despair’ if anything happened to him.32 On the rare occasions when illness depresses his effervescent high spirits or renders him irritable, she feels ‘bottomless gloom’. 22 February 1968: ‘Puss feeling ill & wretched. Says he hates life … I feel so miserable & can’t work, can’t even write in this diary.’ She heeded his comments on Shakespeare, on the necessary deviousness of the novel-form; included in her journal, at his request, the observation that their mulberry tree was on 29 May not yet in leaf;33 noted his view about novels, ‘Destroy the collusion [between writer and reader] which is all the more effective for being so efficiently disowned':34 this affected The Black Prince. She pondered his advice, ‘Write about conventional people, they are more interesting. Fanny Price is more convincing than Micawber & ultimately interests one far more'; stole his observation that ‘We are tolerant and permissive because we don’t take art seriously. In the USSR they pay it the compliment of censorship.’ She recorded his views on artistic impersonality: ‘Writers are invisible or intolerable.’ While noting the phenomenon of John Berryman and Robert Lowell’s confessional poetry, she favoured invisibility. Like Dostoevsky she wished to be able to say, ‘I never showed my ugly mug'; or to resemble free Shakespeare, who in Matthew Arnold’s words did not stay to ‘abide our question’, but escaped all definition.
John did not take Iris’s (or anyone else’s) ethical views seriously. On 30 September 1967 he remarked cheerfully at lunch-time, à propos nothing in particular, ‘If I’d been the wolf of Gubbio I’d have eaten St Francis.’ He none the less shared her special ability to lose himself in the act of looking – an ability about which she theorised. She was delighted to learn from a third party that, watching badgers, he had once been so absorbed he didn’t notice a mouse run up his arm, along his collar and down the other arm. She captured him thus in her 1974 poem, ‘John Sees a Stork at Zamorra':
Walking among quiet people out from mass
He saw a sudden stork
Fly, from its nest upon a house.
So blue the sky, the bird so white,
For all these people an accustomed sight.
He took his hat off in sheer surprise
And stood and threw his arms out wide
Letting the people pass
Him by on either side
Aware of nothing but the stork-arise.
On a black tapestry now This gesture of joy So absolutely you.
In October 1979, when she visited China for three weeks without John, she kept a 10,000-word journal in which she noted that they had rarely been separated for more than two days since her month in Yale in 1959. On the morning of her departure John telephoned her in London from Steeple Aston. ‘We are both tearful – He says, do you mind if I ring again?’ During the trip she recorded ‘terrible home-sickness and longing’ for John, and on return she hurried to the baggage hall to ring Steeple Aston, anxious ‘as phone rings 4–5 times. Then puss’s voice.'
The Cultural Revolution had been even more terrible than she had imagined, but she observed that China, lacking religion, was able to feed its people: India, which retained religion, was not.35
Perhaps all persons are unfinalisable, but some more than others. Iris speaks audibly through Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince when he curses those who seek, like the Freudian hack Francis Marloe, to use Freud to diminish and ‘place’ him/her: her suspicion of psychoanalysis has already been noted.36 She thought it added to Shakespeare’s fascination ‘that his character is unknown, except perhaps through his sonnets’, adding, ‘what a disaster it would be if a contemporary biography of him was unearthed’,37 a view suggesting artistic invisibility as sleight-of-hand. (Doubtless her letters after 1950 were undated in order to conduce to invisibility. Incoming letters, including her own when returned to her, she destroyed.) From 1970 she rented flat 62 Cornwall Gardens, South Kensington, but within two years bought the top flat at number 29, on the opposite side of the square, a quiet modest flat, shaded by plane trees at the front, looking towards the Albert Memorial at the back. There was no lift: by the time most visitors had managed the six or so flights of stairs, before what resembled to some the final chicken-run up to the flat, they were breathless. While in Steeple Aston she worked in isolation, hardly emerging except to go to the village shop, in London she wrote of ‘feeling ordinary & buying cigarettes & feeling a whole city, as it were, backing up one’s incognito’.38 The idea of an urban ‘incognito’ eloquently implied the twin, related pleasures of disguise and of moving unrecognised, ‘invisible’. She loved London pubs all her life.
