Reading her journal in August 1969 it occurred to Iris to note, ‘what an extraordinarily silly person I am in some ways. Silliness as a positive quality.’1 The following month she woke in the middle of the night and wrote down in the dark the following: ‘"Staggering discovery – I now don’t know anyone who is wiser than myself.” (Well.) What on earth do I mean? Perhaps it’s true? But then did I ever – or is it that I now feel my old gurus to be less than wise?’ Not all dreams afforded equal insight. Waking in the night of 23 January 1970 she wrote down something extremely significant. The following morning, however, this turned out to read: ‘Is ishood sufficient sufficiency?’ She lacked self-conceit, indeed lacked a coherent self-image. ‘We, the ungood’, she wrote to a friend, and in an interview, praising Simone Weil’s difficult idea that morality consists in ‘decreating oneself, something she claimed was enormously difficult to do, went on to challenge the interviewer gloomily as to whether he knew anyone who had ever substantially changed himself.2
Iris certainly wished to leave the earth understanding more than when she arrived, and often felt she understood nothing. Yet an account of her good deeds would fill a weighty tome and make uncomfortable reading; she was, by any possible standard, a good person.* There is a moral charge in all she writes that is often challenging, sometimes cosily familiar, occasionally repellent. Can we change ourselves? How is passion refined into compassion? The allumeuse or vamp orbited by admirers in 1953 had metamorphosed into what Martin Amis saw as a ‘beautiful and benignant nun’3 with a court of younger writers, painter-friends, seekers, relationships differently ‘asymmetrical’. If her 1982 journal entry, ‘To be a steady reliable (even if not very moved) recipient of love is to be a benefactor of the human race,’4 is an unconscious yet vital transmutation of her 1945 ‘tendency to want to be loved, and not engage myself in return’,5 the self-worship and solipsism which endanger any spiritual path were not among her essential topics for nothing. That ‘chaste love teaches’ was the message of her 1982 Gifford lectures.
Andrew Harvey, ex-student of John’s, in 1973 youngest Fellow of All Souls’ and an author, spoke for many of Iris’s friends in seeing her as a sage (no saint) who gave all her friends unstinting, patient and non-judgemental support, making them feel loved, blessed, accepted, unique. He noted the reserve which marked her natural dignity. She had no need to impress or prove anything, was an astonishing example of how to wear fame and assume the dignity of an elder, never for one second the grande dame. Her natural radiation stemmed from a powerful, peaceful, gentle wisdom, her journey an increasingly wide embrace from an increasingly private centre. She had ‘360° mindfulness-awareness’. He intuited the ‘work’ she had done on herself. She helped him midwife his own mystical experiences, recorded a three-hour interview with him about Buddhism for the American journal Tricycle,6 acted as guarantor of what he was coming to understand, showing him how to be. She appeared on a 1993 television programme about him, The Making of a Mystic,7 was dedicatee of his excellent Journey in Ladakh which describes a spiritual quest, and went to Paris where in October 1990 Harvey introduced her to the Dalai Lama, who blessed her for some minutes in Tibetan. Iris and Harvey then wandered through the streets of Paris as if in a dream.
She bravely believed, against the temper of the times, that ordinary behaviour is mediocre, self-centred and neurotic, while good is un-neurotic. If the philosopher Martha Nussbaum was right to argue that her attitude to her own characters was one of ‘disdain’,8 that may be truer of some of her later novels – for example The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983). After 1980 she sometimes became, like the ageing Tolstoy whose spiritual obsessions hurt his later work, too ‘good’ to be novelistically true. Her best work came out of struggle, discontinuity and self-division.
Such self-division marks her early journals, full of the dissolving vapour-trails of her search. The journey itself – the spiritual work’ entailed in what she termed ‘decreating oneself’9 – is now invisible, untraceable. On 25 April 1965: ‘Saw Wasfi Hijab, lunch at Mitre. I had the impression we had both improved since our last meeting. Is that possible?’ She had, all her life, dreams of holiness which she recounts with the same cool objectivity she gives to recording watching four grisly operations under acupuncture as anaesthesia in China in 1979. Sometimes in these dreams she is back at school. There are comical or ludicrous tests and ordeals, which she occasionally passes, more often fails, as well as wise counsel. In April 1982 she dreamt of a ‘rather ridiculous-looking’ yet beautiful Tibetan wearing a sort of dhoti with European coat and bowler hat. Unsure if she was allowed to speak to him, she felt healed and thrilled when he touched her back, experiencing strong desire when she leant her face gently against his and he advised her not to kiss him. After darkness and sleep she ‘awoke’ in Oxford High Street, where she invited the holy man to drink in a pub: ‘a mistake’. The very rude landlord would not serve drinks. There were now eight or twelve people, Very upset’, who ate a meal together. A woman sitting beside Iris said, ‘He pardoned you.’ Iris replied, ‘Yes,’ but was sorry that he had evidently spoken about her to a third party. After some confusion and ‘a sort of pink substance smeared on my face (some ritual)’, she felt excluded and that she must go away.
At this point she awoke (about 6.30 a.m.) and tried to continue the dream in drowsy waking thoughts. It went on as a conversation. She wanted to find out ‘what he said to me’, which turned out to be: ‘Give up drinking. Live a quiet orderly life. Bring peace and order into your life. Give up certain thoughts, send them quietly away. When you feel your clutching craving hands holding onto something, gently detach them. Sit, kneel, or sometimes lie on your face in a quiet room. Have flowers in the room. Love the visible world.’ She asked him about penance. ‘Penance? Think in that way if you like, but not with intensity.’ ‘Can I see you sometimes?’ ‘I am nobody, you must give me up too.’ A feeling of grace, of a door opening, accompanied these half-waking thoughts.
Sometimes she allotted such dreams to her characters, as when Monty in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine was given her dream of failing a spiritual test by scooping up imaginary water at the ‘wrong’ level. ‘A most strange & vivid dream’ she had on the night of 20 January 1947 waited thirty years to be used. She saw in a garden two allegorical figures of birds of prey who transmuted into angels, be-winged and with golden hair. They came down from their pillars, passing her by.
I follow them, a little afraid, & call after them. ‘Can I ask you one question: Is there a God?’ They reply ‘Yes’, & disappear round a corner. I follow them and find myself alone in a gravel walk by the side of a building. Then I hear the footsteps approaching of someone whom I know to be the Christ. Filled with an indescribable terror & sense of abasement I fall on my face. The footsteps pass me & I hear a voice say: ‘Ite’ – which I take in the dream to mean ‘Come’ in Greek. I dare not look up.
She heard another person approaching with a rustling dress. This person – the Virgin Mary – stopped beside her and put her hand on Iris’s shoulder: ‘The burden of terror is lifted a little and I say “Forgive me."’ She replies to the effect that ‘Your sins are forgiven.’ The Virgin passed on, Iris keeping her face hidden.
The dream had other sequences, some terrifying, two blissful: the first in which Donald MacKinnon made a careful plaster-cast of her, then kissed her; and another in which the family reassured Hughes, unexpectedly home after having gone missing on a secret service job in which he had to make himself ‘look like a German’, and was afraid he still did. There were ‘very vivid colours throughout … – & a certainty, especially in the gravel walk scene, that this is not a dream – it is a vision’. Thirty years later she gave the first half of this waking vision to the ex-nun Anne Cavidge in Nuns and Soldiers (1980), married to Dame Julian of Norwich’s well-known dream of meeting Christ10 and being handed by him a hazelnut, the universe in microcosm. Christ mysteriously reassured Julian, in answer to her question about how fatally flawed Creation is by sin and suffering, that ‘All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing shall be well; and sin is behovely.’ To Cavidge, Christ, in whom she no longer in the ordinary sense believes, provides different assurances, a pebble substituting for the hazelnut, and her finger burns when she tries to touch him; the burn survives into waking life as an ambiguous sign.
