ABBREVIATIONS
CWA Conversation with Author
DH David Hicks
DM David Morgan
EC Elias Canetti
EM Iris Murdoch, ed. Peter J.
Conradi, Existentialists and Mystics:
Writings on Philosophy and
Literature (London, 1997)
FBS Franz Baermann Steiner
FT Frank Thompson
IM Iris Murdoch
J IM’s journal
JB John Bayley
LP Leo Pliatzky
LTA Letter to Author
MB Marjorie Boulton
MM Mary Midgley
MRDF Michael R.D. Foot
PF Philippa Foot
RQ Raymond Queneau
RW Richard Wollheim
INTRODUCTION
1 To Norah Smallwood, January 1963. One hundred pages of poems, entitled ‘Conversations with a Prince', are at the Brotherton Library, Leeds University. Other versions survive in IM’s estate.
2 Richard Cohen, ‘Iris Murdoch: Half-Believer', The Tablet, 13 February 1999, p.208.
3 First broadcast on Radio 3 in 1986.
4 4 March 1946.
5 Undated, but address indicates between 1979 and 1991.
6 22 October 1948.
7 Anita Brookner’s description, cited by Allan Massie reviewing Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, New York Review of Books, 10 February 2000, p.33.
8 CWA.
9 Anthony Powell’s description in Hearing Secret Harmonies (London, 1975),? .76.
CHAPTER 1: ‘You ask how Irish she is?’
1 So his marriage certificate affirms. According to the dates on his gravestone, he was thirty-one.
2 Marriage certificate shows Louisa Shaw, daughter of John Shaw, farmer, and Elizabeth, née Holdsworth, born and living in Ararimu, married Wills John Murdoch, farmer, son of Richard Murdoch, farmer, and Sarah, née Hughes, born ‘Cown', resident Bombay (New Zealand).
3 For Irish emigration to the Antipodes see David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation (Melbourne, 1994).
4 Their great-grandfather did have one surviving son, to whom he left only £10, while his sisters were more richly endowed with various properties and/or rentals. Conceivably this son had made a marriage of which his father could not approve.
5 Doris Sloan, Ballymullan owner and no relation to the Murdochs, to IM’s genealogist, Arthur Green, 1990.
6 As thirty years earlier in 1917, when a letter to her from Hughes bears that address.
7 Her husband had three further sisters-in-law: another Margaret, Charlotte and Isabella.
8 The Bayleys visited de Grunne’s château in the Auvergne a number of times. He taught at the Royal College of Art immediately after IM left in 1968. Stephen Spender’s unpublished journals show that, on first meeting her years before they became friends, he was disconcerted by IM’s intensity (12 July 1962). This was during the period of her CND involvement.
9 Sybil Livingston, CWA, 10 December 2000.
10 For example during the Famine, when so-called ‘soupers’ of different denominations, especially Non-Conformist, would compete to gain souls in exchange for sustenance.
11 F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (London, 1973), p.24.
12 IM, letter to DH, 29 April 1940.
13 Jean-Louis Chevalier, ‘Rencontres avec Iris Murdoch’ (Centre de recherches de littérature et linguistique des pays de langue anglaise, Université de Caen, 1978), P.93.
14 The shops kept the name of Murdoch into the 1980s, long after the family connexion had gone, but are now closed.
15 IM believed he joined up in August 1914, with a commission deriving from his having been in the Territorial Army (see letter to Harry Weinberger, 4 October 1985). No evidence to support this has come to light.
16 CWA, June 1997.
17 Sybil Livingston, CWA, March 1998. IM, contemplating incorporating her father’s war experiences into a novel, comments (5 November 1991): ‘Trench warfare. Goya. Barbed wire. Grunewald. (What did my father see.) Rescue from continually unexpected cruelty?’
18 A point I owe to Professor Roy Foster.
19 Lionel James, The History of King Edward’s Horse (London, 1921), p.205. Hughes gives second lieutenant as his rank on the back of a photograph from June 1918, and no rank on the back of the 1916 photographs. A surviving document shows his discharge as a result of commission on 22 February 1918. That he spent the period between April 1917 and February 1918 in cadet school does not seem probable, and no explanation is as yet forthcoming.
20 A letter survives from Hughes to his mother giving this date.
21 Aunt Ella kept them. Cousin Sybil rescued them when Ella went into a home. Like his daughter’s journal, it had been cut: discretion was a family trait.
22 J: 5 November 1991.
23 Sources for Hughes’s betting: MM and JB.
24 A photograph of him in his regimentals, dated June 1918, taken in Dublin, shows him proudly astride a beautiful bay with a white blaze.
25 Source: Billy Lee, widower of Eva, August 1998. The church is now done up in post-modern style inside: Penco Insurance Co., and other smaller companies, work from there.
26 IM’s mother spells her name in the French style, ‘Renée'. IM uses both Renée and Rene, but more often the latter, which this text follows.
27 Don Douglas’s vicarious recall that Rene lodged during the marriage ‘at a shop’ (letter to Arthur Green, 31 January 1990) endorses this; ‘the marriage was a hurried affair', he added. For an ‘unhurried’ wedding Rene would presumably have stayed at Blessington Street. Douglas’s first cousin, Professor Brian Murdoch, vouched in July 1999 for the reliability of his now deceased cousin (CWA).
28 Max Wright; see p.10.
29 Arthur Green, ‘The Worlds of Iris Murdoch', Iris Murdoch Newsletter, no. 10, 1996.
30 Professor Roy Foster, LTA.
31 IM’s terms: ‘A Certain Lady', Bookmark, BBC TV, 29 December 1989.
32 IM writing to her editor at Chatto & Windus, Jane Turner, 1993.
33 No record of a church wedding has been found; the Black Church, where family legend believed that Rene and Hughes were married, being merely a chapel of ease, was never licensed for weddings. Iris’s cousin Canon Crawford believes that a Church of Ireland clergyman, while he would not knowingly have married people already married at a register office, would accept the validity of such a marriage, and he thought it possible that a clergyman might have given a blessing to such a married couple. There would be no record, but this might be the origin of the Richardson-Murdoch family legend of a church wedding.
34 Chatto sent the piece on to the Iris Murdoch Newsletter which, under my co-editorship, published it, to the understandable vexation of Mr Green, in shortened form – see n29 above.
35 Letter to Arthur Green, dated 9 August 1990. IM possibly meant O’Hart’s Irish Pedigrees (1884).
36 Tullinisken Notebook V, compiled by the Rev. Henry Gordon Waller Scott, MA, LDS film 1279325. Presented to Armagh County Museum, The Mall East, Armagh, by Mrs Gordon Scott. For the Rev. Scott see Leslie’s Armagh Clergy and Parishes (Dundalk, 1911), under ‘Creggan, Tullinisken and Clonfeacle'. These Tyrone Richardsons who stem from Scotland differ from those of Rossford and Rich Hill (who come from Worcestershire); from the Richardsons of Eagerlougher, Loughall, County Armagh (from Warwickshire); and from the Richardsons of Polar Vale, County Monaghan (from Norfolk). IM’s second cousin Canon John Crawford unearthed this.
37 In this following O’Day’s Irish Pedigrees.
38 See A. Rowan, Pevsner’s Guide to North-West Ulster (London, 1979), where it is misspelt ‘Furlough'.
39 Walter Lindesay was a younger son of Alexander Richardson, eldest son of John Richardson of Farlough.
40 As Arthur Green observes.
41 H. Staples (ed.), The Ireland of Sir Jonah Barrington: Selections from his Personal Sketches (London, 1968),? ?31–3.
42 E.L. Richardson’s first marriage occurred, curiously, in the same parish church of St George’s, Dublin (Church of Ireland), and on the same day, as his own father’s second marriage, in 1889. E.L.R.'s elder brother R.L. Richardson acted as witness both to his brother’s and to his father’s second marriage.
43 Billy Lee has provided a Registry of Assignment for a grave at Dean’s Grange Cemetery for a Mrs Gertrude Bell, widow of Thomas Bell, 15 Bishop Street, Dublin, died 7 February 1957, aged sixty – in fact she would have been at least sixty-five. Eva Lee seems to have dealt with the burial; Rene at that time was dealing with Hughes’s last illness.
44 JB, CWA.
45 Y. Muroya and P. Hullah (eds), Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch (Okayama, 1998), p.84.
46 Where E.L. Richardson (1) was a law assistant, E.L. Richardson (2) was a JP and manager of the Board of Trade at the Dublin Labour Exchange. E.L.R.(2)'s second name was Lindesay; on marriage and baptism into the Roman Catholic Church he took the name Patrick.
47 The Red and the Green, p.44. IM believes the street to have somewhat grander architectural features – ‘graceful’ fanlights, ‘Ornate’ porticos – than is the case. The street is minimally decorated Georgian, though not jerry-built.
48 1901 census return.
49 See Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800–1935: A Study in Urban Geography (Dublin, 1998).
50 A point I owe to Professor Roy Foster.Of some seventy-odd households in the street, at least twelve were members of St Mary’s (Church of Ireland), now closed. Their occupations included clerks, fitter, wagon-builder, ex-soldiers, compositor, policemen etc., as noted in the church register.
51 Douglas to Arthur Green, 23 January 1990. The accuracy of Douglas’s recall needs one qualification: rather than a trainee singer, he thought that Rene, whom he never met, was a ballet dancer.
52 CWA, March 1998.
53 IM’s adjective; J: 15 October 1976.
54 30 Glengariff Parade, where Patrick Effingham Richardson (2) lived at the time of his 1883 Catholic wedding; 2 Melrose Avenue, where he lived with wife, six children, niece and mother-in-law at the time of the 1901 and 1911 censuses; 28 Portland Place, where Rene’s grandfather lived at the time of his first, 1881, wedding; 126 North Strand Road, where her father lived at the time of his 1889 wedding: all were in North Dublin.
55 CWA, 1996.
56 e.g. Harriet in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine; Hilda in A Fairly Honourable Defeat.
57 Author of Mind You I’ve Said Nothing (1953) and The Straight and Narrow Path (1956). Her friend Barbara Pym lampooned her as the vividly brusque and mannish Edith Liversidge in her novel Some Tame Gazelle (1950).
58 Maurice Harmon’s biography Sean O’Faolain: A Critical Introduction (Notre Dame, 1966) details Tracy’s long, passionate affair with him.
59 The letters are to Sister Marian – a friend of IM since 1938 at Somerville, and from 1954 a nun. This letter is undated, but written in the year IM published a novel of 391 pages, a length Tracy mentions as grimly comical; this is A Word Child, hence 1975.
60 Also: in possible recognisance of the as yet unidentified Iris Richardson whose signature is in the book of prayer The Christian Year given ‘After Church’ in Christmas 1887 and in IM’s London library.
61 So-called because of their tendency in times of trouble to support the viceregal line at Dublin Castle.
62 Nonetheless IM was awarded honorary doctorates by Queen’s University, Belfast (1977), Trinity College, Dublin (1985) and Ulster University (1993).
63 The Red and the Green, p.10.
64 Undated letter from IM, c1940.
65 Eighteenth-century Ireland in its cultural pluralism has been compared to eighteenth-century America, with the significant difference that the English migrating to Ireland did not, unlike those entering America, liquidate the original inhabitants.
66 Letter from IM to Ann Leech from 15 Mellifont Avenue, Dublin, 11 August 1934.
67 A June 1967 journal entry compares Stuart Hampshire’s first wife Rene with herself: ‘Struck by Rene’s resemblance to me – blonde roundfaced slightly awkward serious-minded Anglo-Irish only child! Tiens!’
68 Billy Lee, CWA, August 1998.
69 Gertie is not present in any surviving Murdoch family holiday snapshot. Her son Victor has been crudely cut off the edge of an early 1930s photograph showing Rene, IM and Victor; he survives on another copy of the same photo, and is identifiable through wartime photos of him in Irish Army uniform. What caused his extirpation from the snap? Tidiness? Some misdemeanour? He is looking pleased with himself, and IM, looking past her mother and towards him, wary.
70 Patrick West, ‘When the IRA’s Alarm Clock Struck', Spectator, 16 January 1999, p.12.
71 Churchill, angered by Irish neutrality, and hoping to persuade Dublin to change policy, embargoed shipping into Eire, thus causing many shortages.
72 Letters to Paddy O’Regan.
73 David Lee reports that IM paid a genealogist to prepare a three-page Richardson family tree, which has not as yet materialised. He recalls as a small child in the late 1940s visiting a mysterious Colonel Berry in a grand house with suits of armour, maids, two staircases and ghost (which he sighted), not far from Belfast. He took it that his mother was a by-blow of the Colonel’s. A letter dated 1984 from his mother Eva Lee, answering a query of IM’s about O’Hart’s Old Irish Families, survives, in which she appears to point to Anna Nolan, IM’s step-great-grandmother, as her own grandmother – see footnote, p.49.
74 As Roy Foster observes: W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage (Oxford, 1997), p.29.
75 Unpublished interview with RW, 17 July 1991.
76 R.B. McDowell, Crisis and Decline: The Fate of the Southern Unionists (Dublin, 1997), p.168.
77 Later claimed as family by IM, as a (regrettably incomplete) letter she lodged with Ed Victor, from a Bell relative (Jack MacMenamin, who married Connie Bell’s sister Phyllis), makes clear. Also mentioned in draft (only) of Jeffrey Meyers’ 1990 Paris Review interview, where he is associated with the Second World War.
