Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography

Iris’s willingness to mythologise her own origins, and to lament a long-lost demesne (in her case, a real ancestry), both mark her out as a kinswoman of Yeats.* The ‘Butler’ appended to the Yeats family name proposed a not entirely fictitious connexion to that grandest of clans, the Anglo-Irish Dukes of Ormonde. Family pride runs through much of Iris’s rhetoric about her background, both in interviews and also in Chapter 2 of The Red and the Green, with its authorial identification with the old Protestant ruling order, as well as its claim for that order to speak for the whole of Ireland, Catholic and Protestant alike.

The relation between Iris and her cousins was complex. Another Richardson relative she claimed77 – on no known evidence – who had presumably not suffered from the general Richardson decline, was a Major-General Alexander Arthur Richardson, serving with the Royal Ulster Rifles in the Second World War. The Belfast family phrase ‘the Ladies’ bathing-place’ amused Iris. So did the Belfast cousins calling a ‘slop-basin’ – for tea-slops – a ‘refuse-vase’, which the Murdochs considered a genteelism.78 If Iris’s family found the Belfast cousinry genteel, Belfast cousin Sybil Livingston conversely thought the cigarette-holder Iris sported for a while ‘posh'; and she was amazed in 1998 to learn that Rene had a sister of any kind, let alone one with four sons, giving Iris first cousins in Dublin as well as Belfast. ‘You are my only family,’ Sybil recalls Iris saying – mysteriously as it might appear: perhaps there was a remarkable depth of reserve on both sides.79 Sybil around 1930 had passed on to her a ‘wonderful’ party frock of Iris’s, pale blue satin, with a braid of little pink and blue and white rosebuds sewn round the neck and sleeves. For Iris, a much-loved only child, as for Elizabeth Bowen, Ireland represented company.

Iris believed that, after her birth in Dublin, her parents lived with her there for one or two years,80 until the inauguration of the Irish Free State at the very end of 1921. These supposed years in Dublin, often mentioned in interviews – again, like Elizabeth Bowen – confirmed her Irish identity. Around 1921 all Irish civil servants were offered the choice of moving to Belfast or London. It is easy to see why, in the political turmoil of those years, with the Troubles, the introduction of martial law, and then the civil war looming, Hughes, who was after all not merely a Protestant and an Ulsterman but also an ex-officer, might have opted for London, a city he had known on and off since 1906. Iris said he came to England to find his fortune81 but saw this as a radical move, a kind of exile. In fact, if Iris as a baby spent even as much as one year in Dublin, it was only with her mother. On Iris’s birth certificate Hughes gives 51 Summerlands Avenue, Acton, London W3 as his address, and his civil service position was second division clerk in the National Health Insurance Committee, working in Buckingham Gate, London (apart from his three years’ active service) from 15 June 1914 until 24 November 1919, when he joined the Ministry of Health. Cards from fellow-conscripts during the war give his working address as ‘Printing, Insurance Commission, Buckingham Gate, London, S.W.’. The move to London – in reaction against the madnesses of Ulster in 1914, just as much as against those of Dublin in 1921 – had already begun. Presumably Iris was born in Dublin because Rene could rely there on kin and womenfolk to help with the birth. And perhaps Rene and Iris had to wait for Hughes to find the flat in Brook Green where they first all lived together.

Honor Tracy was certainly right that the value to Iris of her Irishness was great: ‘… my Irishness is Anglo-Irishness in a very strict sense … People sometimes say to me rudely, “Oh! You’re not Irish at all!” But of course I’m Irish. I’m profoundly Irish and I’ve been conscious of this all my life, and in a mode of being Irish which has produced a lot of very distinguished thinkers and writers’82 – Bowen, Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde, Goldsmith and Yeats all epitomised Irish modes of expression while living in England and ‘regretting Ireland’.83 The term ‘Anglo-Irish’ is less unhelpful if it means, as Arthur Green argued and the OED allows, some broad confluence of English, Irish and indeed Scots-Irish – a product, in fact, of both islands. It is from this point of view interesting that Iris believed she had Catholic Irish connexions,84 as well as Quaker, Church of Ireland and Presbyterian ones. The pattern of English life, she wrote in 1963, can be dull, making little appeal to the imagination.85 Ireland, by contrast, was romantic. Moreover she identified, until 1968, with Ireland-as-underdog.86 England had destroyed Ireland, one of her characters argued in The Red and the Green, ‘slowly and casually, without malice, without mercy, practically without thought, like someone who treads upon an insect, forgets it, then sees it quivering and treads upon it a second time’.87