In these dreams, as in her schooldays, Iris is partly cast as a lonely child longing for approval; and just as Froebel schoolchildren accumulated within their desks their growing collection of red stars, so she privately recorded a lifelong love of praise. The Iris who in 1938 was instantly enslaved when Ruth Kingsbury praised her Cherwell poems was in evidence when she noted in May 1967 her old friend Tino de Marchi’s letter thanking her for a meeting: ‘It was like reviving after the torture chamber. And your marvellous note! The power of your words! There are people who are mean with them. You are not one. I wish I were like you – as strong, as human, as generous as you are.’ In January 1972 she found ‘very cheering … dear Cecil Beaton’ wishing to photograph her impromptu outside the Victoria and Albert Museum. The next month David Hicks wrote after a lunch, ‘By God, that was the happiest meeting with you I have had for years, and I wept with pleasure in the tube going back to my office. What an absolute darling you are!’ In November 1981 the French critic Jean-Louis Chevalier after a conference at the Centre Pompidou wrote, ‘Le mélange de modestie et de conscience de sa juste valeur chez I.M. m’a énormément séduit.'* The following year a letter praising her Gifford lectures, which had profoundly dispirited her, was ‘one she hoped for’.
Against such a background her hope for ‘change’ must be read. Certain themes recur. She noted in 1949 her deep desire to please others, a willingness which is ‘on my face like a birthmark’.11 She thought this weak. In July 1980: ‘"Weakness of will” is not a unitary phenomenon. I am very strong willed in some ways, absurdly weak in others. (E.g. strong in my work; weak in pleasing others, sometimes anyway) I suppose this is obvious.’ That this is not the only possible reading of the instinct to propitiate and confirm others is suggested by her quoting Traherne’s Meditations’. ‘Never is anything in this world too much loved, but is loved in a false way and in too short a measure.’12 Love of her friends, of her characters, of the visual world, marks her too.
She accordingly praised a passage from Auden’s ‘The Horatians’ that runs: ‘Look at/This world with a happy eye’. She thought Auden’s love of what we see before us is preferable to Shakespeare’s emphasis on music ('The man that hath no music in himself/Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds/Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils'*). Iris preferred to say that ‘the man who does not love the visual world, who does not see what is before him’, is in poor case. Her friendships with painters – Canadian Alex Colville’, Harry Weinberger – were very important to her. She spent much of her Booker Prize money acquiring Weinberger’s paintings, and wrote introductions to two of his catalogues.13 They met often, at his studio in Leamington and touring the National Gallery in London, and her four hundred or so letters to him show how zealously she tried to find him a good dealer and to explore with his help, inter alia, her liking for Francis Bacon, Egon Schiele and Titian, and her doubts about Lucian Freud, Giacometti or Picasso – ‘Great painter but the personality shows too much.’14
Her journals abound in deft evocations of ordinary magic making what is strange familiar, and what is familiar, strange.
13 October 1968. Very engaging gentle tapir in Harrods zoo … trudging around … sniffing the other cages, pushing past a dust bin, sniffing at it with his long sensitive proboscis-like nose. Wonderful round intelligent eyes and strange hoofed feet with divided toes which folded up when he lifted them, and splayed out as he set them down … when he came near we stroked his soft naked warm nose. He had strong back legs, a tiny tail. Puss offered him a peppermint which he accepted with dignity.
13 May 1981. Yesterday we found a queen hornet which had crawled out of the woodpile by the kitchen door. We took her outside on a piece of cardboard and looked at her closely. She stared back with her huge eyes, waving her feelers. We put her on the ground and she crawled away among the plants. I hope she is all right.
25 May 1984. Last night a strange scene in the garden. Just before twilight, very vivid darkish evening light (after a sunny day), we saw from the window [a] deer … daintily walking and feeding in the longer grass of the lawn. Such a pretty graceful brown animal. We watched for a while, the deer lifted her head, then there appeared, like an entry of dandyish quarrelsome youths in a theatre, three large fox cubs, who stood insolently displaying the tawny frills of fur round their necks, just under the yew trees by the new lawn. They approached the deer, who lowered her head menacingly, ran at a cub who approached her and drove him away. Then the three began to run round, one always appearing behind her, while she kept turning aggressively. This game, I think the cubs just playing, went on for some time, until the deer suddenly raced away. The fox cubs stayed and played on the lawn where we watched them for a long time till it got dark. It was like something out of a Book of Hours, the colours were so vivid.
A sense for what Gabriele Annan, reviewing The Book and the Brotherhood,15 called lacrimae rerum,* was always with her. James Scott noted in 1937 that she had, even as a teenager, a feeling for ‘something sad and deep that belonged to the very structure of the universe’. Leo Pliatzky wrote to Frank Thompson in September 1942, ‘She finds the world tragic and moving, but that is not unusual.’16 She was easily moved, struck by the fact that ‘many men cannot weep';17 noted that ‘A very acute realisation that people are suffering elsewhere in the world is a very precious thing to have.’18 On the one hand, ‘the planet is crawling with misery'; on the other, she made a strong case for the quest for happiness and pleasure.19 As for goodness, she noted in her journal, perhaps no discussion or portrayal of it can, in the end, evade sentimentality. Early in Nuns and Soldiers Anna Cavidge and the dying Guy Openshaw have a critical discussion, at the end of which they agree that goodness is a ‘conjecture’.
The characters in Nuns and Soldiers, Martin Amis observed, inhabit a ‘suspended and eroticised world, removed from the anxieties of health and money and the half-made feelings on which most of us subsist’.20 The questioning of her old gurus lies behind this last phase of Iris’s novel-writing, the seven novels starting with Nuns and Soldiers in 1980, which begins with the death of a wise older man, Guy Openshaw. Each succeeding novel chronicles the death of a patriarch, whose wisdom often resembles madness. The modern world, it sometimes seems, has been too much for them. Rozanov in The Philosopher’s Pupil and Vallar in The Message to the Planet, like Iris with Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, are struggling to write their ‘great books’. Many are pursued by needy younger disciples or son-figures: the anxiety of influence a common topic. The Philosopher’s Pupil chronicles the death in a bath-house of the cruel Rozanov, and supposed redemption of his nasty epigone George, resenting his enslavement. The Good Apprentice has the death of a crazed artist-mage who lusts after his own daughter, Jesse Baltram; in The Book and the Brotherhood the old classicist Levquist and Gerard’s father die. The Message to the Planet concerns the demise of the Holocaust-maddened Jewish mathematician Marcus Vallar; The Green Knight the mission, the life after death, and then the real expiry of the Buddhist-Russian-Jew Peter Mir.