78 MM, CWA.
79 The testimony of Muriel Chapman, the cousin closest to IM, would have been valuable, but she died before this biography was started.
80 On ‘A Certain Lady', Bookmark, BBC TV, 29 December 1989, IM mentioned a single year.
81 'A Certain Lady', Bookmark, BBC TV, 29 December 1989.
82 Chevalier, ‘Rencontres avec Iris Murdoch', op. cit., p.93.
83 Roy Foster’s eloquent phrase; Paddy and Mr Punch, (London, 1993), P.220.
84 See above (Shena Mackay interviews in Muroya and Hullah, Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch, op. cit., p.84).
85 Muroya and Hullah, Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch, op. cit., p.29.
86 Those who recall how passionately she felt in the 1950s include Rosemary Cramp and Julian Chrysostomides.
87 The Red and the Green, p.191.
88 A. Rowan, in Pevsner’s Guide to North-West Ulster, op. cit., recounts some family history and the fact that the house is now a ‘picturesque shell'. The demesne is now owned by the Forestry Commission.
89 See Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, op. cit., Chapter 11, ‘Protestant Magic'.
90 Ibid, p.232.
91 Ibid, p.221.
92 Ibid, p.214.
93 IM, CWA, 1997.
94 Eva Lee’s memory, recalled by Billy Lee, August 1998: probably one donnée for The Red and the Green.
95 Billy Lee, CWA. Since the Lees married in 1941, Billy Lee’s direct recall belongs to the last fifteen or so years of Hughes’s life.
96 J: 14 December 1994.
97 Now (1998) closed, they were at the bottom of Mellifont Avenue, where Eva Lee lived with Mrs Walton at number 16, or possibly 15. Two letters from IM at number 15 to her schoolfriend Ann Leech survive from August 1934.
98 Postcards were kept in the Murdoch family album, and prove a resource to the biographer. This card is dated 18 August 1949.
99 She also taught IM a Sunday school song: ‘Jesus bids us shine/With a pure clear light,/Like a little candle/Burning in the night/In this world is darkness,/ So let us shine,/You in your small corner,/and I in mine.’ Cousin Sybil knew this also. It seems possible IM might have heard it at the Revivalist meetings she went to with Eva Robinson (later Lee) and Mrs Walton, meetings with the Crusaders at the Mariner’s Church in Dun Laoghaire; Professor Roy Foster believes that it may well be in the Church of Ireland hymnal.
100 Canon Crawford, CWA.
101 J: 31 December 1969.
102 IM later recalled the cats as her mother’s – J: 17 March 1986: ‘simple love of parents healing. My mother’s cats.’ Billy Lee and others recall them as her father’s. Presumably they belonged, like most cats, to all.
103 17 August 1996.
CHAPTER 2: No Mean City
1 From IM’s contribution, written in 1992, to ‘The Early Childhood Collection', held at Froebel College, Roehampton Institute Library. JB used the same word – docile – of IM as a child; LTA, September 1997.
2 To PF, undated.
3 Heinz Cassirer’s daughter Irene in 1942, Tommy Balogh’s stepdaughter Tiril in the 1950s, Vera Crane’s daughter Frances.
4 John Haffenden, ‘John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch', Literary Review, lviii, April 1983, pp.31–5.
5 EC recalled the Charing Cross Road.
6 Source: JB.
7 J: 1981–92.
8 J: 1 December 1984: ‘I recall my father reading Ernst Jünger’s novel about the war when I was a child.’
9 Interview with Susan Hill, Bookshelf, BBC Radio 4, 30 April 1982.
10 Elizabeth Bowen’s Bowen’s Court (London, 1942) makes clear how popular an author, perhaps unexpectedly, Kipling was in Ireland: when the IRA occupied the house during the serious Troubles, she was much struck that they spent all day reading Kipling in the library.
11 J: 30 May 1971: This is inference, not fact. On recording that the first thing in literature that made Clare Campbell cry was her mother reading this quarrel between two men, IM writes, ‘Yes, yes.’
12 The Sea, The Sea, p.28 (my emphasis). The same remark, about how no one ever knew her father’s goodness, occurs in IM’s journals on his death in 1958. And, later: ‘My father: a marvellous man, known to very few people. A good man’ (12 September 1981).
13 Sybil, despite being Protestant and Loyalist, feared being treated as a pariah.
14 J: 14 January 1992.
15 Barbara Denny, whose mother found Rene’s ‘dishiness’ (Denny’s word) intimidating.
16 Miriam Allott, LTA, June 1998.
17 Miriam Allott did not share IM’s view that Froebel instilled a love of learning – that, for her, came later. She is nonetheless grateful to the school for teaching her a lot about the pagan Greeks and Romans, and especially about the betrayal of Rome. She also feels indebted to it for the fact that she can, to this day, recognise many constellations in the night sky, and some families of plants.
18 Hughes took Billy Lee to Lord’s cricket ground to watch Middlesex play Gloucestershire. It was on their return from this outing that Billy watched Hughes make notes of small expenditures in his pocket-notebook. Hughes was generous as well as meticulous.
19 Margaret Gardiner, A Scatter of Memories (Free Association Press, 1988), p.40.
20 Barbara Denny, The? lay-Master of Blankenburg: The Story of Friedrich Froebel, 1782–1852 (Autolycus, 1982).
21 Miriam Allott’s recollection.
22 Recalled by Miriam Allott, seven decades later.
23 C.H.K. Marten and E.H. Carter, published between 1925 and 1927 (with Blackwell) a series of four history books: Elementary Histories: Our Heritage from the Beginning of the Normans and The Middle Ages; and Histories: New Worlds 1485–1688 and The Latest Age.
24 Gardiner, A Scatter of Memories, op. cit., p.56.
25 Barbara Denny in ‘The Early Childhood Collection', op. cit.
26 Gardiner, A Scatter of Memories, op. cit., p.55.
27 Denny, CWA.
28 Kensington News, 1 December 1978: ‘Headboy was Tom Wilson'.
29 J: 14 May 1972.
30 Miss Bain in Old Froebelians’ News Letter, 1936, p.1.
31 J: 30 May 1975.
32 On one occasion, having been repeatedly scolded for talking in class, Denny was sent ‘down’ to the Kindergarten for the day, sitting on a tiny chair amongst the babies since she was ‘obviously a baby if she could not stop talking when told'. She did not talk out of turn again.
33 Letter from IM to Barbara Denny.
34 Probably Observer, 17 June 1962, p.23, where IM’s Hammersmith and Chiswick background and Anglo-Irish parentage are mentioned, though not Froebel.
35 In the early 1980s Professor Allott first told me of IM’s imaginary brother. Allott’s Froebel reminiscence: ‘She would at times refer to her brother, and the references always seemed to me to express special feeling for him. I seem to recall too that she confirmed this in her answering letter, now lost I fear.’
36 Interview with Susan Hill, Bookshelf, BBC Radio 4, 30 April 1982.
37 To DH, 11 November 1945.
38 William Eastcote in The Philosopher’s Pupil
39 Compare Gardiner, A Scatter of Memories, op. cit., p.56: ‘We were a snobbish lot, our clique: we felt snootily superior to the “common” girls who came from a lower social rung.’ Gardiner was fifteen years Allott and IM’s senior, and indeed may have taught them.
40 Shena Mackay, interview with IM, in Muroya and Hullah, Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch, op. cit., p.84.
41 Sybil Livingston, CWA.
42 J: April 1956 (p.4). These ‘anxieties’ refer to his lung cancer.
43 Billy Lee from Dublin, who stayed at Chiswick a number of times without his wife Eva, remembers Hughes as more active around the house than many husbands, but recalls no dereliction of duties on Rene’s part.
44 J: 18 March 1971.
45 IM gave Rene’s antique red leather card-carrying case to her godson Ben Macintyre when at the age of ten he decided, after much reflection and watching the film The Sting, that he wished to pursue an adult career as a gambler.
46 Sybil Livingston, March 1998.
47 MM, CWA.
48 ‘Nachdenklicher, ungemein anziehender', EC’s unpublished 1993 reminiscences.
49 Sir Lawrence Airey, CWA, 11 December 1997.
50 Sir Peter Baldwin, CWA, 7 January 1998.
51 Cleaver Chapman: Hughes went to the canteen at work and was mortified when, having made an incision into his meat pie, the gravy spurted onto his work colleague seated opposite him, not once, but on the second incision also. This should not make him sound like that other clerk, Mr Pooter in The Diary of a Nobody: Hughes must have told this story against himself.
52 Chevalier, ‘Rencontres avec Iris Murdoch', op. cit., p.93.
53 The Red and the Green, p.10.
54 Billy Lee, CWA.
55 See Chapter 16.
56 Recalled by IM during her speech when accepting an honorary doctorate at Coleraine University, C1992.
57 To Ann Leech.
58 Letter from Rae Hammond, child of Richard, but present on the 1936 crossing, to IM, 3 January 1987.
CHAPTER 3: The Clean-Cut Rational World
1 Badminton was possibly so-named to recall the name of the estate of the Dukes of Beaufort.
2 A fictionalised but accurate, critical and humorous account of the school at a slightly later date (as ‘Greenslades') appears in Anne Valery’s autobiography The Edge of a Smile (London, 1977).
3 July 1936 to March 1937, preparing for Oxford entrance. The story remembered by a much later friend that IM and Gandhi had ‘enjoyable pillow-fights’ does not perhaps strike the tone of their acquaintanceship, given the shyness and reserve of both girls, Gandhi’s unhappiness – her mother died early in 1936 – and her age (nineteen in November 1936). See Katherine Frank, Indira: The Life of Indira Gandhi (London, 2001).
4 'Indira at School, and After’ – IM’s obituary remarks probably delivered January 1987, New Delhi conference. See also G. Parthasarthi and H.Y. Sharada (eds), Indira Gandhi: Statesmen, Scholars, Scientists and Friends Remember (Delhi, 1985), p.308.
5 At Badminton with BMB, by Those who were There, compiled and edited by Jean Storry (Badminton School, Bristol, 1982), a major source for this chapter. All unascribed quotations hereon come from it.
6 IM and JB, CWA, 1997.
7 Alas, the stoicism she so vehemently preached all her life deserted her in her last, sad years, when she exemplified much that, as a pedagogue, she had disapproved of.
8 IM’s speech for the official opening of Badminton School’s new swimming pool, C1992.
9 This was Professor Dennis Nineham, who demurred on the reasonable grounds that it might seem odd for them to be found in a girls’ boarding school in the middle of the night; but ‘she almost dragged me out of the car'. IM’s subsequent attempts to find her way into the Roman Catholic cathedral at Clifton – of which every door was locked – were, to his immense relief, vain.
10 David Thomson, Europe Since Napoleon (London, 1957), P.758.
11 Letter from Brigid Brophy quoted in J: 12 April 1966.
12 Margaret Rake, CWA, February 1998.
13 Undated letter to DM.
14 Basic fees C1936 were forty-five guineas per year for girls entering under fourteen years of age. No note of the value of IM’s scholarship has come to light.
15 Margaret (also known as ‘Penny') Orpen, later Lady Lintott,.
16 Rosemary Cramp, CWA, 13 February 1998.
17 Information from Vera Crane. IM visited Badminton when Vera’s daughter Frances was confirmed there 0968.
18 Margaret Orpen, CWA, July 1998.
19 Dulcibel MacKenzie, Steps to the Bar (Greengate Press, 1989), p.31.
20 'A Certain Lady', Bookmark, BBC TV, 29 December 1989.
21 Orpen returned these letters to IM during the 1980s. Although IM’s letter of thanks spoke of the ‘possible future interest’ they might have, the letters have as yet not come to light.
22 Margaret Orpen, CWA, January 1999.
23 Margaret Rake, CWA.
24 MacKenzie, Steps to the Bar, op. cit.
25 Badminton School Magazine, issue 61.
26 IM in ‘The Early Childhood Collection', op. cit.
27 A Word Child', The Sea, The Sea.
28 Stuart in The Good Apprentice.
29 Letter to DM, undated, 1966.
30 5 November 1990.
31 Born Hereford, 4 May 1876.
32 Source: Margaret Rake.
33 It became so only up to Junior School, as Joseph Cooper recalls in his Facing the Music (London, 1979).
34 J: February 1978.
35 The Monday-morning prayer horrified Margaret Orpen, who could recite it in 1999. It included the words: ‘Help us this week to do our work well/To seek knowledge for its own sake and not for mere reward/To show our gratitude for our opportunities by good and honest work/Done in the spirit of the artist with pride/And not like the drudge with fear.’ The penultimate line seemed peculiarly officious.
36 Margaret Orpen recalls Congregationalism; Ann Leech Anglicanism.
37 Letter to JB from Ms Sychrava, née Cassirer, 4 August 1999. She was sent to Badminton in 1942, IM being instrumental in this.