Iris’s Irish identification was more than romanticism. Her family, Irish on both sides for three hundred years, never assimilated into English life, staying a small enclosed unit on its own, never gaining many – if any – English friends. When Hughes died in 1958, having lived for forty-five of his almost sixty-eight years in England, there were only, to Rene’s distress, six people at the funeral: Iris and John, Rene, cousin Sybil’s husband Reggie, Hughes’s solicitor, and a single kindly neighbour, Mr Cohen, who owned the ‘semi’ with which the Murdoch house was twinned. Not one civil service mourner materialised. And quite as surprising is that no friends or associates of Rene were there. Iris’s first act that year of bereavement was to take Rene and John to Dublin, to find a suitable house for Rene to move back to. The following year Rene took Iris and John to see Drum Manor. There was a dilapidated gatehouse, and some sense of a gloomy and run-down demesne.88 Rene and Iris were reverential.

As Roy Foster has shown, the cult in Ireland of a lost house was a central component of that ‘Protestant Magic’ that both Yeats and Elizabeth Bowen shared:89 Irish Protestantism, Foster argues, even in its non-Ulster mode, is a social and cultural identity as much as a religious one. Some of its elements – a preoccupation with good manners together with a love of drama and occasional flamboyant emotionalism, a superstitious bent towards occultism and magic,* an inability to grow up, an obsession with the hauntings of history and a disturbed love-hate relation with Ireland itself – can be found in Iris as in Bowen and Yeats. Bowen’s Protestant Irishness made of her a ‘naturally separated person': so did Iris’s. Yeats, coming from ‘an insecure middle-class with a race memory of elitism’,90 conquered the inhabitants of great houses such as Coole Park through unique ‘charm and the social power of art’,91 rather as Iris later visited Clandeboye and Bowen’s Court. Both Yeats and Iris elevated themselves socially ‘by a sort of moral effort and a historical sleight-of-hand’.92 Each was, differently, an audacious fabulator, in life as in art.

In the confusion of her latter years when much was to be forgotten, the words ‘Irish’ and ‘Ireland’ were unfailing reminders of Iris’s own otherness. Both struck deep chords, and she would perk up and show particular interest. In Provence in June 1997 she remarked emphatically, ‘I’m nothing if not Irish.’ The following winter, sitting at the small deal kitchen table after a bracing walk on the Radnorshire hills, she disconcerted her hearers by asking, ‘Who am I?’, to which she almost at once soothed herself by musing, ‘Well I’m Irish anyway, that’s something.’ A lifetime’s investment in Irishness, visible in every decade of her life, was then, as it had always been, a source of reassurance, a reference-point, a credential, somewhere to start out from and return to.

10

Iris’s early memories were of swimming, singing and being sung to, of animals, and of wonderment at the workings of the adult world. She sat at the age of about seven under the table while her parents played bridge – either reading a favourite childhood book or, as she put it, ‘simply sitting in quietness’93 and listening in astonishment to the altercations and mutual reproaches of the adults at the end of each rubber. Wonderment, imaginative identification with a fantastic range of creature-kind, capacity to feel strong emotions, secretiveness, and also Irishness: these are recurrent and related themes within her story.

Early photographs show her a blonde, plump, exceedingly pretty baby, flirting in a straw Kate Greenaway bonnet with her mother, and even more with her photographer-father, in Dalkey in August 1921. If the family was by then already based in London, neither this nor the Black and Tans, who had that year raided ‘rebel’ houses in Blessington Street itself,94 prevented the annual Irish summer holiday. The truce of 11 July that year would have offered holidaymakers, among others, reassurance.

Hughes, Rene and baby Iris lived first of all in a flat at 12 Caithness Road, Brook Green, Hammersmith. Hughes was fairly low down on the civil service ladder but had a permanent position as a second class clerk in the Ministry of Health, a ministry he was to stay at until 1942. He kept a pocketbook in which he noted the day’s expenditures, no matter how minor.95 This same meticulousness shows itself in the young Iris’s carefully managed stamp collection. She tucked away in the back both a small ‘duplicate book’, in case of losses, and an envelope marked emphatically ‘valuable stamps: King Edward’, referring, of course, to stamps pertaining to the short reign of Edward VIII.