Rozanov has been compared to a menacing side of Donald MacKinnon. Levquist is based on Fraenkel, Gerard’s father’s death on Hughes’s, and Gerard’s last meeting with Levquist inspired by Iris’s meeting with Fraenkel in 1965. Baltram, like the earlier priapic Otto in The Italian Girl, owes something to Iris’s readings of Eric Gill’s life;21 she claimed Vallar was based on Kreisel,22 who, however, compared the Holocaust to a mere act of nature.23 It is partly Kreisel’s profession as mathematical logician that she exploits – the working title of The Message to the Planet was ‘The Language of the Planet’, mathematics being construed, since Pythagoras, as a universal language – and partly his unpredictable relations with his friends. Vallar’s spiritual struggle derives both from Franz and from Arnaldo Momigliano,24 and apparently predicted the writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s suicide in April 1987.*
Iris wondered in 1990 whether her writer’s guardian angel had been ‘assigned to somebody else?’ She used a fountain pen for two drafts – ‘One should love one’s handwriting’ – then personally brought her novels, swollen now with superfluous ideas and characters, to Chatto in a plastic bag or two. None after 1971 had chapter divisions. Chatto was frustrated that she magisterially refused editorial guidance, and sensitive about it too: Norah Smallwood wrote to Sebastian Faulks, then editing New Fiction, that his suggestion that Chatto was pusillanimous over editing Iris’s books, were it true, was ‘an impertinence, if not libellous’.25 Norah Smallwood’s successor Carmen Callil, newly arrived, and attempting to have The Philosopher’s Pupil copy-edited,26 received a careful letter from Iris requesting her, at some expense, to please ‘put it all back’. She would rather, she said, be read by fewer readers who were more intelligent. On the one hand she now required to approve every comma change;† on the other, as Chatto’s Editorial Director Andrew Motion noted with despairing good humour, ‘she’s a self-confessed bad speller and checker of detail, so the common or garden copy editing has to be done carefully. Heigh ho.’27
A note from Norah Smallwood in 1982 tells Iris that the sum of £200,000 awaited her instructions. Her novels were selling 25,000 copies in hardback. Norah Smallwood retired, and in 1984 bequeathed Iris to the good offices of the literary agent Ed Victor. The old-fashioned contract – an advance of £10,000 per novel and a 50:50 royalty split – was succeeded, thanks to Victor, by more advantageous terms, and much larger advances: £50,000 for The Book and the Brotherhood in the UK alone. Soon Callil referred to Iris as ‘Queen of Chatto';28 to herself as ‘putty in [Iris’s] hands’.29
Iris vigorously defended in The Good Apprentice both her invention ‘oblivescent’,30 meaning ‘in the process of being forgotten’, and her resurrection of the archaic ‘to cote’.31 Each novel now grew fifty or so pages longer than its predecessor. Her characters, older than her when she began, were now often younger. Instead of having them educated at Oxbridge, she was increasingly likely to send them to polytechnics. The map of modern living criticised in the opening Fulham dinner party of The Good Apprentice (1985) is sobering. The old liberal values Iris treasured were threatened by nuclear war, computers and pornography, while a sterile scientistic rationalism promises the decay of faith in the significance of the individual, and of any vision of human destiny that might be termed spiritual. In her Gifford lectures in November 1982 she remarked that the world needs ‘fewer prophets and more saints’. The prophetic note came easily, none the less. Her Platonic dialogues of 1986, which she noted could be staged in modern dress, see the present as a period of critical breakdown of old values, while The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) threatens a future that is bookless, technocratic, soulless and violent, mankind living on the brink of the fastest change in the history of the planet. Honor Tracy had told her humorously that the Days of Mercy were ending as the Days of Wrath drew nigh; in her next hurried scrawl Iris wrote, ‘Thanks inform. Days Wrath.’32 Her dislike of television as ‘frenetic shadows’ that destroy exactly that sense of reality which novels supply perhaps belongs to the early 1950s, when the contempt of intellectuals for television was at its height, and did not prevent her occasional appearances on it.33
Unlike E.M. Forster after the Great War, Iris did not lose the ability either to think about, or to fear, the contemporary world. Fear gave her vision edge. There were also new refuges from modern vulgarity and domestic chaos. From around 1985 the Bayleys stayed with Diana, Lady Avebury, who had a small literary agency, in the top flat at Lepe, looking out over the Solent in Hampshire.34 Diana’s step-brother Bill Pease, owner of Lepe House, had been (though younger) at Eton with John, and his wife Lizzie was a niece of Lord David Cecil’s; there were eleven acres of garden. There were regular visits, too, to George Clive and his mother Lady Mary, sister-in-law of Anthony Powell, friends of the Stones, at their eighteenth-century red-brick house and splendid grounds, Whitfield, in Herefordshire.
Summers were enlivened by friendship. On 30 July 1977 Iris noted: ‘Back from France. A very good time with Stephen and Natasha [Spender]. I begin to feel at home in that countryside, so that I cd write about it. Swam in magic aquaduct, and in pool under rock.’ The Bayleys’ first stay at the Spenders’ Mas Saint-Jerome, near Maussane in the Alpilles, was in August 1973. When Natasha Spender met them at Marignane airport, Iris and John were convulsed in helpless laughter at some private joke. The Spenders were ‘doing up’ the old farmhouse in its great natural limestone amphitheatre, within which Natasha was creating a large and notably beautiful garden. There were Cézanne pine trees in the foreground, ‘frilly’ rocks at the horizon on which windswept smaller trees took on the look of a Chinese painting. This became an annual pilgrimage, in the grand chaleur succeeding exams, both John and Stephen being university professors. The Spenders enjoyed Stuart Hampshire’s description of the Bayleys as Hansel and Gretel. John and Iris bought zinc-capped cheap supermarket wine in three-starred bottles which the Spenders nicknamed ‘child-wine’ – playing surrogate children was a role to which they were used. The Bayleys relaxed Spender in a way that some of his worldlier friends did not. Douglas Cooper,35 art historian, critic and collector, kept the château de Castille at Argilliers near Tarascon and wrote reviews intended to cause ‘unassuageable anguish’. Spender found him spiteful and destructive.36 With this gay ‘Monstre’, as he was nicknamed, Iris was completely self-possessed, calming, dominant. Like the Virgin with the Unicorn, she was the one who, to the astonishment of onlookers, ‘led’ and tamed the Beast. Cooper adored Iris; with her his character changed for the better. Travel writer Rory Cameron, who built a palatial house for his mother Lady Kenmare at Cap Ferrat, gave Iris the phrase ‘une vie de baton de chaise’ for The Green Knight. Referring to sedan chairs, it betokened a rackety life at a high social level. Scrabble was sometimes played in the evenings. The Bayleys enjoyed watching the competitive edge with which the Spenders played – Stephen’s face wore a delightfully cunning look – and liked it when the Spenders won (which was often).
Gardening early one morning, Natasha was excited to hear a woodpecker towards the end of her lilac-walk. Closer inspection showed this to be John tapping out a book on his portable typewriter, getting up and humming a little song as he walked about, then sitting down and woodpeckering away again. Iris would come out and, without ado, help with whatever gardening chore needed finishing, sometimes in silence. She knew the names of moths, and loved to rescue small creatures – for example ants – from humans teetering down the steps. ‘I say, old thing, do be careful …’. The cat Daisy favoured her. Iris wrote in the small room next to the Bayleys’ bedroom in the ‘Bergerie’.
Around 11.30 the Bayleys would disappear for a swim. Iris told her fellow-guests the Rodrigo Moynihans and the Noel Annans in July 1975, ‘I‘m going to let you into a secret.’ They trooped down in a crocodile to reach an ever-changing, rapidly flowing winding strip, the sixteenth-century canal de Craponne, which brought fertility and brilliantly coloured dragonflies to an arid land, at a point where it is bridged and easy to enter from a parapet. ‘Splendid, splendid,’ said Noel Annan, watching from the bridge Iris float on her back in the eau agrìcole in her mother’s ancient skirted bathing-suit, noting her resemblance to one of the beautiful mauve jellyfish that proliferate in the Mediterranean in summer.37 The party cheered as they raced each other towards a short but alarming downhill chute, down which the Moynihan boys dared to plunge. By 1977 Iris was trying to work out whether it might be possible for her hero Tim Reede in Nuns and Soldiers to go through the hundred-yard tunnel ingeniously scooped through a limestone hill, obscured by brambles at each end, through which the canal later flowed. Natasha naughtily said, ‘Only one thing for it, John has got to try it.’ John declined. After the book came out – to ‘screams of rage and hate’ from critics, Iris untypically lamented38 – a fire cleared both ends and John and Iris swam through the tunnel, emerging looking regal and exhilarated, only their torch lost. Natasha was relieved to see them. Ten years later another adventurous soul was killed trying this feat, concussed against the roof and then drowned. Tim’s feat was plausible: the tunnel was dangerous, but sometimes survivable. The novel anticipated the journey.
The vividly memorable landscape in Nuns and Soldiers is a collage and shows something of the workings of Iris’s imagination. The scale of the canal is magnified; a significant local pool, given by Iris a grander valley background from Caisse de Servannes, a Celtic-Ligurian sanctuary, is brought together with a rocky fountain from Salon-de-Provence twenty kilometres off. Just before lunch Stephen and Iris liked to sit on the stone seat below a flower-filled sarcophagus for a pre-lunch drink – talk would centre on whatever each was writing – the Gifford lectures for Iris around 1977–82. Visits to the Camargue to see the flamingos took place after tea. Once they saw bee-eaters. Iris would plunge into almost any available water. Such sights and experiences were precious, both to her and for her art.