The character and history Iris presented to the world were not conscious artefacts, but resembled unconscious myths. She maintained the reputation of a recluse while giving numerous interviews, during which she often learnt more about the journalist than she revealed about herself. She was open-hearted yet reserved, put her intense inner life into the novels and was outwardly still, able to disappear under the surface. She attacked fantasy yet – ‘philosophers attack their own faults’ – came to believe that she and Frank Thompson had been engaged; they were not. She advocated a surrender to the contingent yet kept certain friends apart, and meetings could be preceded by a flurry of communications modulating the time of rendezvous by ten minutes.
She was all her life headstrong, yet in her philosophy attacked the will. The freest of spirits, she questioned freedom as a value in morals (never in politics). She praised monogamy – of which she indeed had a happy experience – attacking the promiscuity which she forgot had marked her own youth. Three years before homosexuality was decriminalised, she bravely argued in her Man and Society article that ‘those who are homosexual should openly declare themselves to their friends’,39 yet, bisexual herself, rarely mentioned it ('There are not many people whom one wants to know one!'). She was a philo-Semite who admitted to her journal that the Jewishness of the odd friend could sometimes be boring, and who, on an official trip to Israel in 1977, wanted the Palestinian case advocated in the group’s final press statement (she was furious when this was first diluted, then ignored). She wanted to be a painter, a Renaissance art historian, an engineer, an archaeologist,40 a poet. The ‘artist’ in her wanted the intrigues of life to resemble those of Shakespearian drama, and she famously kept some relationships ‘closed off’, compartmentalised. The seeker in her admired simplicity. Like Rain Carter in The Sandcastle she had the twin faces of ‘weeping ragamuffin’ and ‘authoritative artist’. She had a striking ability to be different with different friends.41 She believed in ‘unselfing’ and had the extraordinary strength of a much-loved only child, attacked solipsism yet knew that the best art came from the truest self-involvement. She was fierce and gentle, vulnerable and tough, fastidious and energetic, English and Irish, defended tolerance and could be censorious, remonstrated with Hugh Cecil for catching a six-pound salmon at Lismore Castle in Ireland but noted (years later) ‘the best fish meal ever’ at the Fish Enterprise Co. Restaurant in Santa Barbara; probably it was blood-sports she hated. She also remonstrated with Hugh’s brother Jonathan for his undergraduate acting, though long-remembered at Oxford for her own student acting career.
Iris admired the great Victorian novelists for creating free characters, but her novels show human beings as unfree, their behaviour capricious and identity precarious. A daughter of the impoverished middle class, insisting that her mother’s family were ‘minor gentry’, she offered no objection to being taken as a ‘grand bourgeois’, yet detested social snobbery too. When Marjorie Boulton’s tutor advised her in 1944 against seeking an academic post, Iris was furiously certain that the tutor underestimated Boulton for this stupidest of reasons. She similarly longed for others from humble backgrounds, such as her RCA protégés, to succeed. She was an old-fashioned meritocrat: ability and intelligence must take precedence over privilege. Meanwhile one incidental charm of her novelistic world is that it is often profoundly bourgeois, the cushions made of toile de jouy, ‘Tiens!’ a common expostulation. Frances Stewart – Nickie Kaldor’s eldest child – recalled Iris and John at the Kaldor house in the South of France, ‘La Garde Freinet’. The house-party were invited to visit a neighbour, Tony Richardson. The invitation was issued because Richardson, with an option on filming The Unicorn, wanted to meet Iris; the Kaldors wanted to meet Richardson. All thought Iris ‘serenely oblivious’ of such considerations.42
She was in fact an acute observer. The working-class narrator of A Word Child notes that most cultured middle-class people are ‘snobs … quiet, intelligent, surreptitious beavering-away snobs, unless there is some positive quality of character … to stop them’.43 The expression ‘beavering-away’ is carefully chosen, graphic. Accompanying the indefatigable campaigner Lord Longford into a porn shop she noted dryly his unawareness that ‘the real stuff was in the back’. ‘Biting one’s tongue. Let each man enjoy his own special form of meanness,’ she alarmingly noted in 1969.44 Her best fiction is part-fed by a species of cool rage which may relate to a radical contemptus mundi et vitae, but is sufficiently rooted in the world for it to live in the imagination of the reader. If her philosophy is lofty, her best novels are merciless and grim, as well as comical. There are writers – Conrad and Martin Amis spring to mind – who cannot bear to let you forget that they ceaselessly imagine the worst: where Iris’s novels are dark, their author stays fiercely innocent.