38 Priscilla Hughes’s and JB’s belief. Ann Leech identified the church. In Revelations: Glimpses of Reality, ed. R. Lello (London, 1985), IM claimed to have been confirmed at fifteen – which would make the year 1934 or 1935.
39 This was Margaret Rake’s view. Not all agreed. Dulcibel MacKenzie recalls them as ‘most peculiar clothes'; Indira Gandhi thought the outfits capable of improvement, and resented – possibly for religious reasons – having to wear a hat. ‘Consider the featureless and irrational way in which one had to dress,’ commented IM in an unpublished draft for a journalistic piece, ‘Iris Murdoch Regrets she was Never a Teenager’ (in Muroya and Hullah, Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch, op. cit., pp.27–31). Her teacher Leila Eveleigh, at Badminton from 1921 to 1968, recorded that ‘more freely expressed feelings of the girls themselves resulted in some modifications. Grey/blue replaced navy, and a loose, pleatless design replaced the pleats.’ LTA, 8 August 1998.
40 Dulcibel MacKenzie, CWA, 12 July 1998.
41 MacKenzie, Steps to the Bar, op. cit.
42 It featured in Ideal Home and Gardening, August 1945, pp.89 et seq. The architect was Eustace Button RWA, FRIBA.
43 Margaret Orpen, CWA July 1998.
44 On her application to join UNRRA in June 1944 she recalled this trip as of three weeks’ duration. The contemporary account in the Badminton School Magazine, issue 68 (autumn term 1935), by her schoolmistress Miss Feaver gives ten days. One contemporary believes they hiked for a second ten days, making three weeks in all.
45 Margaret Orpen recalls that French teaching was not always rigorous. Mlle Marie du Verduzan, a humorous French Royalist, taught them French, but not very much, as she also liked to tell jokes: ‘If you learn these French verbs, I’ll tell you what are the names of two French towns that describe an article of clothing.’ Answer: Toulon and Toulouse (too long and too loose). Leila Eveleigh points out Mlle du Verduzan’s great wartime courage, working in the French Resistance, smuggling messages concealed in her umbrella.
46 See Frank, Indira, op. cit., passim.
47 Interview with Susan Hill, Bookshelf, BBC Radio 4, 30 April 1982.
48 Leila Eveleigh, letter to John Fletcher, 1982.
49 Ibid.
50 Margaret Rake, CWA.
51 Jenifer Hart, CWA.
52 Katie Bazell (later Lourie), CWA, July 1999. She was at both Froebel and Badminton with IM: ‘Though at English IM was in a quite different league she was otherwise simply a quiet, ordinary girl.’
53 Letter to John Fletcher, 22 February 1981.
54 See Woolf’s essay ‘Middlebrow', republished in The Death of the Moth (London, 1942).
55 Address to Kingston graduates, 1993. See Occasional Essays, op. cit. In The Green Knight, ‘sentimental thirties songs’ are deemed worthy of the tears of the three Anderson girls.
56 Draft for ‘Iris Murdoch Regrets she was Never a Teenager', op. cit.
57 JB, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (London, 1998; US title Elegy for Iris), p.25.
58 Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravished Century (London, 1999).
59 George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale'.
60 Unpublished interview with RW, 17 July 1991.
61 e.g. John Grigg.
62 Unpublished interview with RW, 17 July 1991.
63 'Indira at School, and After', op. cit.
64 'Come Pale Feet', and the untitled ‘Power is a beautiful thing'.
65 She sang also in the chorus of The Yeomen of the Guard – so she wrote to Clare Campbell, not vouchsafing when ('I can vividly recall the tall booted girl who played Fairfax').
66 Letter to DM, 1964.
67 Badminton get-together at Lynmouth, August 1941, described by IM in Badminton School Magazine.
68 Ann Leech did not in the end accompany IM to Oxford.
69 Born Dundalk, 8 November 1913, married Olive Marron 1945, he won the Symington Prize for anatomy at Queen’s University and raised the profile of dental students.
70 IM in E. Whitley (ed.), The Graduates (London, 1986), p.63.
CHAPTER 4: A Very Grand Finale
1 Draft for ‘Iris Murdoch Regrets she was Never a Teenager', op. cit.; but compare 1945 J: ‘Or the pale tragic adolescents of Mauriac. Not all adolescents are tragic. I wasn’t. I enjoyed myself. Oh how I have enjoyed myself!’
2 IM to Vera Hoar, whom she encouraged to join her in learning Russian with Steen during the war – see Chapter 5.
3 One exception: Lilian Eldridge, meeting IM in March 1939 (see Chapter 5), thought her very unconfident about exams. Those who found her assured did not dispute that she was shy also. Compare Miriam Allott’s perceptive comment ten years before: that IM’s firm clear voice possibly countered shyness. Ken Kirk, co-Treasurer of the OULC with IM, writes that ‘her reserve was a function not of shyness but of self-confidence’ (LTA, 7 September 1998).
4 LTA, 6 December 1998.
5 Undated letter to Paddy O’Regan, probably 1940.
6 Badminton School Magazine, no. 79, spring and summer 1939.
7 IM in Whitley, The Graduates, op. cit.
8 On ‘A Certain Lady', Bookmark, BBC TV, 29 December 1989, IM named Carol Stewart; Lucy Klatschko was a particular friend but is sure she was not the third student; Carol Graham-Harrison (January 1999) does not recall the incident: ‘We went there often.’
9 Muroya and Hullah, Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch, op. cit., pp. 16–20.
10 Ibid, p.85.
11 Letter to DH, 20 November 1938.
12 Her immediate neighbour, who recalls this room, was Margaret Stanier.
13 FT’s unpublished ‘Snapshots from Oxford'. IM four years later called Leonie ‘still the same charming, aggressive, nervy individualist. Definitely three dimensional. A person. I enjoyed her company enormously.’ Letter to FT, 11 June 1943.
14 Muroya and Hullah, Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch, op. cit., p.50. And, to E. Whitley, editor of The Graduates, op. cit., p.73: ‘Of course this is a time when you will be acquiring friends for ever.’ Pre-war Oxford numbered 6,742 students compared to 10,788 in 1998; many recall that it was then possible to know, if not everyone, at least most prominent peers.
15 Janet Vaughan, later Principal of Somerville, destroyed many papers. This account of IM’s entrance comes from conversations in 1998 with Isobel Henderson’s surviving sister Katherine McDonald; with Jenifer Hart who co-set the General Paper, and who was also told that Lascelles had turned IM down; and with IM’s contemporary MM, with help from the Somerville archivist Ms Pauline Adams. Somerville College Education Committee Minute Book vol. V, p.153, reads: ‘Miss J.I. Murdoch (English, merit in the examination).’ PF points out that ‘merit’ refers always to the General Paper. ‘I very nearly decided to read English instead of Greats, but I’m very glad I read Greats, but I was very attached to English Literature, and very keen on poetry, and very keen on modern poetry so I read all the writers, you know, Eliot, Auden, Day-Lewis, Spender’ (unpublished interview with RW, 17 July 1991). IM was strongly political at once, as soon as she arrived. Possibly, MM speculated, IM wrote politicised essays on libertarian writers such as Shelley or Milton, which Mary Lascelles did not care for. In the Bodleian UNRRA interview (MSS.Eng.c.4718, fols. 132–62; c 4733, item 16) IM recalls that she was interviewed before going up to Oxford.
16 See? .J. and E.P. Thompson (eds), There is a Spirit in Europe: A Memoir of Frank Thompson (London, 1947), p.12.
17 An ex-Classics mistress, Lady Mott (née Ruth Horder), married to a well-known nuclear physicist, and whose brother was Sylvia Plath’s doctor at the time of her suicide, had helped IM in the summer of 1938. (See Mrs Jeffery’s 1981 letter to John Fletcher). MM was coached by Diana Zvegintsov, an ex-Somerville Classicist living in Chiswick quite near IM, and believes Zvegintsov also coached IM.
18 Source: Professor Sally Humphreys.
19 Anne Elliott, at St Hugh’s reading Mods and Greats 1938–42; also PF.
20 Barbara Craig (later a Principal of Somerville), LTA.
21 Source: Anne Elliott.
22 Charlotte Wallace, née Williams-Ellis, LTA, 9 April 1998.
23 Three undated letters to Paddy O’Regan, summer 1940. In a LTA, 13 January 1992, IM wrote that ‘there was no wide consideration of Plato, he was simply misunderstood. I learnt nothing of value about him as an undergraduate (he was regarded as literature!) … Reading Weil [later] helped me very much.’ In fact IM’s Marxism rendered her deaf to Plato.
24 In Mark Amory’s Lord Berners (London, 1998) he is found sharing an interest in ‘improper French novels': p.187.
25 'Somerville has always had a reputation for intense seriousness', Benjamin Thompson, review of Pauline Adams’s Somerville for Women: An Oxford College (Oxford, 1996) in Somerville College Report 1996, pp.99–100.
26 Badminton School Magazine, no. 82, 1941–42.
27 Denis Healey, The Time of my Life (London, 1989), p.35; and FT’s unpublished ‘Snapshots of Oxford', from which all unascribed quotations in this chapter are taken.
28 IM denied authorship to LP. He recalled the opening lines accurately in 1998. Margaret Stanier, fellow-Somervillian, who collected some of IM’s Oxford poems, believes it may have been inspired by an exhibition entitled ‘Guernica', of pictures and sketches from the Spanish Civil War. IM’s verse-journal shows that she wrote it on 4 February 1939, at 1 a.m.
29 So, for example, MM feared. She researched this and the demotic ‘Link’ while waiting to come up to Somerville, like IM, in September 1938
30 E.P. Thompson, Beyond the Frontier (Stanford, 1997), p.54. Hogg was, of course, later Lord Hailsham.
31 Slavcho Trunski, Grateful Bulgaria (Sofia Press, 1979), p.14. Here IM believes both that ‘The very first thing I did when I arrived at Oxford was join the CP,’ and accounts herself a member by November 1938. In Whitley, The Graduates, op. cit., she mentions her second term as the time that she joined. She told Margaret Stanier that she went first to the nearest Catholic church, St Aloysius, but finding it closed, took this as some sort of sign. Earlier this church visit was recalled as June 1941, when IM was troubled by the CPGB’s change of line on the war effort. This is a more probable date, given Donald MacKinnon’s influence after 1940. (Mary Douglas, two years younger than IM, believes, though this is as yet uncorroborated, that IM gained some reputation in debate as a formidable opponent of religion.)
32 Unpublished interview with RW, 17 July 1991.
33 Compare the following year: Ken Kirk, nominated OULC co-Treasurer with IM for a term in 1940, wrote (LTA, 23 June 1998) that he was ‘a fresher in 1939, while she was in her fourth year'. He felt ‘in awe of her’ – a leitmotiv of IM’s story, from Barbara Denny in 1925–32, through Hugh Lloyd-Jones and Kirk (1940) onwards.
34 Reading PPE, 1938–41. She never spoke at OULC meetings, says LP (CWA, 22 October 1998). Soon Mrs Teddy Jackson, she went into the Board of Trade in 1941, where she worked with Frances Meynell, who wrote of her: ‘[Her] eyes were as bright as her mind, with her gypsy-like hair falling over her lovely small face, which would still look fashionable today.’ Frances Meynell, My Lives (London, 1971), p.273. She died in 1992.
35 From FT’s ‘Snapshots of Oxford'.
36 Born 17 August 1920, Darjeeling.
37 TJ. and E.P. Thompson, There is a Spirit in Europe, op. cit., p.47.
38 In 1937.
39 These may flatter him: Tony Forster and MRDF spoke of him as ungainly – as did LP – and did not recall his beauty.
40 Letter, 1945–46, to E.P. Thompson, from Innsbruck.
41 Trunski, Grateful Bulgaria, op. cit., p.15.
42 6, 7 and 8 June 1940. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, coming up later that year, was in awe of IM: ‘She was already famous in the University for having been Leader of the Chorus in a very successful production in Christ Church of Murder in the Cathedral It was her existentialist period, and she seemed very serious’ (LTA, 15 January 1998). Milein Cosman, who saw the production, especially recalls IM also.
43 IM gave ‘a superb talk’ as an undergraduate, just before her Finals in 1942, on ‘Poets of the 1930s'. MB, letter to Jonathan Auburn, Friends of OULC, November 1997. IM praises ‘A Summer Night’ in Lifelines (an anthology of poems chosen by celebrated persons), ed. Niall MacMonagle (London, 1993).
44 LP, to protect his father who was a ‘stateless alien', never became card-carrying, but was a Communist and did believe that all in the USSR was perfect, until June 1941.
45 Letter to FT, August 1943.
46 Nominally as a clerk. His duties included sweeping the floors, however.
47 It is almost certainly ‘delightful’ Doug Lowe from Ruskin whom FT recorded as saying, not à propos any named girl, ‘Oi never tike a girl to the pichers, unless it’s definitely understood that she wants penis afterwards and Oi said to mself, there’s a short trip for the SS penis there.’