Nuns and Soldiers was dedicated to Stephen and Natasha Spender, and prompted in Stephen the nightmare that he had unexpectedly been made Pope, and had to deliver a sermon to waiting millions (the election of John-Paul II figures at the end of the book). He noted that Iris, though extremely gifted, ‘doesn’t seem quite a novelist’. The lack of surface realism, and the inclusion of a big green and gold lizard which he had never observed, bothered him.39 Iris and John had watched it lying motionless in the dense creepers on the outside wall. The novel is fed by Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, whose story of two impoverished outsiders plotting an opportunistic marriage it plays with and alters, and whose famous final line ('We shall never be again as we were') it twice echoes. The dying Guy is one of those Murdochian characters whose mere existence acts as a guarantee of meaning, continuity, stability, in a frightening world. He represses his own cruelty and is generous financially, morally and emotionally, expecting a calm dignity in those to whose problems he patiently listens. In Iris’s godless universe such people shine out with the force that once accrued to the Church. For Tim and the Count, as for his widow Gertrude whom both love, Guy’s Ebury Street flat is an ‘abode of value’, providing some sense of family.40
While Iris agreed with Guy’s argument that the possibility of the Good is only ‘a conjecture'* – he himself is none the less what she termed an ‘icon’ to his world. On 16 April 1966 she noted that an Iris stylosa whose bud she had picked in the snow had blossomed unexpectedly indoors. Its silky sky-blue flower prompted the thought: ‘Completely pure things as starting-points.’ This rhetoric about icons she developed in the third of her ten Gifford lectures in Edinburgh in 1982. Positive icons – like objects of prayer – were objects, persons, events whose contemplation brought an access of good spiritual energy. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, which wrote up the Giffords and was received with a certain baffled respect in 1992, she noted that we often keep such icons private.41 Negative icons degrade and demoralise.
Iris wrote and rewrote the Gifford lectures repeatedly, but found it hard to bring her thoughts together, and the audience, partly of good ladies from Morningside, shrank during the fortnight it took to deliver them. There were moments of involuntary comedy, as when one lecture was introduced in error as concerning the Ontological Proof of God, rather than of Good. Iris crossly cited the fact that swallows are obliged by their supposed Designer to migrate 12,000 miles each year of their brief lives: ‘The arrangement is both wasteful and immoral.’ She urged that our task is to love other people ‘and perhaps dogs’. She used to consider the image of the mother as the paradigm good person, but had come to see mothers as complicit with power. The good man, she augustly announced, should behave like an aunt. A promised lecture on the ‘Return to the Cave’ and the uses of Good in politics and in the marketplace was postponed and never happened. The official historian of the Gifford lectures wrote a sceptical report on Iris’s performance.42
The rhetoric about icons gets into The Good Apprentice, one of two marvellous late novels (the other is The Green Knight). These are saved from shapelessness by cannibalising and reworking earlier myths. The Good Apprentice recycles the parable of the Prodigal Son, The Green Knight the myth of Sir Gawain. The Good Apprentice (1985) is based on the premise that most lives go terribly wrong at some point. Its hero Edward inadvertently kills his friend Mark in the electrifying opening sequence, then maps a comic journey out of modern London into the mysterious counter-pastoral world of Seegard, from guilt, via ordeals, to self-renewal. Seeking saviours, he finally has to learn self-forgiveness. Stuart, his foster-brother, and the saint of the book, finds spiritual help from watching mice living on the Underground tracks, an image of the power of meekness in a dangerous world (Iris was then re-reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot every year, with its own rhetoric about meekness). Conversely, the image of shorn-off plaits of girls’ hair at Auschwitz, which the Bayleys visited in 1974, haunts Stuart as an emblem of the horrors of the age. Stuart, whose white grublike face links him to Anne Cavidge’s vision of Christ in Nuns and Soldiers, is the single non-allegorical good figure in Iris’s work. It is observed of him that, while preaching selflessness, he has a strong ego. Stephen Medcalf in the TLS was typical of many reviewers in finding Stuart’s style of chastity self-deceived and inhumane, his interventions disastrous, his refusal to believe in God incomprehensible.43 Myshkin, too, was controversial in his time.
The Green Knight (1993) merits comparison with the late romances of Shakespeare: poised and fantastical, with its quasi-divine intervention, it is a myth about redemption which is none the less full of actuality, and an extraordinarily achieved mixture of joy and pain. Iris noted that she wanted this novel to ‘fight back against philosophy’. Her characters usually arrived in a small group ‘carrying a box which contains the plot. Not this time.’ Peter Mir in The Green Knight is more clearly allegorical than Stuart; he is a figure from elsewhere, possibly raised from the dead, his Russian Jewishness a token only of otherness. He links interestingly with Hugo in Under the Net. Both are non-English, and spiritual aliens. Hugo startles us by becoming an apprentice watchmaker in Nottingham; Mir reveals he was formerly a butcher. The ordinariness of their trades is a token of authenticity. Both come to redeem the social worlds they find themselves in. Neither is properly apprehended or understood. Both, again, owe something to Myshkin. Mir is as interesting as Hugo, but more integrated with the life of the novel, as well as with its ideas.
Two episodes in The Green Knight stemmed from a holiday with Borys and Audi Villers, friends of the Bayleys for thirty years and travelling companions in the 1980s: the evening parade through the piazza, which they experienced together at the little town of Ascoli Piceno, where they went to look at the Crivellis in September 1988; and the tense bridge scenes, which were inspired in Spoleto. The bridge so frightened Iris that she refused to cross. Her fear informs the novel as the ordeal Harvey twice has to suffer. John and Iris first went to stay with the Villerses, dedicatees of The Message to the Planet, on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands in 1983. Many trips abroad followed: the Villerses and Bayleys had in common the love of painting, books and music, and mutual friends in Oxford and London. Borys, who started, then sold, a profitable firm manufacturing electric blankets, had been born Emil Chwoles in Vilnius in 1923, converted from Judaism to Catholicism, and anglicised himself at school in England and at Christ Church. The Villerses’ London flat, where Borys died in 1992, was, like the dying Anglojewish Guy’s in Nuns and Soldiers, in Ebury Street, near Victoria station. When Iris invented Guy’s death in Ebury Street in 1978, however, the Villers had not dreamt of moving to that address. Her art anticipated life.
Iris once watched a boy on the Oxford train devouring a novel of hers, wholly unaware of its inventor sitting opposite, eyeing him quizzically throughout. On alighting she reflected, ‘Say what they like: at least I can tell a story …’. Such narrative skills apart, she strove to get out of what she saw as the second division into the first. Since her first contains Homer, Shakespeare, James, Proust, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens and Austen, a place just below these is not dishonourable.
Guy Openshaw and Peter Mir in The Green Knight resemble Charles Dickens’s lonely altruists Jarndyce and the Cheeryble brothers. Each offers the material and spiritual help that society no longer provides. They are suitable angels in a Thatcherite state. Iris believed in such beings. She wrote to a friend, ill and contemplating suicide, that she wished the friend might find someone who could really help: ‘Sometimes such persons can appear.’ The friend decided against drastic action. For a number of her now worldwide collection of pen-friends Iris was such an iconic being herself. For some their only friend. The ‘feeling you’re not understood, that nobody cares what happens to you’ was, she believed, a prime cause of unhappiness.44 There were ‘many lonely folk who are desperately waiting for attention’.45 Friendship mattered more than such public duties as being an honorary member of the Friends of the Classics and of the Tyndale Society,46 or Trustee of the Jan Hus Foundation, to which she made a generous donation47 – all gained from her name – proposing a statue of Proust for the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square48 or agitating unsuccessfully to keep Somerville for women only. The joke about the socialite with ‘a hundred close friends’ was no joke in Iris’s case. Unlike the socialite, she knew each of them. Yet Sir Leo (as he now was) Pliatzky was not alone among her older friends in minding the perhaps understandable alternation in her, now, of peremptory invitations and silence.
Iris began her epistolary career, pre-war, with letters to pen-friends such as James Scott. Answering such correspondents could now take four hours a day. She always answered rapidly, in her own hand, without secretarial help ('I could not bear a secretary'), on J.R.R. Tolkien’s rolltop desk, which she and John had bought in the 1970s, apologising when absence delayed her reply. She met everyone at their own level, addressing their troubles and happinesses alike. Her answers made her friends more interesting to themselves, each uniquely apprehended. Many of her letter-runs have more than a hundred letters in them; some more than three hundred. This energetic expenditure of sympathetic warmth, intelligence and encouragement is, surely, quite remarkable: such unpaid authorship brought comfort and down-to-earth advice. One Belgian correspondent displayed interest in the market value of his collection of her letters. Though in The Black Prince Iris had described letter-writing as a ‘complex warding-off process’, keeping the world at bay, David Hicks was not alone in avowing a shock of delight when a letter with her handwriting came through the door. Her complaints of tiredness became more frequent. When it was suggested in 1992 that the penalty for virtue was a steadily increasing burden,49 she replied with mordant humour, ‘Yes! Pals for life!’ After a short absence in September 1993 she found seventy letters awaiting her. Christmas brought two hundred. She had an educated heart, imagination, and fearsome industry. Her letters, friendship and visits lightened dark places. That she was there mattered. Yeats told us that ‘The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work,’50 Auden retorting that perfection was attainable in neither. Would Iris’s later work have been better had she allowed herself to be a less ‘perfect’ correspondent? But the work and the life were the same project. Walking with her friend David Luke outside St Aldate’s one day in the 1960s, she interrupted a violent altercation between an unknown young couple, saying ‘Stop that! Stop it at once! Don’t do that.’ Luke found this both naive and warm-hearted. It also presaged Tallis in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, who memorably knocked out an unknown thug intimidating a black diner in a restaurant.