Ibsen was inspired in Italy by watching a pet scorpion discharging its venom into an apple. Iris, too, had fiction as an ‘escape-valve’, and perhaps became good in life partly by being able to purge so much darkness into her best work. The novels, for all the pain, doubt, joy and terror involved in producing them, were an integral part of her psychic economy. She loved the actual writing so much when it was going well that she ‘could not write fast enough’,45 rarely finding time to record the ‘aura of creative aspiration and joy and clairvoyance’46 that inspired her – the jokes emerging while writing An Accidental Man cheered her up. (Afterwards the light was withdrawn.) She wrote methodically, as if ‘driven’,47 described by Francis Wyndham as like a Henry Moore statue seated between two massive piles of manuscript, moving only to write, one pile of empty paper, the other full,48 her industry phenomenal. She was, she observed, ‘devoured by ambition’, wishing ‘always to write better’.49 She often crashed into sleep ‘as if diving into a deep sea’.50
Four lesser novels from the 1970s show the interplay within her of the social and the spiritual. An Accidental Man (1971) is fed by two kinds of symmetry. First there is a public one borrowing from the parable of the Good Samaritan: Matthew, a diplomat in Moscow, watches a passer-by coolly join a demonstration and instantly condemn himself to state persecution; Garth in New York witnesses a street-murder; Ludwig, in flight from the Vietnam war, passes by when depressed the guilt-ridden Dorina on her way to needless suicide. There is also, by way of private symmetry, a dance of lovers of the kind parodied by Malcolm Bradbury as ‘Augustina is in love with Fred, Hugo is in love with Augustina, Flavia is in love with Hugo, Fred …’.51 Entire chapters consist only of letters; others of unnamed voices overheard at a party. The final scene between upper-middle-class Charlotte and her overweight working-class ex-athlete lover Mitzi Ricardo, whose portrayal is a reminder that Iris’s social range is larger than sometimes claimed, is Murdochian in a revealing way. The two women meet in a hospital ward, both unsuccessful suicides, fall in love, buy a cottage in the Surrey North Downs and set up house with a dog called Pyrrhus (which Mitzi mentally spells ‘Pirrus'), who is frightened by their furious quarrels. The real-life dramas of 1963 may contribute to their convincing, sad, funny, fictional rows.
Pyrrhus, a large black labrador, rescued, not for the first time, from the Battersea Dogs’ Home, looked up anxiously from his place by the stove and wagged his tail. Pyrrhus’s lot had always been cast with couples who fought and parted, abandoning him on motorways, on lonely moors, on city street corners. He had been called Sammy and then Raffles and then Bobo. He had only just learnt his new name. He had been happy for a little while in the snug cottage and the rabbity wood with his new humans. Now perhaps it was starting up all over again. He heard the familiar sounds of dispute, the cries, the tears, and he wagged his tail with entreaty. A virtuous affectionate nature and the generous nobility of his race had preserved him from neurosis despite all his sufferings. He had not a scrap of spite in his temperament. He thought of anger as a disease of the human race and as a dread sign for himself.52
Happily for Pyrrhus with his felicitous ‘rabbity’ wood, Charlotte, her bags packed to leave, sheds defeated tears, ‘like those of married people who love each other, cannot stand each other, and know that they can never now have any other destiny’. Risking sentimentality, this passage becomes instead a species of Empsonian pastoral. Doggy simplicities oppose the neurotic human addiction to pain. Pyrrhus, like so many Murdoch dogs, is a crypto-Houyhnhnm looking in wonder at our ‘fallen’ human realm.