48 IM, letter to E.P. Thompson from Innsbruck, 1945–46.
49 Antony Forster.
50 Not good poems. e.g. ‘Himeros': ‘Putting down my pen, I looked out into the garden/At the chestnuts thoughtfully budding; the tired wall/Exulting silently in the evening; the grass/Still like a pool beneath a waterfall./A white cat ambled along the wall and vanished;/In the quadrangle someone was laughing; once again/It hopped up to bask in the sunlight. Nothing would answer/The scum of anger simmering in my brain./Then suddenly something cracked. My heart went numb./My rage, frustration and hate all droped asleep./I thought of you. I knew that you would not come./And I longed to lie with my head on your knees and weep.’
51 FT’s version in ‘Snapshots of Oxford’ makes the digging up of the irises his mother’s idea, presumably as therapy, and omits mention of the Doug Lowe ‘trigger', recalled independently by LP, who did not believe that IM and Doug Lowe were lovers.
52 IM to E.P. Thompson, 1945–46.
53 Recalled by PF.
54 To FT, in a letter dated 13 April 1942.
55 LTA, April 1998.
56 MRDF met IM on 4 March 1939, the same day he joined the TA, and two days before It Can Happen Here. Quotation from Sue Summers, ‘The Lost Loves of Iris Murdoch', Mail on Sunday, 5 June 1988, p.17.
57 CWA; Herbert Reiss’s jokey description to IM, a little later. He accompanied Noel Martin and LP on their summer 1939 European journey, and was also in the OULC.
58 Possibly 19 November, when he returned for the conferral of his degree. He and IM had CP friends in common.
59 Source: Kenneth Dover to Simon Kusseff.
60 To DH, 13 May 1945.
61 His gift arrived in July 1940. FT’s posthumous sister-in-law Dorothy Thompson, who knew nothing of this, met IM not long after the war. She was struck by IM’s being ‘white-blonde and very beautiful’ and by her artificially ‘plummy’ voice, a voice IM later lost For her, IM’s attractive appearance ‘called to mind C.S. Lewis’s Allegory of Love'; CWA.
62 A letter to DH, early 1939, speaks of a ‘mad Irishman who writes me verse'; while an undated letter to Paddy O’Regan describes his Irishness. The Irishman referred to was not O’Regan, since he came up to Merton College only in 1939. Margaret Stanier recalled IM’s (undated) attachment to the Irish actor Cyril Cusack, who was in Oxford acting for one term.
63 IM’s good friend Dorothy Thom (later Kent) was recalled by Vera Hoar (31 October 1998) as saying, ‘It’s not Iris’s attractiveness that people fall for but her beauty of character.’
64 Born December 1919; at Liverpool Grammar School as LP had been at Manchester Grammar. Both got firsts in Mods. Neither continued to Greats: NM dropped out; LP changed after the war to PPE.
65 Tony Forster’s adjective; CWA, 4 May 2000.
66 NM does not remember FT being in the Agamemnon class (any more than did Kenneth Dover, Clare Campbell, MM or LP), but then he was distracted by IM. He has vivid recall of FT, a charming man whom he still misses, as did LP.
67 J: October 1958.
68 October-November 1939.
69 Hilary term, 1940. Whether this production took place is in doubt. Same-sex plays (see footnote p.91) were going out of fashion.
70 1939: 4 and 18 May, pp.572, 627; 1 and 15 June, pp.681, 741. Lynda Patterson, nèe Lynch, who shared digs with IM from 1940 at 43 Park Town, passed on this task to IM. Though anonymous, they bear the hallmark of IM’s lively style. Lynch accurately recalled one piece on a visit by Dorothy L. Sayers.
71 Eric Hobsbawm, CWA, 16 August 1999. IM associated with Ulster grandees’ daughters such as the Craig daughter of Lord Craigavon, then Prime Minister of Ulster. (Deirdre Levi, granddaughter of Lord Craigavon, says there was no such CP daughter, or CP relative, apart from one male cousin called Nares.)
72 To DH, 8 March 1945.
73 Eric Hobsbawm (16 August 1999) does not recall FT’s presence at the Surrey summer school he and IM attended: these may have been different events.
74 Set by Geoffrey Bush and Jonathan Mayne. See Geoffrey Bush, An Unsentimental Education (London, 1990), pp.111, 127.
75 Fletcher wrote of his plan to create the Magpie Players in Cherwell, LVI, no. 3, 13 May 1939, pp.50–1. As evidence of public fascination with Oxford he cites the film I was a Yank at Oxford and the popularity of the Boat Race.
76 Cherwell, LVI, no. 6, 3 June 1939, pp.112–14, collected in Muroya and Hullah, Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch, op. cit. The tide refers to Gustaaf Renier’s book The English – Are they Human?, published a few years before. On 17 June Denis Brooman answered her with another light-hearted and more effective polemic, ‘Scot-free, or a true way with Traitors', one of whose claims is that IM is Scottish.
77 To FT, 30 December 1941. Patricia Shaw (later Lady Trend), at the Treasury with IM in 1942, similarly believed, until 1998, that IM’s father was then still working in Dublin.
78 IM in a postcard to Rene and Hughes, 30 August 1939, mentions the silver plate and that Lady Bicester was ‘particularly taken with my acting'.
79 Moira Dunbar agreed about IM’s characterisations: ‘One always felt [Denys] needed a nanny.’ LTA, 14 September 1998.
80 CWA, 20 May 1999. IM’s J continues: ‘He is so exceedingly young & spontaneous & so completely the artist. He seems moreover to be devoid of vices. In “Tam Lin” he embraces and kisses me without the least embarrassment, which is good. I was afraid he might be shy. But of course he has done a great deal of acting before.’
81 Joanne Yexley. Second name supplied by Moira Dunbar.
82 This episode is recalled by Moira Dunbar – IM has torn a page out of the journal. IM confirmed she had met the Brüderhof in a letter to Harry Weinberger.
83 Fletcher turned up in Oxford shortly before his death, around 1991, ebullient as ever, after a life spent teaching abroad. JB secured him St Catherine’s college theatre for the night, since he wished to put on a one-man performance of the eighteenth-century Swedish Bellman’s Ballads. Apart from IM and JB and the then Master (Brian Smith) and his wife, no one came. Fletcher, unperturbed, sang the ballads to his guitar quite happily.
84 Letter from Moira Dunbar confirms 3 September as the date, which is unclear from the journal.
85 The page is torn out, so exactly how she got there is unclear.
86 IM to FT, 12 November 1943.
CHAPTER 5: Madonna Bolshevicka
1 April/May 1942, to FT, now stationed in Lebanon/Syria. IM’s meeting John Willett prompted this fond recall.
2 FT, letter to Desiree Cumberlege. True, he was acquainted with other Oxford ‘Bolshevickas', notably Leonie Marsh, but the repetition of the epithet ‘Bolshevicka’ in the tide of his poem ‘Madonna Bolshevicka’ also suggests IM, who was his ‘muse', in poem after poem, over a period of four years. Desiree was pacifist, IM the Communist. See n9 below.
3 Spectator, 5 January 1940.
4 Graham Lehmann, CWA.
5 See Trunski, Grateful Bulgaria, op. cit., p.16.
6 MRDF, LTA, 31 August 1998. Two dozen of them went by bus: ‘I took part … [8c] had a long, fairly useful chat with A.P. Herbert, then member for Oxford University … I believe (though I am not quite sure) [FT] took part.’ MRDF, like about half of FT’s contemporaries at New College, belonged to what the Habsburg monarchy called ‘Kaderfamilie', families of the old officer class who, like MRDF’s grandfather, and then Brigadier father in 1912, and himself early in 1939, foreseeing a great European war, joined a Territorial unit.
7 A friend since childhood days, Andrew Ensor, had severely shaken FT’s confidence in the inevitable and absolute purity of Soviet intentions, vis-à-vis the USSR-Germany non-aggression pact, as Ensor recounts persuasively and at length in a letter to Simon Kusseff.
8 While Raymond Carr, whose acceptance into the Party by Peter Shinney at Queen’s College partook of a religious ceremony, with candles and oaths, felt bullied by both these doctrines, the entry of others – e.g. Patrick Denby – was less dramatic. Nonetheless Vera Hoar was present when John ['Jack'] Terraine was, at Hythe Bridge Street, informally tried, then summarily drummed out of the Party for some such error.
9 He wrote in praise of the Madonna as a feminine stereotype – a Wykehamist loyalty too – and Apollo as a male one, in a later letter, and also addressed Desiree Cumberlege (see n2, above) as ‘madonna'.
10 Lord Healey recalls Professor D.W. Brogan using this phrase when answering IM’s ‘defence of the Party line’ in the Spectator, 1939–40. Although the correspondence has so far proven elusive, the phrase rings true.
11 Lionel Hale in the Oxford News Chronicle, quoted by FT in a letter to Desiree Cumberlege.
12 To Paddy O’Regan, no date, probably June 1940.
13 To DH, 21 March 1941.
14 To Paddy O’Regan, undated, C1940. In unpublished interview with RW, 17 July 1991, IM dated Austin’s lectures to March 1940.
15 Lindsey Lynch, LTA, 8 April 1999.
16 Wartime letters to both Paddy O’Regan and DH mention coltsfoot growing near the house in Blackpool where IM’s parents spent the war, and mention IM painting and framing there also.
17 Cherwell, LVI, no. 3, 11 November 1939, 63.
18 Eliot’s name is repeatedly invoked in IM’s poetry journals of the time.
19 Peter Conrad, Observer Books section, 14 February 1999, p.16.
20 Whether or not IM skated no one recalls, but ‘most of Somerville’ did. Eight miles of the Thames was frozen solid. A pair of IM’s skates from Steeple Aston days survived: white leather, scarcely used, made by Lilywhites C1963.
21 Undated, but must refer to April or so, as she mentions ‘next term'.
22 Letter to FT, 24 December 1941.
23 She helped her friend Janet Vaughan to become college Principal. Isobel Henderson’s 1934 cartoon of Helen Darbishire, with Somerville motto, as a spoof of the Winged Victory (used by Pauline Adams as cover for her college history) shows both her understanding of the absurdity of women’s colleges and her great love of them.
24 Sally Humphreys, eulogy for Isobel Henderson, Somerville Report, 1967.
25 See Chapter 3.
26 JB’s recollection: see Iris, op. cit. Mildred Hartley also told IM and MM about the class. She said it was a ‘most distinguished affair and the condition of entry was that they should undertake never to miss it – if ill, or dying, we must tell Prof Fraenkel in advance and in writing'. When MM did indeed have to miss a class because of a broken leg, Fraenkel answered her letter of apology by sending her a small book as a gift. She thinks she and IM would have checked their plans for Mods with Isobel Henderson in their first year, which would have been when Henderson made the quoted remark.
27 David Pears, CWA.
28 Fraenkel, for example, ‘Once put out feelers that he could do with [Clare Campbell] as secretary/paramour; nothing doing'. Clare Campbell, LTA, 23 February 1998.
29 Mary Warnock, A Memoir: People and Places (London, 2000). She notes that Fraenkel’s behaviour disgusted a friend of hers (Imogen Wrong), and had a lasting and bad effect on her attitide to sex.
30 MM, LTA.
31 MM, LTA, 25 August 1998. She was in love with Nick Crosbie, killed in the war. Noel, FT and LP were variously in love with IM.
32 Hugh Lloyd-Jones, LTA, 3 February 1998.
33 Kenneth Dover, Marginal Comment (London, 1994), P.39. Dover attended the class 1938–40.
34 J: 1964–70, P.8.
35 IM, undated, to Tony Forster, probably 1967: ‘So you were at that terrifying class of Fraenkel’s – it was the most frightening part of my university education.’
36 Gordon Williams, ‘Eulogy of Eduard Fraenkel', Proceedings of the British Academy, LVI, 1970 (OUP, 1972), p.438. My account of Professor Fraenkel is throughout deeply indebted to Williams’s vivid, scholarly and detailed eulogy.
37 From IM’s notes of Fraenkel’s and Beazley’s classes.
38 Hugh Lloyd-Jones, LTA, 3 February 1998.
39 Letter to DM, 17 July 1966.
40 Kenneth Dover, LTA, 27 February 1998.
41 Williams, ‘Eulogy', op. cit., p.438.
42 One well-known brief account is Perry Anderson’s ‘Components of the National Culture', in A. Cockburn and R. Blackburn (eds), Student Power (London, 1969), pp.214–84.
43 To DH, 21 March 1941.
44 Mark Amory, Lord Berners, op. cit.,? .179.
45 See G. Hirschfeld, ‘Durchgangsland England? Die Britische “Academic Community” und die wissenschaftliche Emigration aus Deutschland', in England? aber wo liegt es? Deutsche und Österreichische Emigranten in Grossbritannien 1933–45, C. Brunson et al (eds) (Munich, 1996), pp.59–70.
46 In the 1920s a light was always visible through the night in Fraenkel’s study in Kiel: physical hardship was of little account compared with scholarship. What religion is to some, work was to him – it gave shape, purpose and meaning to his life. His first major work, on Plautus, was written between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. after his day’s work was over.