Honor Tracy noted to Sister Marian: ‘She is so very famous … Perhaps she feels that, wherever she goes, a kind of other imaginary distorted self has got there ahead of her and put obstacles in her way.’ Tracy thought she had no enemies, ‘except among the envious and less successful’. It is not clear that Iris wholly understood her own celebrity, nor how the age had made out of fame itself its secret religion. Simplicity did not make her less of an icon. A journalist wrote that Iris’s entire career was familiar to educated persons, like national folklore. A television advertisement for British Rail showed a contented passenger reading Henry and Cato. A.S. Byatt on Iris’s seventieth birthday argued, ‘She’s not a minor writer. She’s at the centre of our culture.’51 ('Everyone very kind,’ Iris noted, in Queen Victoria mode, of the messages she received.) Owing to her friendship with Iris, Byatt announced, it was no longer possible for her to tell a lie. The artist Tom Phillips spent years painting her portrait, pale, still and mystical, a light shining in darkness, for the National Portrait Gallery, in front of her own favourite Titian’s late The Flaying of Marsyas.* This portrait, on permanent display in the gallery, was also made into a postcard. Iris did not mind being a postcard. On a BBC TV Bookmark programme about her in 1989 she praised the separateness and coolness of Phillips’s portrait, adding that she did not think she had any very strong sense of her identity: ‘I don’t think of myself as existing much, somehow.’52
The Bayleys went more frequently now on the British Council lecture tours that had begun in the 1960s, performing an unscripted double-act all over the world, ambassadors for liberal British culture and the traditional novel alike. One advantage of such travel was visiting art galleries, and she remarked to the noted critic of her work Richard Todd in 1986 of the three Vermeers, including the View of Delft, at the Mauritshuis in The Hague: ‘I’m sorry, but if we don’t manage to see those pictures ‘I’m afraid I shall go mad.’ (On the flight back, so as not to have to check any baggage, she wore four cardigans one on top of the other. To Todd’s enquiry, ‘Iris, aren’t you going to be incredibly warm?’ she replied, ‘No, we shall make a quick getaway at Heathrow.') In Malcolm Bradbury’s good-natured parody of a Murdoch novel there are characters called Moira LeBenedictus, Hugo Occam, Sir Alex Montaubon.53 There were plenty of names as odd in real life: in Japan in 1975 she met Endymion Porter Wilkinson and read about Tabitha Powledge.
Iris was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987 – ‘There is nothing like a Dame,’ friends predictably quipped – and wore to her investiture at Buckingham Palace black plimsolls that allowed the natural expansion her painfully crippled hammertoes required. In 1993 alone she was awarded four honorary doctorates – from Alcalá de Henares (in Spain), Cambridge, Ulster and Kingston. She was disconcerted to find she had to give the speech at the Barbican for Kingston, finding it hard to plan the jokes, rewriting many times. Although her best novels are comedies, she was never an entertainer. Kingston’s Vice-Chancellor suggested she curtail her speech; dismayed, she cut out a section on the necessity of Christ in the twenty-first century.54 She vowed to accept thereafter no more doctorates.
On Saturday, 10 January 1987 Iris sat next to E.P. Thompson on an Air India jet,55 both flying first class to a New Delhi conference commemorating the recently assassinated Indira Gandhi, Iris’s contemporary at Badminton.56 Thompson had never travelled first class before, and noted that ‘young Dame Iris’ took all – including champagne, cocktails, caviar, lobster – as her customary due. However fast asleep she seemed to be, she had a preternatural seventh sense to catch the wine waiter passing by. His father had been a friend of Indira Gandhi’s father Jawaharlal Nehru, family tradition maintaining that Indira was married at Somerville before the war in a sari borrowed from E.P. and Frank’s mother Theo. He used the occasion to brood upon political change. In 1941–45, ‘that half-democratic, half anti-Fascist’ time, the chances of life were shared, the young gave priority to the injured, the sick, children and the old, and the pursuit of private privilege was deemed contemptible. He neglected to congratulate ‘the young Dame Iris’ on the title she had accepted from a mean and malevolently philistine government: ‘How could Iris Murdoch have forgotten the oaths of yesteryear?’57
Despite saying of the miners during the 1981 strike, ‘they should be put up against the wall and shot,’58 and approving the Falklands war, Iris’s own perception was not that she had moved to the right, but that the Labour Party had been taken over by left-wing extremism. The formation of the moderate Social Democratic Party by four ex-Labour Cabinet Ministers in 1981 was (at first) splendid news: ‘I am on the whole very glad about this development.’ It reminded her of February 1940 and the splitting of Oxford University Labour Club, when Roy Jenkins, now a member of the ‘Gang of Four’ founders of the SDP, abandoned the extremist left, led by her. ‘How right he was,’ she wrote, ‘on both occasions.’59 Iris was a nominator for Jenkins in 1987 as Chancellor of Oxford, he soon nominating her for an honorary doctorate in his inaugural – hence personally chosen – list.60 She deplored Labour’s policies in the early 1980s of leaving the Common Market and NATO, of doing without the House of Lords and abolishing private schooling. Of the extremists whom Labour failed to purge she felt particular venom towards the miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, whom she blamed for the fact she was ‘now rather a floating voter’, although she maintained in 1991 that she ‘continued to believe in socialism as represented by the Labour Party’.61 She accepted an invitation from Margaret Thatcher to a reception at 10 Downing Street also attended by Sir Raymond Carr – with whom, fifty years before in 1938, she had canvassed in the ‘Munich’ by-election – now a distinguished historian and Warden of St Antony’s College. She recorded in her journal ‘Margaret Thatcher as will-to-power’.62 Before the June 1983 general election she wrote to Philippa Foot that she
did not much like the Tories what with unemployment and no incomes policy, but what are the alternatives? I might vote Liberal if they were an independent body, but the SDP business seems very shadowy, & SDP is (they keep it dark) deeply divided left & right … the whole party seems unreal. And wd Michael Foot* make a good PM? … (If Denis Healey not so bad, but it wouldn’t be him). Anyway the Labour Party is deeply, by now, contaminated by the extreme left who want to abolish parliamentary democracy in favour of some sort of party government by ‘activists’. On things I really know about, such as education and Ireland, I agree with the Tories, and very much not with the Labour Left. It’s all very depressing. Some sort of reform or control of the unions is very important but even the Tories’ feeble attempts have got nowhere (their little law is ignored!) – and anyway they ought to talk to the Unions. (The LP wd just be run by them.) Enough of politics.63
In 1988 she wrote at length to Kenneth Baker, then Secretary of State for Education and Science, registering ‘acute anxiety’.64 The Tories were attacking the independence of universities, and thus of the ‘old liberal intelligentsia’ in general. The proposed abolition of the University Grants Commission65 ceded control over higher education to the government. She defended Mods and Greats as training students in ‘independent’ thought, against the demand for more vocational courses. She grieved over the decline of Latin and Greek. The new pressure on academics to publish worried her. The current watchwords of relevance and manpower planning were wholly alien, the notion that British universities should be geared to increasing national productivity loathsome: hers was a meritocracy in the old sense, hostile to the new managerial Thatcherite ethos. Accordingly: ‘I send very best wishes for yr plans for better, more selective school education which will change the fates of clever children from poor bookless homes.’ Baker replied, and proposed that Iris become a member of his committee on the English Language Curriculum.66 She declined, but wrote out six further pages of suggestions, defending selection and exams, requesting more money for schools, more prestige for teachers and for training colleges. She again waxed indignant about the injustices perpetrated by the current system on ‘poor children from bookless homes’. Her fury and misery over those denied higher education is also expressed in her journals.*
While Iris and E.P. Thompson were flying to India (they later made up their differences) The Book and the Brotherhood, a favourite novel of hers, was being readied for publication. A group of Oxford friends – once Marxist like Iris and both Thompson brothers – agree to fund one of their number, Crimond, to write his great work. He has stayed Marxist; they have tired into liberalism. Crimond resembles Frank, in that both stay true to the ideals of their youth; and Gerard’s blond brother who died young yet still haunts the survivors may recall Frank too. Gulliver Ashe cannot get a job and fears he is ceasing to be a person; Tamar expects a baby she does not want. She is the unwanted daughter of spiteful, resentful Violet, herself an unwanted illegitimate daughter. In the hands of a lesser novelist Tamar’s story might have made a whole novel. Unemployment and Tamar’s problems are solved alike in ways that appear fey, although Tamar is the best thing in this big, rambling, confused book. If there are absurdities in the plot, there is also wealth in the book’s margins, in its profligate details.