Such spiritual obsessions sometimes gave the appearance of sealing Iris’s novelistic world off: A.N. Wilson in a memorial address believed that in her work ‘there are no [Barbara] Pym-like evocations of office-life … No one comes home on the tube obsessed by envy or hatred of the boss.’53 Hilary Burde, narrator of A Word Child (1975), lives on the Circle Line, obsessed by hatred and envy of his Civil Service boss Gunnar Jopling. Key scenes are set in the office. Yet Wilson is partly right: the Circle Line, its two erstwhile station-bars accurately observed, is a Dantesque circle of hell, an image as much of spiritual stasis as of locomotion. Burde is exactly the kind of brilliant working-class hero whom Iris’s essays of the 1970s championed, whom she feared might have suffered under comprehensivisation. But the interest of the book is as much spiritual, even eschatological, as social. A Word Child continues Iris’s stylised attack on the liberal fantasy of an unconditioned world, showing its protagonists enslaved to unconscious life-myths. In her novels human beings – even the so-called cultivated – repeat themselves irrationally. Most are dark to themselves. In The Bell Nick destroys Michael’s career, then fourteen years later, his vocation. An Accidental Man (1971) explores Matthew’s complicity in the death both of his brother Austin’s first wife, then years later of his second, and, to underline the point, shows sibling rivalry poisoning the lives of Charlotte and her sister too. A Word Child also uses a repeating plot. Hilary had fallen in love with Jopling’s first wife, who was killed in a car crash; in trying to put things right twenty years later he falls in love with Jopling’s second wife, who also dies.
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (a tide posing translators interesting problems) (1974), winner of the Whitbread Prize, is a better novel than A Word Child.54 Early in 1972 Iris twice noted that ‘The same picture can represent Mary and Martha or Sacred & Profane Love. (Only of course the girls play different roles).’ While it develops the usual mythic intensity, the novel has a social dimension whose bite and subtlety were underestimated. The ‘bad’ Emily’s move from the role of mistress to wife improves her; the ‘good’ Harriet’s demotion to rejected wife starts to render her feral and malign, before she is killed off with notable authorial coolness. Where one stands vis-à-vis society is not some airy irrelevance, but a leading determinant of ‘character’. This makes The Sacred and Profane Love Machine a more disturbing and satisfying novel about a love-triangle than The Sandcastle. Henry and Cato (1976) contrasts Cato, another failed gay priest journeying into the demythologising landscape of Iris’s Platonism, and Henry, trying to disburden himself of an imposing family house for ‘political’ reasons – in fact taking revenge on his dowager mother. The ending is a Whiggish compromise: Henry keeps the house, a new housing estate gaining some of its needed land. Each of Iris’s convoluted plots fakes up a whole world, a society we enter and miss when we leave.