What exactly constitutes a ‘first’ memory? Surely later imaginative significance as much as strict chronological primacy. Iris gave as her ‘first’ memory not ‘My mother flying up above me like a white bird’,96 but herself swimming in the salt-water baths near Dun Laoghaire when she was three or four years old.97 Her father got quickly to the further side, where he sat and called out encouragement. In 1997 she could still enact the excitement, fear, sense of challenge, and deep love entailed in her infant efforts slowly to swim to the other side and regain her father’s protection – a powerful enough proto-image in itself of her continuing life-quest for the authority of the Father. Another version has Hughes first of all persuading her to jump in, and into his arms.

Swimming was the secret family religion. It is not merely that Hughes liked to swim in the Forty-Foot: swimming is mentioned on postcard after postcard, in letter after letter, from and to Iris over many decades, and the word order of one particular card from Sandycove, Dun Laoghaire, from her mother to Iris makes clear which activity carried the greater weight: ‘Had a bathe this morning – after church.”98 Churchgoing is likely to have occurred mainly because Rene was still singing in the choir.

In her journals Iris would recollect, especially latterly, many songs her mother taught her. In January 1990 she records:

Recalling Rene. A prayer she must have taught me when

I was a small child. I remember it as phrased –

Jesus teacher: shepherd hear me:

bless thy little: lamb tonight:

in the darkness: be thou near me:

keep me safe till: morning light.

She must have taught it to me word for word as soon as I could talk.99”

Rene also sang to Iris ‘Tell me the old, old story of Jesus and His Love’. But who exactly was Jesus’s love? The infant Iris, misconstruing this sentence as small children are apt to, used to wonder …

Grown-up Iris knew the words of the combative ‘Old Orange Flute’, probably from her father, who could also recite Percy French’s ‘Abdul the Bulbul Ameer’. Rene sang, as well as works such as Handel’s Messiah in a choir, light ballads, French’s among others. Percy French songs suggest the comfortable synthetic Irishness Tracy later made fun of in her books. Rene took pride, too, in singing Nationalist or ‘rebel’ songs:

Here’s to De Valera,

The hero of the right,

We’ll follow him to battle,

With orange green and white.

We’ll fight against old England

And we’ll give her hell’s delight.

And we’ll make De Valera King of Ireland.

After the shootings that followed the Easter Rising, when Rene was seventeen, some Protestant Richardsons were pro-independence;100 Rene was pro-Michael Collins and against De Valera in 1922, when the two found themselves on opposing sides in the civil war. She took delight, when she learnt it later, in the song ‘Johnson’s Motor-Car’. The Nationalist ‘rebels’ borrow Constable Johnson’s car for urgent use, and promise to return it in this fashion:

We’ll give you a receipt for it, all signed by Captain Barr.

And when Ireland gets her freedom, boy, ye’ll get your motor-car.

Grandma Louisa, after a visit to London in the twenties, would often recount Iris sitting on the pavement and weeping inconsolably about a dog which had been hit by a car. Iris was to give the death of a pet dog as a first memory, and first trauma, to characters in successive books.* The dog might have been hers: a photograph of Hughes with a mongrel (possibly containing some smooth-haired terrier) survives, and a smaller third hand must belong to the child Iris, otherwise wholly hidden behind the animal. Another shows Iris proudly stroking the same beast on her own.

There were cats also, Tabby and Danny-Boy. Danny-Boy uttered memorable growling noises on sighting birds from the windowsill. Seventy years later Iris recalled her father wishing the cats goodnight before putting out the lights.101 They attracted friends: Cousin Cleaver recalls Hughes putting out fish and chicken for the neighbourhood strays.102 There seems never to have been a time when Iris was not capable of identifying with and being moved by the predicament of animals – dogs especially. When the Mail on Sunday invited her in 1996 to contribute to a series on ‘My First Love’,103 her husband John, writing on her behalf, told of her first falling in love as a small girl with a slug. It is not wholly implausible. Cousin Sybil remembers Iris and Hughes carefully collecting slugs from the garden, and then tipping them gently onto waste land beyond. In the autumn of 1963, seeing John’s colleague John Buxton look sadly at his old dog Sammy during dinner, Iris was moved to tears and could hardly stop weeping. The dog died a few weeks later.

‘The strict faith of the Plymouth Brethren appealed to many mid-nineteenth-century Irish Protestant families, including that of Parnell.’ Roy Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage (Oxford, 1997), p-543, n12.