47 Fraenkel dedicated his study of the Agamemnon to his wife Ruth and to Professor Sir John Beazley.
48 Sunday Times, 23 December 1934.
49 Williams, ‘Eulogy', op. cit.; see p.435, n24.
50 The Unicorn, p.8o.
51 An idea repeated in Nuns and Soldiers.
52 J: 1945. undated.
53 Williams, ‘Eulogy', op. cit., p.429; Fraenkel on the Hymn to Zeus (pp.160ff of Fraenkel’s study). My emphasis.
54 See Toynbee, Friends Apart, op. cit., p.67. Toynbee, like IM, read Greats at Oxford, though a few years before.
55 Williams, ‘Eulogy', op. cit., p.440.
56 Ibid, pp.431–3.
57 J: 1975–78, p.38.
58 Letter home, 15 May 1943.
59 FT, letter to Desiree Gumberlege, June 1940 (i.e. after Dunkirk). He also jokily proposed that she acquire a ‘good translation of the famous chorus from Agamemnon', to strengthen her pacifism.
60 17 April 1941, on board ship.
61 Respectively 30 December 1941 and 29 January 1942.
62 She read PPE at Somerville 1940–43.
63 David Pears, CWA.
64 George Steiner, unpublished eulogy of Donald MacKinnon, 20 May 1994, Corpus, Cambridge.
65 MRDF, CWA.
66 J: 15 May 1971. IM is describing the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard’s voice, which recalled MacKinnon’s clearly to her.
67 George Steiner, eulogy of Donald MacKinnon, op. cit.
68 Dennis Nineham, CWA.
69 David Pears, CWA.
70 'Evil and Personal Responsibility’ and ‘The Crux of Morality', both from Listener, 18 March 1948, pp.457–9 and 16 December 1948, pp.926–7. ‘Things and Persons’ from Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Vol. XXII, 1948, pp.179–89.
71 Vera Crane’s recollection.
72 Prefoce to EM, p.x.
73 PF has an identical recollection. These short wartime courses, incidentally, IM refers to as ‘dismal’ (7 April 1942, to DH).
74 Nicholas Lash, obituary of Donald MacKinnon, Guardian, 5 March 1994.
75 IM to Rosalind Hursthouse, undated, C1994.
76 IM wrote (from Seaforth, undated, but probably summer 1943 since there is as yet no kitchen) inviting PF to stay with her in London: ‘Yes, please come & stay – if you don’t mind no cooking & a shortage of furniture & blackout (there is however an extra campbed & blankets so you will at least be comfortable at night). I’ve been feeling intensely lonely on and off lately – do come Pip. Let me know when.’
77 Surmise of various friends, including MM, Vera Crane, Margaret Lintott. See Chapter 6, n37 below.
78 'Students cut down on social activities and dig potatoes in the parks – joining some society such as the Cosmos, all of which gives them a vague sensation of social betterment without confronting them at any point with a realistic picture of the world. Oxford does its best to dream even now.’ Badminton School Magazine, 82, 1941–2. The Cosmos was recalled by Marjorie Reeves as a predecessor to the Socratic Club, hence Christian.
79 Undated letter referred to in n76, probably summer 1943, since the occasion of the letter is PF’s arrival in London.
80 See Whitley, The Graduates, op. cit.
81 Toynbee, Friends Apart, op. cit., p.61. Compare also Toynbee’s depiction of the disagreeable attempt to convert Jasper Ridley; and Jenifer Hart on love as bourgeois fiction in Ask me no More (London, 1998).
82 Healey, The Time of my Life, op. cit., p.36.
83 Toynbee, Friends Apart, op. cit., p.18.
84 See Spectator, 12 January 1940.
85 Jenkins, in A Life at the Centre (London, 1992), says Crosland, Ian Durham and he were the only three not on the CP line (a phrase that might or might not indicate membership). Robert Conquest (LTA) says Christopher Mayhew was the only notable OULC person not in the CP.
86 Robert Conquest, LTA, April 1998. Also LP, CWA, February 1998. Dennis Nineham, an officer of the Oxford Student Christian Movement during the war, believes that Communist infiltration happened only long after the war was finished.
87 Dennis Healey, CWA.
88 In none of her longish letters to the Badminton School Magazine, recounting the doings of Old Girls, does IM mention this. Her Communism had less shock value at Badminton.
89 This was the only time he and IM ever met after 1932. He has cause to recall the month: having been called up to the Royal Engineers, he was trying to buy Schlomann’s Technical French Dictionary for use in France, whither his unit was being sent.
90 The minute book for the OULC for the period beginning 1940–41 recently came to light: Herbert Reiss found it in his Cambridge attic in December 1997.
91 To take place on 15 May 1940.
92 November 1941: ‘The only useful lesson I learnt was the cunning … with which Communists infiltrate other groups, non-political (religious, for instance), as well as political.’ Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (Penguin, 1991), p-37- But The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed.? . Leader (London, 2000), suggest his commitment went at least a little deeper: see pp.1–5.
93 Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, op. cit., p.36. The Labour Party had just disaffiliated itself from the ULF.
94 Roy Jenkins, LTA, June 1998.
95 Ibid.
96 Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland (London, 1982), p.11.
97 New Statesman, 11 May 1940, p.610. MM believes this was a rump OULC meeting.
98 Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland, op. cit., p.12.
99 Badminton School Magazine, 81.
100 Unpublished minutes of OULC, 22 February 1942: ‘It was unanimously decided to approach the Senior ex-Chairman from Somerville [sic] … to take Comrade Terraine’s [i.e. the future military historian] place … in the debate against the OUDSC:’ No one else appeared willing.
101 IM to FT, 17 February 1943: ‘I don’t know if it will mean much to you after these years & years … but the two clubs, who were always at each others’ throats, have now amicably amalgamated & all is unity & progress. This is a fine thing & a real tonic to me. Leo’s heart will leap slightly.’ FT was interested in the news and passed it on in a letter to his brother E.P. No history of the OULC after 1934, when M.P. Asley and C.T. Saunders’s Red Oxford came out, has yet been written.
102 They did not meet until long after the war, when both were established writers.
103 Two vivas. In the morning viva MM froze, and was hospitably invited back that afternoon by the examiners. IM wrongly feared that the fact that she herself was not to be viva’d meant she had done less well. Her philosophy papers, if not her history papers, were outstanding.
104 MM, LTA, January 1998.
105 Compare John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch', op. cit.: ‘The good man creates space; the bad eats it up.’
106 Recalled by A.L. Rowse around 1980 at an All Souls’ dinner, at which recollection IM then smiled.
107 To FT, 16 September 1941, from 9 Waller Avenue, Bispham, Blackpool, whither her parents had moved for the war with Hughes’s civil service department, and an airgraph from Somerville dated 24 April 1942. IM’s first cousin Muriel Chapman was teaching at Reigate during these years and spent one summer with the Murdoch family – probably 1940 – after discovering, too late, that she could make only one annual trip home to Belfast in wartime.
108 To DH, 7 April 1942.
109 IM records that she was interviewed for the Treasury in her recollections of UNRRA in the Bodleian Library (op. cit.). MM: ‘Somerville had been advised to let us know that they would be glad if we went into the Civil Service rather than the forces, because the Civil Service was very short of people.’ It was to MM that IM communicated her fears about her CP membership prejudicing her chances of a job.
110 Badminton School Magazine, 82, pp.41–2.
111 J: 17 February 1978.
112 IM calls herself ‘temporary Assistant Principal’ in Badminton School Magazine, 1942, on her UNRRA application in June 1944, on the backs of her novels, and in Who’s Who. FT used the same term to describe her grade when writing to his family. Sylvia Raphael, a Treasury colleague of IM’s, pointed out that it was only the Treasury that, true to its sense of being different, did not in fact use the term ‘[Temporary] Assistant Principal', but called its young women graduate recruits ‘Temporary Administrative Officers', the tide IM is allotted in the British Imperial Calendar for 1943 – none being produced in 1942 or 1944 (or, for that matter, 1941).
CHAPTER 6: This Love Business
1 Iris wrote from 55 Barrowgate Road, Chiswick, a street away from her parents’ house, which had suffered bomb damage a year or more before.
2 Vera Hoar, at the Ministry of Supply in Carlton House Terrace from 1943, later at the Shell-Mex Building in the Strand, recalls that many if not all APs used the office telephones for social calls as well as business ones.
3 IM to DH, January 20 1943.
4 The door onto the street now (1998) closed.
5 Letter to FT, 31 May 1943.
6 IM gives her Principal on her UNRRA application form as A.H.M. Hillis, but most worked to two different Principals; Vera Crane thought Hilary Sinclair (a man) her Principal. Peggy Pyke-Lees thought it B.D. Fraser; John C. Robinson is a name crossed out on IM’s 1944 UNRRA application.
7 Olive Pound was also there.
8 Peggy Pyke-Lees, and also Professor Raphael, Sylvia’s widower, CWA, 5 June 2000.
9 Also known as E/G.
10 Peggy was in ‘SS', or Social Services. Her husband Walter dealt with some of the same tasks as Iris before 1944.
11 On IM’s UNNRA application, June 1944.
12 19 October 1942. To DH she wrote on 20 January 1943 that ‘urgent letters sojourn neglected at the bottom of my tray, & the notes of important telephone calls which I write on the back of OHMS envelopes get lost somehow. I get a kick out of it all though …'.
13 IM to DH, 20 January 1943.
14 MRDF to FT, 24 August 1942.
15 FT to IM, 7 June 1942.
16 Letter to FT, 22 October 1943.
17 This is inevitably based on a straw-poll among survivors. At least neither Peggy Pyke-Lees nor Lady Trend visited the flat, though the latter recalled its reputation as legendarily ‘modern'. Sylvia Daiches Raphael was once invited to a supper, probably in 1943 – to help keep Iris safe, she felt, from the advances of Nickie Kaldor and Tommy Balogh.
18 Letter to DH, 8 March 1945.
19 Every tenth night they had to fire-watch or perform other duties. One stayed up the whole night, often in the company of the Great and Good. Peggy Pyke-Lees believes that sleeping took place, if at all, on bunk-beds in concrete bunkers in the basement.
20 Peggy Pyke-Lees’s mother’s wisdom.
21 MRDF, CWA.
22 To MB, undated: ‘I rarely escape from the office now before 7 or later.’
23 J: 10 September 1971.
24 IM to Rosalind Hursthouse, undated, 0994.
25 A postcard from IM at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford dated 28 July 1940 shows Rene and Hughes living at 196 Cavendish Road, Bispham, Blackpool, where they moved at the outbreak of war. A letter to DH shows the move from Cavendish to Waller Avenue was complete by 21 March 1941.
26 After the Blitz, property was scarce and hence costly, so Rent Acts were passed to protect tenants against unjust rent rises, tying rents to earlier rateable values. IM and PF thus acquired a protected tenancy, which Marion Bosanquet (later Daniel) inherited. The rent stayed at sixty guineas a year for decades.
27 Letter to MB dated 16 August 1942: ‘I move in in September’ – on a three-year lease.
28 To MB, 16 August 1942.
29 Called PRHA (People’s Rest-House Association).
30 IM downplays its unusualness when writing to DH, 20 January 1943: ‘a long & erratic studio on top of an empty warehouse down a rather dark alleyway'. Her letters to DH are more worldly, less lyrical than those to FT. To Clare Campbell in late 1942 she also writes of living above a mouse-ridden warehouse.
31 Probably after ‘Killycoonagh', the modern but grand house of Paddy O’Regan’s family near Marlborough, which IM visited and recalled later. It also boasted an ‘atrium'.
32 Not necessarily so designated at first, since a letter to PF warns of ‘no cooking'. There was mains gas laid on, and IM must have acquired the ancient stove, probably second hand.
33 Now a canteen for Scotland Yard.
34 All unascribed quotations come from PF’s record; see Iris Murdoch Newsletter, no. 13, 1999, pp.1–2.
35 22 January 1943.
36 The coach-houses in the corner off Spencer Street, where a linden tree now flourishes, waited a little longer.
37 This was the view of her closest schoolfriend Margaret Lintott, who was told during the war that IM was a CP member while at the Treasury, and of MM and of Vera Crane, who was also involved with the CP.
38 Letter from MRDF to FT, dated 15 and 23 July 1943.
39 See John Jones’s review of this book, ‘She Loved and Sung', TLS, 5 October 2001; and also John Bayley’s response, Letters, TLS,
40 MB recalled how IM always loathed jokes about the purges.
41 CP archives (1943–92) at the Labour History Archive and Study Centre, 103 Princess Street, Manchester.
42 By Ruth Kingsbury.
43 In September 1945 doodles were drawn low down on the wall, possibly by bored Party members during such meetings.
44 As Dorothy Thompson pointed out, ‘The loan of a flat by an absent owner/tenant happened regularly at CP meetings.’
45 Source: Thomas Balogh’s son Steve, December 1999. Paul Streeten, Balogh’s student and friend from 1944, points out (e-mail, 31 December 2000) that Balogh moved from far right, supporting Horthy and working with Hjalmar Schacht, to far left, overestimating the USSR’s economic strength and therefore opposed to provoking the Russians.
46 Née Towers, then Sale.
47 Clare Campbell, LTA.
48 This sleeping in the bath was something PF had not, in 1998, known or recalled that IM also did.
49 Marion recalls that MM was a little indignant when it was returned after the war, somewhat the worse for wear.
50 Letter to MB dated 16 August 1942.
51 In a closed Bodleian collection. IM lent some of FT’s letters to E.P. Thompson in 1946 when the latter was co-editing the commemorative There is a Spirit in Europe, op. cit.