Iris’s mother’s health had started a ten-year decline in the summer of 1975. Rene was becoming irrational. She often stayed at Cedar Lodge, where she would summon Iris to help her from the lavatory by calling for her dead sister, Gertie. ‘How odd these identifications are in a family,’ Iris wrote.67 The Bayleys had taken Rene to France and Spain and to Italy and Yugoslavia, and when apart Iris wrote to her each day, even if only a postcard. There would be fewer journeys abroad now. Iris wrote to Philippa, ‘How awful the loss of the person can be in old age – there is a sort of ghostly likeness, often a caricature.’ When, in 1976, Iris was made a CBE,68 she wanted only Rene to accompany her to Buckingham Palace. The following year Rene’s presence tired and saddened her deeply: ‘The complacent slowness and helplessness of old age is terribly wearing and it is hard to be absolutely patient. Yet she is so good.’ In 1978 Rene was admitted to Charing Cross Hospital after falling downstairs: ‘vague and helpless and seems to get no better … The burden of worry and incurable sadness about Rene is with me all the time.’ Iris noted how important it was to understand Rene’s ramblings about the past. A coherent sentence was now an event: by the first autumn frosts, when John was saying he’d ‘had a nice day’ in Oxford, Rene suddenly said, ‘We’ve had a lovely day!’ Iris noted in her journal that her mother was ‘so stoical and kind even in this utterly reduced state’. She added an upper-case ‘N’, signifying ‘of possible use for a future novel’, notating the poetry of Rene’s nonsense talk. ‘N: Where are the children? The little boy. Have they had their tea? Who is that man there? Oh, he has gone away to his own room.’ Presumably putting her mother’s dementia into a novel might have been one way of negotiating the pain. The process by which one gets used to someone’s senility, ‘laughs at simple jokes etc’, struck Iris as good. One’s smile, she observed, despite feeling the same inside, was as one aged less charming to others.
By 1983 there was serious trouble. Holidays in Provence and in Spain were cancelled. Iris was angelically kind and also ruthlessly practical. In July Rene appeared finally to Iris to be mad, crying to her over the telephone, ‘Gertie, Gertie, take me home!': ‘Misery of this.’ She came to stay for weeks, taking pleasure in the tumbler of mimulus Iris had put in her room, but one nightmare day she became very violent, screaming, beating on the door, wanting to rush down the street, calling for the police, throwing things about and, when Iris and John tried to restrain her, attacking them with tremendous strength. She waved her stick, said she would break all the windows unless they took her back to her flat, called a solicitor, accused Iris of cheating her out of her home. Iris could not recall crying so continually for a long time. They got her into St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton, where Rene had a stroke. Iris sat a lot with her in the big ward, trying in vain to wake her, talking to her, touching her face and hands. When Rene woke she held her hand and spoke to her and smiled a dim sweet smile, then began to look upset and anxious and tried to say something but failed, falling asleep again.
Soon she was talking a little, not very coherently, in a low voice, sitting up in the television room, not watching TV. She and another old lady sat side by side in the otherwise empty room. Her face expressed self-enclosed grief and a sort of annoyance. She smiled at Iris once. An effort of politeness in greeting John made her look more alert.
The nightmare summer continued. Rene made a good recovery in hospital, walking well, her talk sane and cheerful, but memory all blurred. They moved her to Marelia Lodge nursing home in Northampton, and then to an old people’s home in Oxford at 111 Woodstock Road, a friendly place, with a lovely room looking out on the church, and a little path to North Parade where Iris imagined herself coming through and waving to her. Iris brought books, clothes and thought how she would decorate her room. Then, on 15 September 1983 the telephone rang. Rene had become ‘quite mad’ in the night, rushed about ‘all over the house etc etc, and could I please remove her at once’. Iris rang her London GP, who was away. Another doctor arranged for Rene to go straight to a mental hospital in Banstead, Surrey. John and Iris took her and her belongings away in their Volvo. She was sweet and cheerful on the journey, her ‘best dearest self. They even stopped at the Bull pub at Bisham – and Rene was reminded of Bispham, where she and Hughes had lived during the war, at Blackpool, where Hughes’s ministry was evacuated. They talked of that.
After getting lost near Epsom they eventually found the hospital and Ward E1; Iris knocked and went in and saw ‘a terrible scene of mad old women’. Rene said she wouldn’t go in, stamped and shouted, threatened never to speak to Iris again. At last forms were filled in and Iris left her, very angry, asking why she couldn’t go back and live in her flat, saying she wouldn’t need looking after, just someone to do her shopping and so on. Iris tried to explain that she was ill and couldn’t just be left alone. She would not believe this. Iris cried driving home.
In mid-October Iris took Rene out of Banstead, trying her in a small Oxford nursing home: ‘No end to the problems.’ They invented a solution, putting her in a small home in Fulham they effectively subsidised, where Rene was looked after by a district nurse who had visited and bathed her in her flat in Barons Court. Her old friend Jack Sing, who had before retirement worked in a car factory, lived nearby, in her flat. He had known her for fifteen years, had driven her to and from Steeple Aston, and taken her to her choir for singing practice. Now he visited each day, taking her to the pub for a drink or two. Previously teetotal, Rene overdid matters after Hughes’s death.69 On the night of Friday, 30 August 1985 she had another and massive stroke. Iris saw her the next day, her eyes occasionally opening, without recognition or response. She died at four minutes past ten on the night of Thursday, 5 September, never regaining consciousness. Iris had sat with her earlier in the day, and now felt ‘absolutely desolated by her absence’.
Rene was cremated at Mortlake, on a very sunny hot day, with an Anglican burial service. John, Iris, Jack Sing and three other carers were the only mourners. Many blue irises adorned the coffin. Iris asked for Rene’s ashes to be scattered between two conifers. The previous evening, miraculously warm and still, she and John had walked in Kensington Gardens. The Albert Memorial against the blue sky reminded her of Orvieto cathedral. People were going into a Prom, some picnicking on the grass with wine. Everything was green and warm, there were the big quiet trees: ‘The beautiful sun and quiet was anguish.’ In her journal Iris had sketched dogs which she had intended to copy onto cards to cheer up her mother. They would not be needed now.
The Bayleys were growing older too. Cedar Lodge had become too much for them. On 1 December 1985 Iris noted, ‘We have bought a house in Oxford, 68 Hamilton Road, OX2 7QA.’ They sold Cedar Lodge for £225,000. Hamilton Road, much smaller, cost £90,000. Departure the following 2 March was ‘terrible. For 30 years kings of infinite space, now to live in a nutshell.’ She and John walked together in the garden of Cedar Lodge, she crying a lot. Meanwhile the necessity of clearing out thirty years of papers became urgent, and by January she was destroying letters. It was psychologically as well as physically exhausting.70 She found a postcard from Fraenkel dated 29 September 1952, and a letter from Canetti describing Friedl’s death.