† Told in Gath (Belfast, 1990), reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, 21 June 1991, p.10, ‘A Peculiar People’ by Pat Raine, and by Patricia Beer in the London Review of Books, 23 May 1991, p.12. Iris and Wright met only once, when she received her honorary doctorate at Queen’s University in 1977, although they corresponded thereafter.

Probably his cousins Isabella and Annie Jane, always known as Daisy and Lillie, daughters of Thomas Hughes Murdoch.

Elias married Charlotte Isabella Neale, a Quaker. His sister Sarah married firstly Charles Neale, who was Charlotte’s brother and also a Quaker. One child of this marriage, Mariette Neale, an active Quaker, was step-aunt to Reggie Livingston, also a Quaker, who married Iris’s first cousin Sybil.

† Quakers figure in An Accidental Man, A Word Child, Henry and Cato, The Message to the Planet, The Philosopher’s Pupil and Jackson’s Dilemma. See Arthur Green, ‘The Worlds of Iris Murdoch', Iris Murdoch Newsletter, no. 10, 1996.

Nor did Rene’s mother, Elizabeth Jane Richardson, witness the marriage. Dean’s Grange Cemetery shows that she died, aged seventy-five, on 10 February 1941 at 34 Monkstown Road, where she was living, together with Mrs Walton, with the newly-wed Eva and Billy Lee. The two witnesses are Rene’s sister Gertie and one ‘Annie Hammond’, whose son Richard Frederick Hammond went, often hand-in-hand, to primary school with Rene. Annie Hammond (née Gould) worked as housekeeper first to her husband’s brother Harry Hammond, later to Dr Bobby Jackson of Merrion Square. (Letter from R.F. Hammond’s son Rae Hammond to Iris Murdoch, 4 February 1987.)

See Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (London, 1993), Chapter 11, ‘Protestant Magic’, pp.215ff. The Richardson version of the ‘Butler’ worn by Yeats may be the frequently recurring middle name of ‘Lindsay’, associating them with the Earls of that name. The Australian Dictionary of National Biography, under ‘Richardson (Henry Handel) ‘, notes that Richardsons claimed descent from the Earls of Lindesay. O’Hart gives four different Lindesay Richardsons among IM’s immediate ancestors.

* For Iris Murdoch’s interest in these matters see pp. 277, 451, 525–6.

* Eugene in The Time of the Angels; Willy in The Nice and the Good.

2 No Mean City 1925—1932

Happy childhoods are rare. Iris was both a happy and a ‘docile’1 child. She led an idyllic life at home. When she wrote about her pre-war life, especially at her two intensely high-minded and eccentric schools, all was, despite a rocky start at the second, golden, grateful and rhapsodic, a cross between late Henry James and Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. These reminiscences were requested by the schools in question – ‘Why did I agree?’ Iris wrote in vexation.2 Moreover, though three friends had already sent their daughters to Iris’s old school Badminton on the strength of her example,3 when the critic Frank Kermode in 1968 wished to send his daughter there, Iris advised against it: ‘she had not been altogether happy there’. Presumably the tone of her written recollections – decorous, nostalgic, pious, suppressing the uncomfortable – owed something to Iris’s desire to please former mentors. With such provisos, and especially by contrast with what was to come, this period was broadly happy, and she was lucky in both her schooling and her family life. She once said to Philippa Foot, ‘I don’t understand this thing about “two’s company, three’s none". My mother and father and I were always three, and we were always happy.’ She pictured her parents and herself as ‘a perfect trinity of love’.4 They were a self-sufficient family unit, contented to be doing things together.

Hughes was interested in reading and study. He loved secondhand bookshops, frequenting one during his lunch-hour in Southampton Row,5 where classics such as Dickens and Thackeray could be picked up for, say, sixpence.6 He bought first editions of Jane Austen,7 and read Ernst Jünger’s First World War fiction.8 Both her parents loved reading to Iris, and Hughes would discuss the stories they read together. Her ‘earliest absolutely favourite books’ were Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Kim,9 which she had a great feeling of living ‘inside’.10 Treasure Island was the perfect adventure story, and she and Hughes would both enjoy being frightened by Blind Pew’s stick tapping along the road, and the exciting moment when Jim goes up the mast – ‘And another step Mr Hands and I’ll blow your brains out.’ This passage later became part of her and her husband John’s private mythology, with its brilliantly observed detail of the fish or two which ‘whip past’ the shot and drowned Hands.