Both Henry and Cato have difficulties growing up. Good artists, however, in some sense stay childlike. Four of Iris’s novels of the 1970s refer to ‘the sinister boy’ Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie’s play being about ‘one’s relationship … to the subconscious mind’.55 John had introduced her to Barrie’s novel of the same title, which impressed her. She envisaged growing up as a gradual release from the cave (enslavement to one’s unconscious – without which there was, however, no art), acknowledging that her philosophy, being in quest of ‘salvation or enlightenment’, was essentially religious. To be religious is to differ from oneself, to notice that everyone is (at least) two people, one worse or darker than the other, then to seek a means to privilege the better. She noted:
When one is within the small net of irrationality one is mad and bad. Just outside it one feels rational and good again. That state then seems impossible! But the little net just does not communicate with the rest. Goodness (rationality) as making all such little enclaves connect with the open scene. (Pretty obvious! But sometimes one feels it in a sort of inner-spatial way.)56
The ‘silly’ overgrown child of June 1954 who, at nearly thirty-five, despaired because one of half a dozen suitors at a St Anne’s ball flirted with someone else, was no more. In her 1970s journals Iris notes objectively in herself envy, jealousy, losses of nerve, depression, masochism, anger, anxiety, silliness, ‘asininity’, artistic vulgarity, surreptitious optimism. She observes good-humouredly that she is ‘terribly sentimental. What is to be done about it?’57 and is sometimes, usually through vanity, a bad judge of people. She enquires into how low, resentful states of being are to be expelled, transcended, ‘seen through’. Such a movement from a closed-off obsessional enclave towards wonder at the more ‘open scene’ – what Zen calls little mind to big mind – marks her fictions, philosophy, and her private journey too. ‘Amazement at the world’, she observed, is something a novelist and philosopher might feel;58 the novelist invites us to share it when, for example, Jake in Under the Net tells us, ‘I had forgotten about rain.’ Both the forgetting, then the recall, are necessary. The self-involvement of the journal-keeper, too, is repeatedly ambushed by amazement. She noted ‘the extraordinary business of each night’s sleep';59 ‘How extraordinary this moment to moment not-knowing-the-future way of existing!';60 ‘Looking down at one’s body – so odd.’61 Reynolds Stone’s funeral was ‘so strange …’62
If a technology existed to fuel this journey, Iris came to believe it might be found in Buddhism, whose truths she increasingly pondered. ‘Sometimes, confronted with the religions of the east, one feels like the butcher’s boy discovering the circulation of the blood,’ she noted in 1971.63 Buddhism offered a religion without belief in God or the supernatural, and confirmation of what she recognised about her own mind, and ergo about ‘mind’ as a factory of illusion in general. Both Japanese Zen Buddhism with its aesthetic puritanism, and the very different picturesque, superstitious and magical ‘tantric’ Buddhism of Tibet interested her equally. Tantric Buddhism provided the backdrop to The Sea, The Sea: unworthy emotions are not to be discarded but their energies transmuted into wisdom, like a lotus growing in its necessary mud. Tibet’s favourite saint Milarepa, mentioned in The Sea, The Sea, was a reformed murderer. ‘The problem of the transformation of energy is fundamental.’64 She discussed this transformation with Krishnamurti, the remarkable spiritual teacher who bravely stood, as did she, outside all organised religions, when she was invited to engage in dialogue with him in October 1984.65
It is striking that one Buddhist teacher with whom Iris herself requested an interview came from the only tantric (Shingon) tradition in the land of Zen. The Bayleys visited Japan three times, in 1969, 1975 and 1993. On the 1975 trip they visited at Iris’s request the Daihonzan or temple of Ishiyamadera,66 not far from Kyoto, a venue associated with The Tale of Genji, an early Japanese novel Iris loved and whose scene of cat-stealing she borrowed for The Nice and the Good. Here they met the Abbot, Ryuko Washio. After breakfast he performed the tea ceremony for them, with strong green tea, each action having ritual and sacred significance. He resembled a tough Japanese colonel, asking searching questions about how the American trappist monk, sometime hermit and prolific writer Thomas Merton had died: John told him about Merton’s heart attack triggered by electrocution from a defective fan in Bangkok. The following day Iris and the Abbot talked alone. No record of their conversation survives, but probably he gave her simple meditation instruction, which she also sought from the Buddhist Society in London.67