52 J: 7 August 1991. This comment is à propos the letters she wrote to Paddy O’Regan C1940.
53 Anne Valery, then a pupil at Badminton, vividly recalls IM, on a trip to the school C1941, enquiring as to which house Valery was in and, with a joky peremptoriness criticising her ‘back bent like a hoop!’ Badminton girls who developed early were embarrassed by and wished to conceal the fact that they now had breasts. Until 1999 Valery assumed that IM was then still a prefect, although it was in fact three years after IM had left.
54 IM to FT, 20 March 1943.
55 FT to IM, 17 October 1942.
56 IM to FT, 22 January 1943.
57 FT, letter home, 17 September 1943.
58 Probably summer 1942. Compare MRDF to FT, 2 April 1943: ‘Shocked to see how nakedly and crudely we put our intimate selves into our typewriters.’
59 Compare also FT to E.P. Thompson, 21 April 1942: ‘You & my old friend IM are the only 2 of my contemporaries in England with whom I correspond regularly.’
60 FT consoled Desiree Cumberlege, one of whose suitors was killed in November 1941: ‘next to my parents', your letters are the best I get'. In spring 1942 Desiree got engaged, though she never married; her surviving brother believes she was in love with FT. FT wrote also to Catherine Nicholson, daughter of Robert Graves, whom his mother favoured, and to his cousin, young ‘Tubsie’ Pilkington-Rogers, now Mrs Barbara Sloman.
61 C/o an aunt, Margaret Levitt, in Beirut.
62 FT had jaundice at the time of writing, late 1942.
63 This was probably in summer 1944, in the UNRRA offices in Portland Place. See IM’s UNRRA reminiscences, Bodleian Library, op. cit.
64 Dated 14 March 1944, a Tuesday. Thomas Balogh used Kaldor’s flat in Chelsea Cloisters each Wednesday.
65 See e.g. EM, pp.112, 124, 160, and The Sea, The Sea, passim. IM’s journal references to Lawrence continue until late. JB teased her about this: see Iris, op. cit., p.72. Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy and William James in Varieties of Religious Experience both predicate the saint on the model of the soldier – a moral conscript, as it were.
66 Born 2 February 1920, he started as a pacifist at Merton in 1939, enlisted in the RAMC in 1940, then SOE in Italy in 1944, where he won the MC and bar. He died aged forty-one on 9 March 1961 after a career in the Diplomatic Service. His surviving elder brother John says how much he owed to IM for giving him the courage and determination to fight.
67 LTA from MRDF, expert on SOE, and himself ex-SAS. See also Nuremberg Trials, vol. 15, p.297 (HMSO, 1948).
68 IM to FT, 17 February 1943: ‘Yet you are a Romantic too.’
69 IM to FT, November 1943.
70 Compare FT to IM, April 1944: ‘I know forgiveness is one of your chief virtues.’
71 IM to FT, 16 September 1941.
72 IM to FT, 24 April 1942.
73 FT to IM, 29 January 1942.
74 FT to IM, 12 November 1943.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid.
77 Such was the general belief of acquaintances such as Anne Elliott, reading Mods and Greats at the same time as IM, though at a different college, St Hugh’s.
78 Lilian was sceptical about Noel and IM having been lovers without her having caught wind of it, as she and Noel were close, but also commented: ‘It could conceivably be hard for a nicely-brought-up young girl to say “no” – especially in wartime – precisely because they had been brought up to oblige.’
79 CWA, 15 October 1998; LP strongly implied that the relationship had not been ‘fully’ sexual at that stage. A 1940 letter from IM to Paddy O’Regan, agreeing in principle to a camping holiday with him, in which she wonders whether she has the courage to lie to her parents about the sex of her companion, opens the field to another contender. No evidence survives about whether or not the expedition took place, but in August 1991 IM wrote to O’Regan’s surviving brother John an affectionate letter in which she vouchsafes that the relationship had been ‘distinctly passionate'. IM told MRDF, with whom she had an affair starting in July 1943, that her first lover had been at Queen’s. Noel Eldridge was at Balliol, LP at Corpus. A lover at Queen’s would fit Denis Healey’s recollection that IM had been briefly ‘lined up’ with his fellow-ex-Bradford Grammar School acquaintance Derrick Brooman, who entered Queen’s in 1937 to study PPE but left in 1939 to join up, then went to Bristol University and Oxford, and died in June 1979. Though no one else recalls Brooman, IM pasted a snap of him in an early photograph album. She told Vera Crane, Clare Campbell, DH and FT that she had lost her virginity by early 1943. To DM she remarked much later that she was anxious to get rid of her virginity as soon as she could.
80 For example, she at some point told her Belfast cousins that her only lover before JB was Noel Eldridge. She wrote to DH (20 January 1943) that she had relinquished her ‘quaint virginity cult’ some time ago. A poem would seem to date this to April 1943 (in Redhill), however.
81 Margaret Stanier was by no means alone in recalling IM at Oxford as very promiscuous: CWA, 8 March 2000 and LTA, 10 March 2000.
82 Margaret Stanier, LTA.
83 See e.g. Toynbee, Friends Apart, op. cit., or Pat Sloan (ed.) John Cornford: A Memoir (London, 1938)
84 To PF, c July 1942.
85 J: 1992–96. Susie Williams-Ellis did not, in 1998, share this recollection.
86 Source: her stepson Julian Jackson.
87 FT to E.P. Thompson, March 1940.
88 When he describes a visit to a brothel, he finds himself without any money. LP, meeting FT in 1943, thought his new confidence and physical coordination might have come from his having had an affair. His biographer Simon Kusseff believes that, on the contrary, it was the result of intense physical training that preceded the Sicilian landings, and that he died a virgin.
89 Robert Graves’s daughter Catherine Nicholson recalls a visit by E.P. Thompson around 1946 to check that she was financially secure. Her understanding was that FT’s first will was in her favour, and was changed only after her marriage in the summer of 1942.
90 A point I owe to Simon Kusseff.
91 For his part Hal Lidderdale spoke to Christopher Seton-Watson of FT’s ‘wide interests, appetite for experience and good humour'. The Lidderdale house was in Woodstock.
92 15 September 1942.
93 She believes autumn 1942 (CWA, 1 August 2000).
94 Dr Ken Roberts (son of W.C. Roberts), LTA, 14 January 2001.
95 Anecdote told to Richard Lyne in 1954 by Dr Ken Roberts; also told to Margaret Bastock, later a colleague of IM at St Anne’s, and her husband Aubrey Manning. The two versions differ somewhat – Lyne has the bus into work on which IM usually sat at the front on the left, Roberts at the back, normally only a formal greeting passing between them. Manning has the bus home. But the two accounts overlap significantly.
CHAPTER 7: ‘A la Guerre, comme à Guerre’
1 Not sentiments that he shared directly with IM.
2 J: 11 December 1977.
3 J comment by IM on re-reading her 1943 diaries, on 21 December 1988.
4 IM wrote to MB in 1967 of Seaforth as a ‘real Naboth’s vineyard’ – i.e. a possession coveted by its legal owner – and spoke wistfully of the flat during the war (CWA, September 1994). She paid an unheralded visit to Seaforth one evening in the early 1970s. Marion and Peter Daniel were delighted to see her and opened some hock, but such an impromptu call was very out of character, and a token of her strength of feeling: unsolicited visits IM deplored in principle.
5 She worked under Rosenstein Rodan, preparing plans for the Balkans and Central Europe.
6 Unpublished interview with RW, 17 July 1991.
7 IM to Rosalind Hursthouse, 0994.
8 J: May 1959: ‘Or was that at Oxford?’ IM lodged at PF’s at 16 Park Town in 1948–49.
9 An American told MRDF that IM put an empty hock bottle on her mantelpiece each time she turned down a proposal. (Liebfraumilch, Noel Martin recounts, was the drink of the time if you wished to try to get your girlfriend tipsy and amorous.)
10 David Worswick, with whom Balogh worked at Balliol, doubts that Balogh would have been permitted, as an alien, to do such hush-hush work, though noting too Balogh’s skill at getting to know the ‘right people'.
11 Confirmed by Ruth Kingsbury: IM got cross if her books were borrowed and not returned to their correct spot.
12 Published 1943, so presumably bought back from Paris after the Liberation; see Chapter 8.
13 Undated letter to MB. She utilised a substance called ‘Liverpool virus'.
14 CWA, 1993. A letter inviting Clare Campbell to the ballet survives. JB believes IM especially liked the adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony as music for a ballet of Hamlet, and that she went to see Stravinsky’s Petroushka.
15 J: 4 April 1948.
16 PF, LTA, June 2000. They would not necessarily go to the same parties. Vera Hoar recalls that one brought a bottle to Seaforth parties.
17 Saunders not merely worked at the Treasury, but appeared to his friend Mervyn James even to sleep there.
18 To DH, 4 October 1945.
19 See Jane Williams (ed.), Tambimuttu: Bridge Between Two Worlds (London, 1989), esp. pp.278–9. Eliot supported ‘Tambi’ both financially and by commissioning him to edit poetry anthologies for Faber, Poetry in Wartime appearing in August 1942. Such, at least, were the myths. See Julian Maclaren-Ross, Memoirs of the Forties (London, 1965), pp. 137ff, and Gavin Ewart, ‘Tambi the Great', London Magazine, December 1965, p.6o, for their debunking. IM wrote ‘Poem and Egg’ for Tambimuttu in 1977, and attended the relaunch of Poetry London/Apple Magazine in October 1979.
20 It is hard to date the beginning of IM’s friendships with other denizens of the Swiss and the Wellington – i.e. of artistic and literary London – such as Audrey Beecham, Dan Davin, Gerald Wilde, Mulk Raj Anand and Paul Potts – but the last two of these certainly started in the war. Ralph Larmour, Les Epstein, Keidrych Rhys and Olivier Wormser, all represented in IM’s photograph album, were, JB believes, among her other wartime beaux, and Wormser and Rhys wished to marry her.
21 J: 27 January 1967.
22 MM. Ruth Kingsbury believes Potts may have been in the CP. Dorothy Thompson recalls Potts as having written ‘My name is Paul Potts/And I’ve holes in my socks'.
23 Unpublished interview with RW, 17 July 1991.
24 IM to FT, 24 December 1941.
25 'Some of it looked rather good,’ she dispassionately noted in her journal of the fragments in her waste-bin.
26 MM and Jewel Smith.
27 On 21 September 1947 she wrote to RQ that this manuscript greeted a return of hers to London.
28 IM told Ruth Kingsbury she was writing a novel about a professor.
29 Spectator, 18–25 December 1999.
30 Standard biography F.A. Lea, The Life of John Middleton Murry (London, 1959). Lois MacKinnon doubted that Donald MacKinnon and Murry were acquainted.
31 Adelphi reviews of Nicodemus’s Midnight Hour, January-March 1943, pp.61–2; of S. Cook’s Rebirth of Christianity and K. Ingram’s Taken at the Flood, July-September 1943, pp.125–7; and E. Hayman’s Worship and Common Life, July-September 1944, pp.134–5.
32 FT to Desiree Cumberlege, C1940. Simon Kusseff dates ‘Pollicita Meliora’ to around 1940–41.
33 MRDF to FT, July 1943.
34 In July 1990 she noted that her publisher Carmen Callil and agent Ed Victor took her out to the restaurant Nico’s, then at this address.
35 According to FT’s reminiscences of Winchester.
36 This was one of at least three occasions on which PF borrowed Balogh’s Dorchester cottage.
37 Michael Hamburger’s translation, as IM wrote to him fifty years later. Her copy is inscribed ‘I? Oxford Sep 1943', with ‘H??’ underneath.
38 Whose ‘perfect beauty was marred only by a receding hairline', as Ruth Kingsbury recalls IM saying (May 2000).
39 Lady (Catherine) Balogh, CWA, 15 February 1999.
40 Not recalled by MRDF, December 2000.
41 Lady Balogh, CWA, 15 February 1999.
42 When IM feared, falsely, that she might be pregnant by Balogh, he was willing if necessary to marry her. Many expressed their sense of ill-omen about this affair: Balogh was considered egotistical.
43 13 April 1942.
44 5 July 1943.
45 Thompson, Beyond the Frontier, op. cit.
46 Ibid, p.42.
47 Major, later Lord, Henikker calls them a compound of ‘bombastic deserters and inexperienced Communists’ (Beyond the Frontier, op. cit., pp.79–80).
48 Thompson, Beyond the Frontier, op. cit., p.23.
49 So, at least, claims Stowers Johnson, whose study Agents Extraordinary (London, 1975) is notoriously ill-documented.
50 Sharova came to England as a delegate to a World Trades Union Congress in 1945, and so was probably a CP member. She is the sole source both for the story of the trial and for FT’s avowal of Communism thereat. See News Chronicle, 8 March 1945. The story was recycled in T.J. and E.P. Thompson, There is a Spirit in Europe, op. cit.; by Trunski in Grateful Bulgaria, op. cit., who did not believe it but who had himself been tortured 0947 as a ‘British spy'; by Stowers Johnson in Agents Extraordinary, op. cit. ('slowly & quietly, [FT] declar[ed] boldly he was a Communist', p.166); finally in Thompson, Beyond the Frontier, op. cit.