The childlike, visceral excitements of these works travelled with Iris through adulthood. Intellectual though she was, she never despised the old-fashioned, primitive satisfactions of storytelling. She gave Hands’s surname to a favoured character, Georgie, in A Severed Head. Among the first passages to move her was a quarrel between the swashbuckling Alan Breck and David Balfour, the quiet abducted Lowlander in Stevenson’s Kidnapped,11 and a quarrel between two men later fuelled many of her novels. Kim is cited in Nuns and Soldiers when Gertrude and the ex-nun Anne imagine travelling through life ‘like Kim and the lama’. And in her most difficult and intimate novel, The Black Prince, she gave her semi-autobiographical hero the dying words ‘I wish I’d written Treasure Island.’ ‘Stories are art, too,’ he had earlier explained. Perhaps good writers retain their childlike interest in and wonder at the world. Iris’s Belfast cousins were much struck that Iris, though so intelligent and academic, was simultaneously so simple. When cousin Sybil lost her husband and Iris at the Festival of Britain in 1951, she discovered them riding together on the merry-go-round, en route to see the ‘amazing motor-cyclists’ on the Wall of Death. ‘I do like your Reggie,’ Iris pronounced, with the only child’s unconscious egoism.

When the family came to England, their absolute friendlessness there somehow did not matter, since the three of them were such a ‘tight little entity’. Hughes probably did not introduce his office acquaintance into the family circle. Nor did he and Irene miss social life, Hughes being, like many men of his class and time, a home-body. Yet the compactness and intimacy of this family unit is remarkable. Iris had her own names for her parents, unusual for a child in those inter-war days. ‘Rene’ and ‘Doodle’ was how she normally addressed them – ‘Doodle’ being Iris’s coinage, and perhaps a baby’s mispronunciation of ‘Daddy’.

When Iris created the aptly named (since innocent) ‘Adam’ Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea, it was of her own father that she was thinking.

My father was a quiet bookish man and somehow the gentlest being I have ever encountered. I do not mean he was timid, though I suppose he was timid. He had a positive moral quality of gentleness. I can picture him now so clearly, bending down with his perpetual nervous smile to pick up a spider on a piece of paper and put it carefully out of the window or into some corner where it would not be disturbed. I was his comrade, his reading companion, possibly the only person with whom he ever had a serious conversation … We read the same books and discussed them: children’s books, adventure stories, then novels, history, biography, poetry, Shakespeare. We enjoyed and craved for each other’s company … I remember feeling in later life that no one else ever knew how good my father was.12

Perhaps the family’s Irishness contributed to their self-containment. Landladies, after all, put up notices advertising rooms with the proviso ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ as late as the 1950s. In the 1920s, at the height of the Troubles, when the Murdochs first settled in London, an Irish accent could not have been an asset. Iris’s future mother-in-law Olivia Bayley, née Heenan and half-Irish by descent, was determinedly English, ‘plus royaliste que le roi’. Rene by contrast had a brogue which deepened in some situations. And, as cousin Sybil was to discover on a visit to Birmingham coinciding with the terrible IRA bombings of the 1970s,13 the English are not always skilled in making nice distinctions between varieties of Irish voice and identity.

2

Around Iris’s sixth birthday memorable things started to happen. Rene got her a little wind-up man on a tricycle – ‘I see him so clearly, and her.’14 She went to her first school. And, not long after, the family moved from Brook Green to Chiswick. Hughes must have had an adventurous streak as well as being a homebody, since around 1926 he bought a small, newly built, semidetached gabled house in Chiswick. His annual salary was well under £400 per year, so he took out a mortgage. There was a newly planted chestnut tree outside, and the house, at 4 Eastbourne Road, was tucked away off what was soon to become the Great West Road. The family took walks in the grounds of nearby Chiswick House.

On 15 January 1925, aged five and a half, Iris had entered the Froebel Demonstration School at Colet Gardens, a very good, quite expensive day-school, a fifteen-minute walk across Brook Green from the Caithness Road flat, presumably chosen partly because of proximity. It was the ‘demonstration school’ for Froebel College at Grove House in Roehampton, and had just over a hundred pupils. Iris flourished there. The new house must also have been bought with proximity in mind. Eastbourne Road was five short stops from Froebel on the District Line, close enough to be walkable in summer.