At first they were tearful after the move, and kept referring to Cedar Lodge as ‘home'; but soon number 68 was home, Cedar Lodge ‘the outpost’. Four further years of sorting and destroying old letters and papers followed. 1 May 1986: Sunny weather. Old letters. Many cards from Fraenkel from all over Europe … D[onald MacKinnon] on corkscrew turning of spirit … My friends, the apple tree and the birch tree, are at last a little hazy with green.’ The following day she witnessed ‘Interesting scene of dustman collecting my discarded letters from bin!’ On 21 December 1988: ‘I have torn up some early diaries (about 1943) and also what looks like a novel. Looking at the fragments they seem rather interesting.’ The destruction of letters, with their cargo of dead passions, gave her the idea for a novel – ‘That such a storm of feeling could simply be annihilated by time.’71 On 15 July 1990 she noted, ‘Am 71 today. Looking at old diaries and destroying much. Entry for 10 October 1970: “I feel bloody bored by my novel.” Plus ça change.’ Two weeks later: ‘I have been tearing up some old diaries – sad in a way. So much silliness etc. – but strange meetings with my former self which I might well record or reflect upon. Perhaps I should resurrect some events and thoughts. A lot of self-examination went on in those days!’
Iris destroyed her war journals, ajournai starting autumn 1972, and excised probably 5 per cent of her remaining journals with a razor-blade, though the proportion varies from volume to volume. Where an excision on the recto causes loss of something valuable on the verso, she writes in the missing words in the hand of C1990. It is impossible to know what has been removed, but it is likely that survivors, including John, are protected, while her own story is streamlined and sanitised. Occasionally words are crossed out and written over. When Iris dedicated Under the Net to Raymond Queneau and received what she regarded as an insufficiently fulsome letter of thanks,72 she wrote in 1953 – deletions italicised within square brackets – ‘This caused me [anger and] distress … I felt upset [replacing ‘almost contempt for him'] at his inability to respond properly.’ Queneau died in 1976. The Iris of 1990 did not approve the Iris of 1953 experiencing ‘anger and contempt’ for others. Such sanitising recalls those Beerbohm cartoons in which a successful public figure confronts her own juvenile persona.
There were further such confrontations. In 1965 Iris praised Honor Klein in A Severed Head as a conqueror of self-deception. By 1983 Honor was a demon.73 In 1963, ‘because I had a feeling of mortality’, she had deposited with Norah Smallwood a cycle of a hundred poems entitled ‘Conversations with a Prince': ‘I would like one or two of these poems to have a chance of surviving.’74 It was now that she deposited with Ed Victor her family tree, a copy of the short story ‘Something Special’ and a copy of John’s Newdigate Prize-winning poem ‘Eldorado’. She did not want these mislaid. In 1989, just before her seventieth birthday, she asked Chatto for the poems back. Probably she now saw herself more as a versifier than a poet.
When, in a 1985 interview, she pontificated on the joys of monogamy and severely censored promiscuity to the writer Adam Mars-Jones, she was not being consciously hypocritical.75 She had no memory of her own bohemianism. In August 1993 she commented, ‘I have been looking over my old diaries from 1945 to 1954 circa and am absolutely amazed to find how very many people I was in love with, also dear friends with!’ In 1987 she wrote to monitor Chatto’s use of photographs of her for a collected edition. Often the photographs she objected to were those she had requested, now commending previously censored ones. Small wonder a Chatto editor wrote, ‘I will try very hard not to swear about the attached’ memo concerning this; or that Iris coined ‘oblivescent’ in three different books.76
Three years after their move to North Oxford, the Bayleys moved again. John had bought Hamilton Road on the spur of the moment without exploring much inside, or enquiring about the neighbourhood. Iris was ‘good about it’. Anthony Powell noted that a mutual friend had dined with the Bayleys. Iris, expressing a deep philosophic truth, removed the casserole from the oven, upsetting it over a beaded cushion. Without pausing in her talk she reversed the cushion over a serving-dish, gave it a brisk wipe, and dinner proceeded.77 They were moving, Powell wrote, to get away from the noisy children who pervaded the surrounding houses. They bought 30 Charlbury Road, not far off, but quieter.78 It was also bigger, pebble-dashed, a Betjeman villa soon, after John retired, bulging at the seams with books. Domestic arrangements remained idiosyncratic. The journalist Kate Kellaway’s hilarious, tender interview for the Observer painted an unforgettable picture of benign chaos, the recklessly squalid kitchen doubling as John’s wardrobe, objects breeding out of their normal habitats in the zestful, prolific space. ‘Would you like to see what is going on in the cupboards?’ asks Iris. What is going on? ‘We don’t really know,’ she says. Iris pointed at one point to the pretty blue-and-white mugs in the top cupboard. ‘They are all together,’ she says, as though this were an unusual and significant point.79 In 1953 she had contrasted ‘the terrible untidiness of Elizabeth Anscombe]'s house’ with the equal and opposite ‘tidiness of the J[oneses, John and Jean]. I love what lies between.’ Terrible tidiness had ceased to be a serious danger. In Mary Killen’s ‘Your Problems Solved’ column of the Spectator appeared a letter from Oxford, name withheld, asking advice about a guest, the male member of an elderly literary couple, who loaded his pockets as well as his plate with items from the serving dishes, to fry up his booty later at home. Killen suggested that the host in future serve only soup, soft roes, creamed spinach, vegetable curries and syllabubs.80 Iris was especially fond of potatoes, which John, a top-of-the-stove cook, could not bake. Hot baked potatoes were frequent plunder, and tasted good unless pocketed together with chocolate biscuits.
The 1980s saw a renewal of Bayley family holidays, lapsed since the war. From 1982 Gloria Richardson, an old Bayley family friend keen to keep them together, borrowed her cousin’s Dumfriesshire house, set in wild country. Iris and John occasionally swam in the big loch nearby, which had the disconcerting habit of going violently up and down when used for hydro-electric power. John’s brothers Michael and David played golf nearby. David’s wife Agnes cooked, John and Gloria helped. There were walks and sightseeing. Then from 1986 until 1994 they rented houses in Cornwall, north Wales, Shropshire and Suffolk. Iris loved being in the bosom of a family, and felt sadness when these outings came to an end.
There are scattered signs over the years that Canetti’s friendship continued to matter to Iris. Her letters to him are loving and respectful. One, probably in 1966, acknowledges that there are things she can only say – or best say – to him. He inscribed that year in the copy he gave her of his Aufzeichnungen 1942–8, ‘In Alter Liebe und Freundschaft von EC’.* In 1976 she put his observation that Czech is unique in having so strange a word for music – hudba – into A Word Child, where she misspellt it hutba.81 On 18 May 1978 she was reading from The Black Prince at the Gesellschaft für Literatur in Vienna. She had never read from her works before: ‘It wasn’t bad.’ Tea at the British Embassy with Canetti, also in town, was arranged. They had not met since Canetti moved his principal residence to Zürich early in the 1970s. Meanwhile she went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, to see the collection she had first visited early in 1946, much struck by the Rembrandts, ‘especially the long mid-period one of the gazing romantic R which I so much identified with when I saw the collection when I was young and did not know my life’. At the Breughels she ‘met Canetti (underlined). They exchanged simple news. ‘6 years no see.’ This accidental meeting was so perfect, they cancelled the Embassy tea party. She flew to Zürich to see him in 1990, just after the revolutions in Eastern Europe, which had thrilled her. In October that year she pondered whether her relationship with religions, ‘which is by no means clear’, was ‘just making me feeble and soft? Canetti’s advice from long ago. “The way of brokenness"?’ In August 1992 a flight to Zürich to see him was cancelled after he rang saying he was unwell. In March 1993 she re-read her diaries from January 1953 onward and commented, ‘About Franz. Also Canetti, Friedl. Amazing stuff. The depth of deep emotions.’ (But The Sea, The Sea showed their tragi-comical emptiness, too.)
Canetti spent some days in February 1993 recording memories of Iris and others in England, passing sentence.82 He chronicled their affair, inaccurately, and insinuating that Iris had not been slow to instigate it. He was not confused83 – he lists, correctly, the professions of those Iris loved (ancient historian, economist, theologian etc.), and adds insightfully that these represented her ‘alter egos’ (Verwandlungen), whom she absorbed during ‘endless’ conversations. Thus her male characters were conceived. He noted critically her aptitude for intent listening and patient cross-questioning – capacities, after all, which he shared. She collected hungrily, he tells us, usable confidences, ‘like a housewife doing her shopping’. (This ‘housewife’ sounds suspiciously like Canetti himself. It is doubtful that – to take one instance – Peter Ady, who turned to Iris for support after the death of two nieces, would have recognised Canetti’s chill account.)