51 FT’s sister-in-law Dorothy Thompson recalls (15 February 1999) the film-maker Tony Simmons at an unspecified later date uncovering some of FT’s clothes, the condition of which strongly suggested torture. In October 1999 Dorothy, on being told the story of the execution, pointed out that the blood could also have been a product of the shooting.
52 Ken Scott, speaking on the Bulgarian television film entitled Major Frank Thompson, 1977, now in the British Film Institute.
53 Trunski, Grateful Bulgaria, op. cit., p.66.
54 Slavcho Trunski, who saw FT on and off for four months in 1944, says his Bulgarian was by no means fluent.
55 Simon Kusseff: the date is uncertain, but between 7 and 10 June.
56 TJ. and E.P. Thompson, There is a Spirit in Europe, op. cit., pp.10–11.
57 IM’s journals at different times mention her ownership of both.
58 So Dimitri Markov, prize CP writer, told Robert Conquest. Discovering this when researching a play about the partisans helped make Markov decide to defect.
59 Source: Major Frank Thompson, Bulgarian television, 1977.
60 To the Algerian Ambassador. See also Arnold Rattenbury, review of Thompson, Beyond the Frontier, op. cit., ‘Convenient Death of a Hero', London Review of Books, 8 May 1997, pp.12–13.
61 Trunski, Grateful Bulgaria, op. cit., p.52; Rattenbury, a family friend but not an eye-witness, believed that FT’s Communism would have survived into peacetime: see ‘Convenient Death of a Hero', op. cit.
62 FT, letter home, 18 December 1942.
63 To Catherine Nicholson.
64 One example: FT gave brilliant ‘mess'-talks in 1943 on the history of the Balkans, on Beveridge, on the make-up of the German army, astonishing in their range and their grasp of detail. He knew of the liquidation of a million Jews also. When the 1940 Katyn massacre of Poles by Soviets was discovered in 1943, however, he refused to believe that this was not a Nazi crime.
65 Fellow-Wykehamist Tony Forster (telephone CWA, May 2000), who last saw him in Egypt in 1943, where Forster joined Phantom, never took him for a dogmatic Communist at all.
66 As Luisa Passerini has excellently observed, in Europe in Love, Love in Europe (London, 1999),? .314.
67 As the post-war show trials were to demonstrate.
68 Thompson, Beyond the Frontier, op. cit. See also Artemis Cooper, Cairo During the War (London, 1995), where the possibility that SOE officer James Klugmann might have been an NKVD agent is touched upon.
69 Rattenbury, ‘Convenient Death of a Hero', op. cit. See also Trunski, Grateful Bulgaria, op. cit., p.50: the British feared arming a left-wing regime and so did not rush to aid the guerrillas. Basil Davidson (Major Frank Thompson, Bulgarian television, 1977), with SOE in Yugoslavia, also believed British support for SOE in Bulgaria equivocal, as Britain feared a non-bourgeois post-war government.
70 LTA, 2 February 1999: ‘Of about a hundred SAS men taken prisoner in 1944, only six (of whom by a blind stroke of fortune I was one) ever returned.’ See Chapter 8.
71 IM and PF probably did not regularly read the papers; PF believes they could not afford them. From IM’s letters to DH it is clear that she learnt of FT’s death shortly after Monday 8 October. She had been in Blackpool the week before.
72 Since the same source – Summers in ‘The Lost Loves of Iris Murdoch', op. cit. – claims that IM ‘lived for three years’ with FBS, it cannot be accounted reliable. In October 1996 IM said to the author, ‘I adored FT; we were to have been married.’ She described him as burly and ‘one who laughed a lot'.
73 Summers, ‘The Lost Loves of Iris Murdoch', op. cit.
74 Misrecall: FT sighted IM in the autumn of 1938, but first spoke to her on 6 March 1939.
75 This was his name ‘in the family'. He was Edward to non-family. IM put the name to use in A Severed Head, where Palmer Anderson is the villain, a borrowing E.P. took in good part.
76 Dorothy Thompson’s recollection, December 1999.
77 To FT’s biographer, Simon Kusseff.
78 And, around 1980, a fourth was mooted, by E.P. Thompson, MRDF and Anthony Forster together. This came to nothing.
79 IM to The Times, 27 August 1975.
80 To Sue Summers, 1993.
81 IM to The Times, 27 August 1975.
CHAPTER 8: A Madcap Tale
1 E.P. Thompson, Persons and Polemics (London, 1994), pp.2–9.
2 J: 9 July 1976.
3 IM to LP, 16 May 1945.
4 Two weeks before his death Slavcho Trunski said the entry was made strictly ‘under orders; they were partisans, and their job to fight'. FT’s biographer Simon Kusseff points out that Apostolski, a leading Serbian partisan, was among those specifically warning FT against this move.
5 J: ‘… Burning-eyed, his torrent of restless talk, his undergraduate room, the way he rushed away suddenly nervously to get cigarettes, the way he made tea, his pictures. A sort of resemblance in him to Frank.’ Isaiah Berlin later recommended Kullman to the Royal College of Art.
6 Peter Wiles.
7 IM to Tony Forster.
8 IM to DH, September 1944.
9 When MM and IM were students, ‘Mary mentioned that Aristotle says you can’t be in love with more than one person at a time. “Why on earth not?” IM shouted, really indignant at such intolerance.’ See IM Newsletter no. 15, pp. 10–12, MM’s review of this book.
10 JB, Iris, op. cit., p.24.
11 IM to RQ, 6 November 1947.
12 As, for example the revelation at the end of An Unofficial Rose that Miranda always loved Felix.
13 See Chapter 3.
14 To DH.
15 As Jenny Hartley points out in Hearts Undefeated: Women’s Writing of the Second World War (London, 1994), p.2.
16 IM visited Hal Lidderdale’s and John Willett’s mothers – almost certainly others too, now lost to view.
17 To DH, 5 January 1946.
18 To DH, 20 May 1944.
19 Ken Kirk, active in the OULC with IM, LTA, 7 September 1998.
20 To DH, 12 December 1944.
21 'Wild’ is JB’s vicarious recall; ‘adorable’ IM’s, in a letter to DH.
22 To DH, May 44.
23 Sister Marian, LTA, 18 January 1999: ‘He pursued me relentlessly from 1936 when I came up until into the war.’
24 Ibid.
25 Written after DH’s death on 5 November 1991 for a Times obituary, but never used, since Hal died two months later, on 20 January 1992.
26 Sixty years later David’s sister Barbara Robbins had a dim recall of a girl with long, straight blonde hair.
27 IM, airgraph to LP, 8 February 1943.
28 To DH, 10 February 1945.
29 IM noted to DH on 4 February 1946: ‘I get hypersensitive & worry if I’m “left out” of anything, just like I did at school – all very infantile & interesting to observe.’
30 Ann Toulmin, CWA, 2 March 2000.
31 Hilda Foster in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, p.22.
32 28 February 1943.
33 Two letters, 16 and 24 September 1945.
34 'Being determined that immediately upon the liberation by the armed forces of the United Nations or as a consequence of retreat of the enemy, the population thereof shall receive aid and relief from their sufferings, food, clothing and shelter’ (pamphlet published for the whole UN Information Organisation by HMSO, London, 1944).
35 Jo Grimond, Memoirs (London, 1979), PP.133–40.
36 The separation happened ‘shortly after I wrote to you last', IM says in a letter dated 24 September 1944. The previous letter was started on 20 May and finished on 7 June.
37 Olivier Wormser, whom JB recalls as wanting to marry IM. When Wormser and his wife later visited Steeple Aston IM and JB were amused by Madame Wormser’s question on seeing foxes in the garden: ‘Est ce qu’ils sont dangereux?’ PF was asked out to Dorchester to meet Wormser in 1942–43: Wormser was a friend of Thomas Balogh’s.
38 IM remarked to Ruth Kingsbury, ‘He hurt me; I hurt him.’
39 Simon Kusseff dates this to between 7 and 10 June – see Chapter 7.
40 To Paddy O’Regan, undated, summer 1940.
41 To LP, 4 April 1945.
42 Date deduced from letter to DH. IM’s UNRRA application form, held at the UN in New York, gives June, but no date. She speaks of ‘wangling’ a job at UNRRA in earlier letters to DH.
43 An inability a later letter shows her as having rectified while staying in 1951 in Devon, too late for the post in question.
44 IM’s account of UNRRA in the Bodleian Library, op. cit., is of interest despite occasional inaccuracies regarding dates and times. Her misrecall that she worked for UNRRA in London for only ‘a few months’ – it was fifteen – may relate to the fact that her time abroad was more rewarding. She further misremembers that she came back from Austria to go directly to Cambridge. This elides an entire year of depression and inactivity – 1946–47 – during which she was refused an American visa.
45 Letter to Noel Eldridge’s twin sister Lilian, 1 December 1944. They had re-established contact through attending classes with the same Russian teacher.
46 17 June 1945.
47 Letter to Lilian Eldridge, 1 December 1944.
48 Three letters to DH: April 1942, January 1944, December 1944.
49 See Peter Davison (ed.), The Complete Works of George Orwell (London, 1998), 20 vols, item 2620: ‘I am leaving … for Paris’ (15 February 1945). Probably IM’s friend John Fulton, then also with UNRRA, went to Paris; and it is possible that in this way she obtained RQ’s Pierrot mon ami, to which she introduced PF.
50 Letter to DH, 10 February 1945.
51 The Nonsuch Bookshop in Cambridge has IM’s copy, dated 19 January 1945, with some underlinings, of An Introduction to Dilthey by H.A. Hodges.
52 Partly to learn Greek on what might now be called a philosophy junior research fellowship, though teaching philosophy began soon after. ‘Can you teach economics as well?’ asked Janet Vaughan. ‘No!’ said PF. IM, from her letter to DH, appears wrongly to have thought that PF’s post was publicly advertised.
53 To DH.
54 To DH.
55 IM to DH, 11 November 1945 (i.e. Pen Tower, then Gatty, later Balogh).
56 To DH, 8 March 1945.
57 She had been staying the previous weekend with Vera Crane in Leighton Buzzard. They came down to London for the celebrations of Tuesday, 8 May.
58 PF recalls that a single picture only in the whole gallery would be on show for weeks. She and one Goya got to know each other well.
59 1 June 1945.
60 MM hazards the guess that this may have been late in the war, perhaps after IM had learnt more at UNRRA about the 1940 Soviet acquisition of the Baltic states, IM’s irritation with an anti-Yalta Pole in March 1945 notwithstanding. IM mentions the shift in a letter to E.P. Thompson, c December 1945.
61 To LP, 16 June 1945.
62 Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar (London, 1945),? .7.
63 To DH, 1 June 1945.
64 Frances Stewart, LTA, 6 January 2000.
65 IM, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (Cambridge, 1953), p.76.
66 To DH, 24 September 1944.
67 To E.P. Thompson, November 1945.
68 To DH, 27 July 1945.
69 J: 5 August 1945.
70 Marion Bosanquet believes she moved into Seaforth in August 1945.
71 To LP, 4 September 1945.
72 6 November 1945.
73 CWA. She kept a key and even used the flat occasionally, e.g. on Hijab’s last night before his sailing to Port Said in the summer of 1948, when it seems the flat was sub-let to Ruth Kingsbury and her future husband William Mills.
74 To DH, January 1944. Also to Jeffrey Meyers, ‘The Art of Fiction cxvii: Iris Murdoch', Paris Review 115, 1990, p.209.
75 IM to Hal Lidderdale, 6 November 1945: ‘It was so very good to see you in Brussels.’ To LP she wrote of the meeting with Hal as recent on 30 October 1945. An Italian song copied into the end of a poetry journal is inscribed ‘Haaltert [a town near Brussels] Hal & Marie Sep 8 1945', the probable date of that meeting.
76 The Sea, The Sea, p.64.
77 Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade (London, 1997). The passage continues: ‘And there was another emotion, too, among women. Frenchmen loved women and showed it … adorable France, which loves its women and gives them confidence in their feminity.’
78 To DH, March 1945.
79 16 September 1945.
80 13 May 1945.
81 4 October 1945.
82 4 December 1945.
83 10 October 1945.
84 16 September 1945.
85 10 October 1945.
86 'He was rather standoffish': Bodleian Library, op. cit., p.13. Since DH was ‘crazy about the Marx brothers', according to his son Tom, IM’s meeting Chico would presumably have given him pleasure.
87 Unpublished interview with RW,
88 6 November 1945.
89 3 November 1945.
90 To LP, 30 October 1945.
91 Letter to Mrs Theo (short for Theodosia) Thompson, 21 November 1945.
92 Letter to Paddy O’Regan from Cavendish Road, C1940.
93 Letter to MB from 9 Waller Avenue, 13 November 1943.
94 Bernanos, Journal d’un curé de campagne (1936, translated 1954); ‘through his self-sacrifice [he] brings Christ’s redemption to enslaved souls'. Bernanos’s theme is ‘the strife between good and evil, fought in the souls of a saintly elect'. Penguin Dictionary of European Writers (1969), pp. 106–7.