A belief in goodness scarcely accords with the nihilism of the age, which identifies the spiritual urge as pathological or self-martyring, and argues that ‘what goes up must come down’. Iris believed, by contrast, that what is self-enclosed is disturbed, and what is good, self-transcending. Attention – what she was to call a ‘passionate, stilled attention’ – was the bridge. But she never wholly abandoned ‘original sin’, or – with the notable exception of some crucial passages in The Nice and the Good, Bruno’s Dream and The Green Knight – agreed with the Buddhist’s certainties that evil is in a vital sense unreal, our original nature pure and awake. Goodness, for her as for Simone Weil, was by contrast essentially counter-natural.* She was obsessed by the religious life as something to be lived and experienced in every waking moment. She meditated, albeit irregularly, for much of her life thereafter.68
While reading about Buddhism in 1972, Iris asked herself, ‘If art really thrives on … secret gratifications and its splendour is partly imagined, how does it relate to the spiritual quest at all?’69 Dora in The Bell had had an epiphany in front of Gainsborough’s picture of his two daughters in the National Gallery; while when demoralised by the devilish Julius, Morgan in A Fairly Honourable Defeat sees the Turners at the Tate as limited and amateurish. The painter Tim Reede’s dream of hell in Nuns and Soldiers is of seeing the pictures in the National Gallery as trivial, valueless, inane. Perhaps, Iris pondered, all literature, all art misleads: the false unity of the art-work sanctioning an equally false sense of unity within its client. She satirised her own fiction in The Black Prince as ‘a congeries of amusing anecdotes loosely garbled into racy stories with the help of half-baked unmediated symbolism’. This was partly protecting herself against criticism by getting a blow in first; yet also half-serious. She cared deeply about the novel-form, but, in a sceptical age, wished to strengthen it by radical criticism, as steel is the stronger for being tempered. She turned once more to Plato, who had put the case against art in terms so extreme that Iris could grant herself, and art, a final pyrrhic victory.
She gave the Romanes lecture in the Sheldonian Theatre on Plato on 13 February 1976,70 and worked it up into a small book, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists. The book went down better than the lecture, which lacked animation and pace, ran well over the statutory hour, tried too hard and got tangled, the audience becoming restless. The dinner that followed with Alastair Clayre at Brasenose College was uncomfortable. Clayre, a talented Wykehamist polymath – Fellow of All Souls’, documentary film-maker, singer and songwriter – who never quite got his life ‘together’, committed suicide by throwing himself under an Underground train in January 1984. Iris liked his kindness and was fond of him; she hoped for responses to her talk, but got none.
If The Sovereignty of Good attempted to exorcise her fear that ‘morality might turn out to be meaningless’,71 The Fire and the Sun addressed her ambivalence about art and the artist. In 1954 Canetti had confided his fear that even the ‘innocent’ power of creation was wicked. Iris reassured him, ‘It is making more things possible for human beings.’72 The challenge to prove this remained. Although The Fire and the Sun purports first to explicate Plato’s case against art, then contest it, Iris’s and Plato’s voices increasingly become a single indistinguishable composite intellect. Her Plato, rumoured to have torn up his own poetry, felt within him, as did she, ‘the peculiarly distressing struggle between the saint and the artist’.73 Her identification with Plato was remarkable.
This Plato is also Simone Weil’s, giving to love-experience a central place in ethics, yielding a whole metaphysic. For Weil the myth of the Fire and the Sun in The Republic provided half the story. Weil asked, ‘What is the force that keeps the prisoners in the cave?’ and ‘What is the force that releases them?’, finding the answer in Plato’s two erotic dialogues, the Phaedrus and Symposium. The force that imprisons is low Eros – base, blind, obsessive desire; the force that releases high Eros – sublimated love, love of what is highest, desire educated and transformed, refined and dispassionate.74 Falling in love played a role here. It was the only time you saw the world without yourself as the centre of significance, with someone else startlingly at its heart, a quasi-religious experience available to all. Falling in love made you discontinuous from yourself.
Here was one myth within which Iris moralised and made sense for herself of Canetti’s idea of the self as discontinuous, prone to ‘Verwandlung‘, or transformation. Like Plato and Freud she gave to sexual love and to transformed sexual energy the central place in her thinking. This was the heart of her fiction, as of her philosophy. It was no accident that she used the difficulty of trying to ‘check being in love’ as an example of the primacy of ‘attention’ over ‘will’ in The Sovereignty of Good:75 loving her many and varied friends dispassionately mattered too.