Canetti had lived in England for nearly forty years, hating it.* He blames Iris for its faults.84 Having watched her ‘assemble’ herself before his eyes four decades before as a ‘complete Oxford parasite’, he could not take her seriously. He notes her lack of dress-sense, bad figure, promiscuity, bisexuality and religiosity, her ‘vulgar’ success, the mixture in her of eternal schoolgirl and headmistress which hurts her fiction, her ‘scheming opportunism and essential toughness, the meticulous schedule governing her love-life. Her novels are too Oxonian, her characters simply her pupils and friends, all ‘physically conceived and born in Oxford’, a city for which he expresses withering contempt. He spends some hundreds of words on a revealing silk blouse which she demeaned herself by wearing at Hampton Court in 1955, to attract Sir Aymer Maxwell,† because Maxwell, though homosexual, was grandson to a Duke of Northumberland; although it was nearly forty years before, Canetti can neither forget nor forgive this episode. When she lied to him, ‘You are beautiful,’ this meant no more than ‘I am hungry. Come!’ Calling each of her victims ‘beautiful’ was a way of glossing over unpleasantness. He often got himself into a fury simply thinking about her. He considered her to be – unlike him – what he termed a ‘sozusagen “illegitimin” Dichter': a so to say illegitimate Poet or Master of Transformations. Real Masters of Transformations, it appears, may blithely traduce old friends.
Canetti’s attack is one-sided. If Iris was indeed an adventuress – ‘Mem: to make my mark’, Philippa jested in 1943 that Iris wrote in her diary – her schemes were often upset by unpredictable attacks of soft-heartedness. Canetti claimed that she ‘shrank’ from what is truly frightening, so that ‘always self-interested, never having to suffer as a writer, she was unable truly to lose herself’. Real terror, he argues, she knew only from literature. This last is a curious charge, coming from someone who went to Amersham to escape the Blitz. While Iris was undergoing what she called the ‘utter break-down of human society’85 in the Austrian refugee camps in 1945–46, Canetti’s boast that he had visited Auschwitz was by contrast mendacious. His claim that she was ignorant of ‘real terror’ is flatly wrong. She dramatised such emotions, certainly; yet struggled to understand and command them objectively too: part of the greatness of The Black Prince lies in its meditation on the horrors of life, and on our squeamish strategies of avoidance. It is impossible to imagine Canetti conveying, as did Iris, Gertrude’s grief in Nuns and Soldiers; and no accident that, in sixty years, he never finished another novel after Auto da Fé in 1935. She had the toughness that permits vulnerability – he, the very different toughness that conceals it. She certainly enjoyed the company of the grand and exotic, as of the unknown or unremarkable. She agreed when Philippa remarked, ‘You find no one boring, do you?’
It is possible that, after decades of mystification, Canetti has unwittingly vouchsafed an accurate self-portrait. In a late novel Iris followed the well-known French maxim that ‘Jealousy is born with love but does not die with it’ with her own black and mordant observation, ‘Bad news for the young.’ It is hard to see what, apart from jealousy, informs Canetti’s portrait of Iris. He appears still jealous of her breaking free of him in 1956, jealous of her fame and, an arriviste himself, of her artistic and social success. ‘A woman, write poetry!’ he had joked in 1953. She represented something unforgivable, blasphemous: an independent and successful woman. He overlooks the extraordinary closeness in the 1950s and 1960s of Oxford and London.* Perhaps he hated Oxford because its rejection of him stung – his play The Numbered flopped there in 1956. He certainly minded never being introduced to Oxford’s leading mage, Isaiah Berlin, who was not difficult to meet. It is noteworthy that Canetti overlooked Iris having given one of only two glowing reviews of Crowds and Power confirming his genius, which she always proclaimed. More seriously, he is blind to the role of London, rather than Oxford, as the city her fictional world is in love with: no earlier novelists apart from Dickens and Virginia Woolf loved London so well, or celebrated it so memorably as she.
He acknowledged that she ‘researched’ him, then put him into her work, affecting a mixture of Olympian forgetfulness and shame about the details. Perhaps, for all that he made her suffer from 1952 to 1956, she never really understood evil. Her novels do. Where he can be felt behind a novel of hers, the sense of danger is unavoidable, disturbing. Knowing Canetti gave her portraits of the enchanter Mischa Fox, the jealous, paranoid, rapacious tyrant Charles Arrowby, the wickedly manipulative Julius King some of their weight and authority. Iris’s own darkness moves in each of these characters too. Perhaps she had heeded his 1959 advice to try to ‘draw blood'; and he resented her accuracy.
Canetti had maundered obsessively to the last about it being his destiny to defeat death. It was through a pen-friend86 that Iris learnt that, on 19 August 1994, he had died notwithstanding. She had just written to him for his eighty-ninth birthday.87 When Jeremy Adler telephoned she was upset. He had to explain more than once that Canetti was being buried next to James Joyce in Zürich. She wrote to Adler that she was glad Canetti went quietly, expressing concern for his daughter Johanna, whose education she and Canetti had discussed. One year earlier, on 23 September 1993, she had noted, ‘Find difficulty in thinking and writing.’ And added characteristically, ‘Be brave.’
* In 1961 Ved Mehta announced that she had the reputation of a saint, adding optimistically that she had no enemies. Certainly she early felt morality needed the concept of sanctity as an ideal limit. ‘About saints I know nothing,’ she wrote in her first Adelphi review in 1943. Mehta was echoed by, among others, the editor of the Independent, who entitled an interview with her ‘In the Presence of Perfect Goodness’ (8 September 1992), and by Raymond Carr in his Spectator review of Existentialists and Mystics, where he mentions her reputation as ‘a lay saint’ (5 July 1997). A.N. Wilson suggested that not merely was she seen as a lay saint, but had perhaps started thus to perceive herself, in ‘Iris Murdoch and the Characters of Love’ (News from the Royal Society of Literature, 2000). The witness of Hilary Mantel, who saw her at parties but never spoke to her, was that ‘Her presence was so powerful that it was the opposite of threatening, it was almost overwhelming … She radiated a powerful benignity, a goodness that seemed to have little to do with “saintliness", but much to do with strength and vertu; there was a heartbreaking simplicity about her, like some simple comforting flower: a daisy. She seemed both aged and very young … Her face … had assumed lines of power and grace’ (review of John Bayley’s Ms: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, in Harvest: Journal for Jungian Studies, vol. 45, no. 1, 1999).
* ‘I was enormously taken by the mixture of modesty and of awareness of her true worth in I.M.’
* Merchant of Venice, V.i.
* ‘The tears of things'; from Virgil’s Aeneid, where Aeneas in the temple of Juno at Carthage sees a picture of fighting in the Trojan War: ‘there are tears in the very nature of things and men’s affairs touch the heart’.
* Iris wrote to Sister Marian from 30 Charlbury Road, undated: ‘I too read Primo Levi’s book – and before his death, wrote in one of my books about such a death of someone, years later, who had been haunted by the Holocaust.’
† Jane Turner, who helped edit Iris’s novels from roughly 1969 onwards, recalled Norah Smallwood’s strong sense that, so valued was Iris as a writer and a friend, nothing must be cut – particularly, perhaps, by an editor unknown to Iris. However, as friendship and trust grew, Turner observed that Iris would agree to occasional changes and small cuts.
* ‘Everybody except a few saints (and how much close examination wd they stand?) is very selectively kind and good, if they are kind and good at all.’ Journal, 7 November 1976.
* The agonising removal of Marsyas’ skin was, for Renaissance painters as for Iris, a central religious image of the loss of ego; it recurs in her fiction.
* Leader of the Labour Party 1980–83; unrelated to M.R.D. Foot.
* As, also, her anger at the plight of the homeless in interviews: ‘I take it as a shocking thing that there are such poor people in this country.’ Y. Muroya and P. Hullah (eds), Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch (Okayama, 1998), p.65.
* Notes, 1942–8: ‘From EC in [remembrance of] old love and friendship’.
* Probably retrospective wisdom. Allan Forbes, who was close to Canetti from 1951 to 1959, does not recall any anglophobia then.
† Canetti implies that Iris and Maxwell had never met before this 1955 outing. Her journal shows that she knew him by July 1953.
* ‘Senior members of the University were supremely confident … wooed by the BBC and at home there, as well as in the “corridors of power” … Oxford left-wing dons seemed to take it for granted that they would advise Labour, and seriously influence policy.’ Mary Warnock, A Memoir: People and Places (London, 2000), p.156.