95 PF asked IM one afternoon why she did not approach Donald MacKinnon with some problem. IM silently changed the subject: ‘Look at that aeroplane up there!’ PF dates this to before September 1943. In her letter to DH, 11 November 1945, IM reports that she has not seen MacKinnon ‘for 2 years', but that MacKinnon must know the ‘Outline of the events that followed’ through, for example, MRDF. To RQ 21 April 1946: ‘I have not seen [MacKinnon] for 2 years.’
96 In The Sovereignty of Good.
97 IM interview with Laura Cecil, ‘How to write a Novel', Cover magazine, Oxford, issue 4, March 1968, pp.9–10.
98 Pat and Andrew in The Red and the Green; Pip and Max in The Unicorn.
99 LTA, 8 February 2000.
100 To DH, 11 November 1945.
101 5 December 1945 and 13 January 1946.
102 7 January 1944.
103 1 December 1945.
104 5 January 1946.
105 To Harry Weinberger, 9 June 1992.
106 The postcard of Berchtesgaden she sent home on 22 December 1945 bears only the legend, ‘And I have been here too!’
107 To Harry Weinberger, 3 December 1981.
108 Interview in The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition: Interviews with English and American Novelists, ed.? . Ziegler and C.W.E. Bigsby (London, 1982), pp.209–30.
109 Anne Valery, ex-Badmintonian, was around 1944 a co-denizen of Fitzrovia, and saw IM looking both ‘very glamorous’ with her long blonde hair, and very well-turned out, in a French restaurant in London.
110 Diary reference of Harry Brumfitt, fellow-OULC campaigner, then at Queen’s reading French, 1942.
111 Undated, probably C1950; and 24 June 1952.
112 She wrote that she had known quite well three young people who became seriously ‘depressed ['that mysterious soul-ailment so many seem to have now'] and killed themselves – one was Caspar, son of Ian Fleming, handsome, rich, clever &tc &tc but just did not want to live. The determination to go was in all the three cases, very very deep.’
113 Letter to IM, 12 April 1977.
114 Inferences: she had two catalogues for ‘An Illustrated Souvenir of the Exhibition of Persian Art', one probably given her by MRDF, whose first initial she wrote into it, together with ‘London February 4th 1944'. Her Russian notebooks survive and are dated.
115 20 May 1944.
116 February 1945.
117 31 December 1945.
CHAPTER 9: Displaced Persons
1 28 February 1946.
2 Copied into a 1994 journal, ascribed an original date of 25 April 1946 (but 1947 is more likely, since it was originally written in Paris).
3 See Chapter 8, n48.
4 On 11 April 1946 IM wrote to RQ: ‘J’ai fait une traduction quelconque des premières 25 pages de Pierrot. Beaucoup de lacunes: et je dois réviser la chose deux, trois, dix fois. Je vous l’enverrai en quinze jours peut-être. Je ne mepresse pas (et je manque de temps d’ailleurs). Mélange de joie et de désespoir. Le premier provient de votre style, et son reflet (même paume) en anglais (oui, c’est un travail passionnant que la traduction). En effet, c’est pas facile … C’est des choses très simples, des riens d’argot, que je trouve difficile.’ IM’s letters to RQ strongly indicate that she delivered a translation of Pierrot to Lehmann, albeit the second half was less polished and satisfactory than the first.
5 New York Times, Living Arts section, 22 February 1990, p.B2: ‘He would never speak English with me.’
6 Olivier Todd, CWA, 26 October 1999: ‘an awful accent!’ Kreisel and Harry Weinberger believed her spoken German poor.
7 He translated into French Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard [sic].
8 See New York Times, Living Arts section, 22 February 1990.
9 e.g. Henri Calet (1904–56).
10 The Quest for Queneau, BBC Radio 3, 11 October 1985.
11 Asa Briggs, CWA, March 1998: ‘They were friends, not lovers.’ RQ’s biographer Michel Lecureur’s view also.
12 J: 12 July 1947: IM admires ‘that vertiginous heart-breaking absurdity which Queneau achieves by his ambiguous serio-comic play. Oh oh I wish I could write like that.’
13 Letter to Walter Redfern, 14 March 1979.
14 28 February 1946.
15 14 January 1954.
16 To DH, 25 January 1946.
17 G. Woodbridge (ed.), The History of UNRRA (New York, 1950), vol. II, p.320.
18 To LP, 4 March 1946.
19 John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch', op. cit.
20 She was giving him help in collecting material for the commemorative There is a Spirit in Europe, op. cit.
21 Undated, but probably late February 1946.
22 Possibly after Klagenfurt; IM’s letter to PF in late March makes no mention of Puch. The exact sequence is unclear.
23 Richard Symonds, ‘Amiable Despair: UNRRA in Austria', Bodleian MSS.Eng 4703, UN Careers Records Project, Chapter 2.
24 Woodbridge, The History of UNRRA, op. cit., p.306.
25 To LP, 4 March 1946.
26 Woodbridge, The History of UNRRA, op. cit., vol. 2, p.504.
27 Her position there is given in the ‘UNRRA Austrian Mission Directory of Personnel’ as ‘Registrar'.
28 To MB, 17 April 1946.
29 Symonds, ‘Amiable Despair', op. cit., passim.
30 The Sandcastle, p.251.
31 J: 23 May 1978.
32 Her time there was further shortened by a brief period of leave in mid-May in Venice and Florence. Source: postcard home. John Corsellis recalls that UNRRA personnel such as IM were sometimes given a vehicle and driver when on leave.
33 BBC European Productions, Meeting Writers, no. 5, ref. no. 4222, 4 February 1957.
34 Interview with Susan Hill, Bookshelf, BBC Radio 4, 30 April 1982.
35 Michael Ignatieff on M. Djilas, Fall of the New Class, New York Review of Books, 4 March 1999, p.29.
36 Nigel Nicolson, Long Life: A Memoir (London, 1997), p.116.
37 Documented in John Corsellis, Slovenian Phoenix (forthcoming). See also Nikolai Tolstoi, The Minister and the Massacres (London, 1986; subsequently withdrawn from circulation after legal proceedings); and Nicolson, Long Life, op. cit., Chapter 5, ‘The Witness'.
38 See Gitta Sereny, The German Trauma (London, 2000), p.359.
39 Carinthia had been claimed in 1945 as sovereign territory by Tito’s partisans, who posted proclamations on public buildings; after the repatriations such claims seem to have been dropped.
40 Nicolson, Long Life, op. cit., p.123.
41 The exception was Hochsteingasse, reserved for students at Graz University.
42 See Corsellis, Slovenian Phoenix, op. cit, Introduction.
43 J: 1947.
44 See e.g. Nikolai Tolstoi, Victims of Yalta (London, 1977), p.468n, dealing with the Kempten incident in Bavaria, in the American Zone.
45 To MB, 17 April 1946.
46 Dr Edgar Chandler, The High Tower of Refuge: The Inspiring Story of Refugee Relief Throughout the World (London, 1959), Acknowledgements.
47 See Bodleian Library, op. cit., for IM’s recall. In interview with John Corsellis c 1979 Jaboor said ‘emphatically that Iris’s role … was a very junior one'. Her grade on her letter of resignation is Grade 7, her position Admin Assistant.
48 On 28 June 1946.
49 From FBS’s journal.
50 To LP, 17 June 1945, from Seaforth.
51 To PF, 27 March 1946.
52 5 September 1946.
53 Letter to RQ.
54 'It’s still there. I have to ask for a waiver if I want to come to the United States,’ Meyers, ‘The Art of Fiction, op. cit.; see also unpublished interview with RW, 17 July 1991. IM spoke resentfully of the ban in 1997. Source for Gaitskell’s involvement: Denis Healey.
55 IM to Hal Lidderdale, 6 September 1946.
56 To PF, 30 May 1947.
57 Cheryl Bove, ‘America and Americans in Iris Murdoch’s Novels', in R. Todd (ed.), Encounters with Iris Murdoch (Amsterdam, 1988), pp.69–78, a paper to which IM responded, ‘I love America …'.
58 A Fairly Honourable Defeat and Nuns and Soldiers.
59 For example Henry in Henry and Cato, or Christian in The Black Prince.
60 Two letters to Harry Weinberger, 2 May 1978 and 26 March 1984.
61 J: 19 November 1989.
62 Letter to RQ 20 July 1948.
63 Undated letter to PF, but before September 1947.
64 Both Jancar and Kenneth Robinson thought IM in this decade torn between ancient CP sympathies and Anglo-Catholicism, though Robinson is unaware of the latter.
65 15 September 1946.
66 His letters are mentioned in Dame Magdalen Mary’s day-books first in 1946, again in 1947, and several times in 1948. He wrote in 1946, probably to ask for the nuns’ prayers, and Dame Magdalen Mary’s warm personality led to a continuance of the correspondence.
67 Lois MacKinnon, LTA, 24 September 1999.
68 Around 1980.
69 Not always at the same house: they rented more than one.
70 Sybil Livingston, LTA. Sybil herself does not recall this.
71 J: 10 June 1985.
72 Thus IM wrote to her second cousin Max Wright, ex-Brethren, in 1990.
73 Sybil Livingston dates this possibly to before the war, which Margaret Lintott finds inconceivable: when Margaret left Badminton, a year before IM did, IM was non-religious. If the episode was indeed in 1938–39, then James Scott’s influence may lie behind it – he was in the process of moving towards Catholicism. Margaret Stanier’s story of IM knocking on the door of St Aloysius in 1938–39 and finding it closed also suggests a mind not entirely closed to religion.
74 Undated, but from 1940.
75 CWA, from a conference on Literature and Theology at Durham University, autumn 1984.
76 Letters 9 January 1998, 18 February 1999.
77 EM, p.153.
78 J: 5 April 1947.
79 September 1946.
80 As her 11 November 1945 letter to DH makes plain.
81 Undated but probably 05–20 October 1946.
82 Undated letter to Paddy O’Regan, probably summer 1940.
83 Undated, but probably January 1947.
84 To RQ, 7 August 1946.
85 To DH, 16 September 1946.
86 To PF. It is cold and end of term, so either December 1946 or March 1947.
87 To DH, September 1946.
88 Unpublished interview with RW, 17 July 1991.
89 Postcard in album dated 18 February 1947.
90 Evidence: correspondence with RQ
91 She told DM that RQ – ‘the bloody fool’ – had given her a small scar when opening the boot of his car to insert her luggage and colliding the boot and her forehead.
92 Letter to DM, June 1964, in which she claimed not to know Soho striptease, though LP had taken her, at her request, to one ‘joint’ C1946. Probably she had forgotten this when she wrote in 1964.
93 Letter to DM, June 1964.
94 (1922–1994). Also actor, composer, singer, painter.
95 Jonathan Cecil, CWA.
96 JB, CWA.
97 J: 23 September 1947.
98 Although their reading knowledge was good, Lois taught Heinz Cassirer and Friedrich Waissman spoken English.
99 J: 28 February 1947.
100 See, for example, his strange observations in ‘Moral Objections', from Objections to Christian Belief (London, 1963), introduction by A.R. Vidier, on the ‘woman of affairs who eggs on a tired middle-aged husband to rejuvenate himself by sexual adventure', pp.11–34.
101 Lois MacKinnon, LTA.
102 Mark, xvi, 9.
103 Letter to DH, November 1945.
104 To Vera Crane.
105 In ‘Intercommunion: A Comment', collected in Donald MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars (London, 1969), he makes clear his move away from the Anglo-Catholicism that marked him in the 1930s.
106 Interview in Ziegler and Bigsby (eds), The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition, op. cit.
107 The Sandcastle, p.77.
108 15 April 1947.
109 6 May 1947.
110 Donald MacKinnon to PF, 30 December 1948.
111 J: 12 June 1947. IM also used the identical phrase to PF: see p.269.
112 J: 15 August 1947.
113 J: 15 April 1947.
114 IM to PF, C13 September 1947.
115 J: 31 July 1947; also undated letter to PF.
116 To PF, August 1947.
117 E.P. Thompson had stayed in the Balkans with his future wife Dorothy Sale, helping the Yugoslavs build the Samac-Sarajevo railway.
118 J: 13 August 1947 mentions the Bledlow visit. Evidence for disapproval: Dorothy Thompson’s reminiscence. Theo, a ‘Daughter of the American Revolution', was socially ambitious for her sons, and hoped they would marry ‘up'. Dorothy says she was, towards her, like the mother-in-law in The Sovereignty of Good.
119 Major Frank Thompson, Bulgarian television, 1977. The inspiration for the ceremony came from Robert Conquest, press attaché to the Allied Control Commission in Bulgaria, 1944–47.
120 A J reference of IM’s states that the volume of Catullus from which she has quoted bears FT’s name.
121 J suggests 4–8 October as the date of her arrival in Cambridge.
122 IM’s copy, in French, of Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots bears the publication date 1949.
123 For a discussion of this indebtedness see Peter J. Conradi, The Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (third edition, London, 2001).
124 23 September 1951.
125 Simone Weil, Intuitions Pré-Chrétiennes (Paris, 1951), p.21.