Peter Conradi - Iris Murdoch - A Life - The Authorized Biography

‘The child is innocent, the man is not,’ an Iris character was to proclaim. 38Did Iris idealise Froebel? Miriam Allott thinks this possible, since her own memories of Miss Bain are of a figure less than ‘magisterial’ (Iris’s word). ‘Innocence’ among the children was probably not as widespread as Iris recorded in 1992. Allott recalls that there was competitiveness among the squires and knights when jockeying for their dames and ladies, and some pronounced pre-adolescent passion, occasionally even some odd and tentative, if innocuous, pre-sexual behaviour. Allott thinks Froebel’s insistence on script writing for everyday use, which Iris admired, led to difficulties when pupils began ‘joined-up’ fast writing, which often descended into a scrawl. ‘[Iris’s] own grown-up handwriting was appalling [a judgement at which others demur] and so generally was mine.’

What was the reason for the winter and summer games, the medieval and the Native American Indian? Presumably they were thought of as inculcating a certain spiritual and moral nobility, and respect for the shared nobility of different cultures. Might the general system reflected in the ‘Knights and Ladies’ game have unwittingly encouraged a certain kind of moral snobbery – and possibly on reflection some social distinctions too? 39Titles came into Iris’s life, she remarked, easily and early.

The rituals associated with being Knighted and Lady-ed (kneeling before the King, accolades, the violets &tc), together with the accompanying kudos and sense of being somehow specially endowed with grace, have something in common with less edifying aspects of the Honours system … It was never clear whether the elevations were based on being clever and good, or being somehow ‘elect’, and if so, how determined and by whom?

Both Allott and Iris are reminiscing ‘through’ the Second World War. One exercise touches Allott deeply to remember. Selected children were invited to come to the front of the form and speak about how they would like things to turn out in life, what they would like to do when they grew up, what they planned for themselves, and what they would like to achieve. Edward Meyer, small, fair-haired, the son of a doctor or dentist, perhaps partly central European, stood at the front and gestured to indicate some kind of physical activity – travel, or was it sport? Whatever it was he wished to do with his life, he had little more than ten years ahead of him. He was to be killed in the war, like the red-haired and freckled John Clements.

Barbara Denny wept copiously when she had to leave Froebel for Putney High School in 1934. Miriam Allott also ‘grieved’ to have to leave, in her case for Egypt in the spring of 1932. She missed the bizarre pageant of Froebel life, bright days in Kensington Gardens, Peter Pan and the Serpentine, so wretchedly that she wrote to Miss Bain. Miss Bain replied kindly and conventionally, but ‘happened by’ Cairo later with Miss Armitage, a friend of Miriam’s mother, and tried to cheer her up on the tram between Heliopolis and Cairo. And Iris? ‘Dame is such a nice concept, so old-fashioned and romantic,’ she commented after becoming DBE in 1987. ‘Knights and Ladies’ casts a fresh light on The Unicorn and The Green Knight, on her taste for Gothic, her explorations of courtly love, her invention of a fictional universe simultaneously contemporary and yet mythical and timeless, where the young wear ‘tunics and tabards’ and the boys have a ‘raffish Renaissance look’. 40

Around 1933 it seems there was a palace coup at Froebel. Miss Bain left, and since Mr Dane, Miss Bosley and Miss Short left too, parental protest or controversy were probably involved. The touchingly absurd, idealistic school ethos was conscripted into the humdrum twentieth century. When Quaker Miss Barbara Priestman became headmistress in 1934, ‘Knights and Ladies’ (too martial?) was replaced by ‘Guilds’, more appropriate for the socially engaged 1930s, but less enthusiastically received by the children. After wartime evacuation in Buckinghamshire, the Demonstration School moved to its current position in Roehampton; and soon the buildings in Colet Gardens were taken over by the Royal Ballet School and extensively altered. In the hall where the strange concentric prayer-meetings had been held, young girls in tutus now exercised.

Iris once told her friend from Somerville College, Oxford, Vera Hoar that she had been ‘brought up on love’. ‘She was a denizen of no mean city,’ says Crane. If Froebel was not entirely idyllic, how was life at home in Eastbourne Road? Because Iris was an only child, of very loving parents, and she a loving child, they got on together as if they were all equals.

Iris’s grandmother Louisa once asked Rene whether Iris was going to have any children: ‘I jolly well hope NOT!’ Rene at once returned vehemently, to her mother-in-law’s surprise. 41This exchange, long before Louisa Murdoch’s death in 1947, may be taken as evidence for John Bayley’s theory that Iris’s birth had been a traumatic experience. Rene had been only nineteen, it was a difficult birth, and Rene decided that ‘she wasn’t going to go through that again’, which is why Iris never had a real as opposed to imaginary little brother. Some, John Bayley among them, think that Hughes and Rene’s marriage was a mariage blanc, with abstinence the normal form of contraception, a view Billy Lee, widower of Iris’s quasi-cousin Eva Robinson, *did not find implausible. Perhaps this was not uncommon at the time, despite Marie Stopes, and despite Hughes’s having married Rene in haste when she was pregnant.

If so, various things follow. When The Green Knight came out in 1993 Iris remarked that she might well, like Lucas in that book, have felt murderous towards a real sibling. She would have had to sacrifice herself to a younger brother who, being male, would seriously have embarrassed her education by taking priority. Her father was then a junior civil servant, earning very little. Rene had no money, there was a mortgage and Hughes, determined to give Iris a good education, borrowed from the bank to do so. John Bayley’s hypothesis helps throw light elsewhere. When in The Sea, The Sea Iris has her hero-narrator boast about not being highly sexed, she pointedly subverts contemporary pieties. We do not wish to imagine a hero as less than highly sexed, or a happy marriage as less than ‘fully’ sexual. It does not accord with these pieties, either, to imagine that Rene’s happiness in her self and her body, clear in photographs and reminiscence alike, could have been wholly unrelated to the marriage bed, as the hypothesis would require.

Iris’s adult philosophy, both written and lived, was to give to non-sexual love an absolutely central place. She advocated what she once called to her friend Brigid Brophy ‘a sufficiently diffused eroticism’. It is a striking feature of her fictional universe, too, that love and sexual emotion are ubiquitous and ill-distinguished. Yet chaste love, for her as for Plato, is the highest form of love. A family in which sexual love is sublimated might be one in which – ideally – the currents of love flow even more strongly towards the child, and awaken what Wordsworth termed ‘a co-respondent breeze’. Sublimated love, Bayley remarked, resembles Shakespeare’s mercy, ‘It blesses him that gives, and him that takes’, and was Iris’s natural state. How might this connect with the fact that the adult Iris frequently fell in love with men considerably older than herself? A father adept at sublimating all such impulses — Iris’s cousin Sybil, for example, could not recall Hughes cross, or even imagine it easily – could be, as Hughes was, a source of ‘anxieties’, 42as well as of reverential love. Anxiety and reverence could indeed be two faces of the same emotion. Iris was to comment on this obliquely, and transmuted into high art, in The Black Prince.