The theatre director Michael Kustow, excited by The Fire and the Sun, encouraged Iris to bring her philosophy closer to the interested lay reader. She accordingly wrote two Platonic dialogues, Art and Eros: A Dialogue about Art and Above the Gods: A Dialogue about Religion (published later as Acastos). The first made a well-received platform performance at the National Theatre in February 1980, with Andrew Cruikshank as Socrates and Greg Hicks as Plato. Nowhere else are her ideas brought so alive as in these two dialogues. Each, like the Symposium, contains a group of characters. Plato and Socrates here are two aspects of Iris herself, the former intensely puritanical and fanatical, the latter more relaxed, worldly-wise, pleasure-loving. Plato is an unbalanced twenty-year-old clicking his heels like a Prussian; his moral absolutism needs to be tempered by Socrates’ quieter and more patient wisdom. Plato argues that ‘Art is the final cunning of the human soul that would rather do anything than face the gods.’ Socrates answers thus:
You say art consoles us and prevents us from taking the final step … It may be that human beings can only achieve a second best, that second best is our best … Homer is imperfect. Science is imperfect … our truth must include, must embrace the idea of the second-best, that all our thought will be incomplete and all our art tainted with selfishness. This doesn’t mean there is no difference between the good and the bad in what we achieve. And it doesn’t mean not trying. It means trying in a humble modest truthful spirit. This is our truth …
It may even be that … good art tells us more truth about our lives and our world than any other kind of thinking or speculation – it certainly speaks to more people. And perhaps the language of art is the most universal and enduring kind of human thought … We are all artists, we are all story-tellers … And we should thank the gods for great artists who draw away the veil of anxiety and selfishness and show us, even for a moment, another world, a real world, and tell us a little bit of truth. And we should not be too hard on ourselves for being comforted.76
The understanding that Iris was Platonist inaugurated a second wave of criticism with Elizabeth Dipple’s worthy but humourless Work for the Spirit in 1982. The characters in her novels were chastised for refusing to be saints; the pleasures of the text – details and their comedy, interiors, times of day, weather, seasons, parts of London, cars, dogs, scènes-à-faire – were neglected. If Plato can help the critic (as opposed to the novelist) it may be through his emphasis on the provisionality of all imagery. The pilgrimage towards the sun is a demythologisation, a progressive discarding of specious or illusory goods. It means seeing through one’s own ‘stories’.
In Under the Net Hugo argued that all stories are lies. The Unicorn too proposed that the spiritual life ‘has no story’ and so cannot be tragic. One reason Iris gave A.N. Wilson for destroying an early journal was that she ‘did not want what it contained turned into a story’. Her work abounds in iconoclasm, books left incomplete, torn up, china or glass smashed. In 1961 she called her work ‘an investigation that never ends, rather than a means of resolving anything’.77 This strong playfulness and incompleteness can merge into a failure to be exact or demanding, where character is unfocused, depth of field facilely achieved, psychological indeterminacies woolly: the novel being ‘the most imperfect of art-forms’.78 In the wilful obstinacy of her imperfection too – as in her refusal to be edited – she contrived to escape definition.
* Her progress was slowed by ‘discovering’ – quite erroneously – that the Esperanto for ‘mother’ – patrino – was the diminutive of ‘father’. Letters to Boulton for years stubbornly elaborated the ‘staggering and (honestly, to me) offensive’ insensitivity of using a diminutive suffix to designate the feminine: it recalled to her ‘that male chauvinist book’ the Bible, where Eve came only from Adam’s rib. The point invaded A Word Child.
* Journal, 13 May 1982: ‘Autobiography: “to try to tell the truth about oneself” – why bother? So you are indifferent to truth? No – one struggles with truth versus falsehood all the time. But that effort would be pointless, one must just try to be good. Idea of autobiography is utterly unattractive to me as an art form – and also somehow morally sickening.’
* See The Sovereignty of Good, passim, for Iris’s exploration of how ‘good’ is both transcendent and immanent.