Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography

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.41 This 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’,42 as 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.

8

The bond between Iris and Hughes was very great. He played both father and, to some degree, mother. It was said to be Hughes who bought her elaborate school outfits at Bourne & Hollingsworth on Oxford Street, when she went away to Badminton in 1932, and he shared the task of taking her to Froebel in the mornings. Redeeming himself after his schooldays, it was he who often did the laundry. Rene was no more a housekeeper than Iris turned out to be. She was ‘not a housekeeper at all’, much to grandmother Louisa’s distress. Louisa was certainly, says Sybil, horrified that her son should have to do so many of the things women were then expected to do. Cleaver, more directly, says that Aunt Ella thought of Rene as having ‘sluttish ways’, a wife who could not even cook for her husband or keep a tidy house. Sybil also remembers Hughes doing the gardening, housekeeping, laundry, much of the shopping and organising, for example, the travel arrangements for the annual Irish trip. He cooked and washed up while Rene sat back and looked pretty. No one did much cleaning. Once Cleaver was staying in Chiswick and he and Hughes came in late. ‘Have you had anything to eat?’ asked Rene, and on learning that they had not, went off to the kitchen to cook, ‘with an expression on her face’ at having to do so. Bayley takes another view. The Belfast ethos, from which Hughes was in lifelong flight, militated against Rene’s domestic virtues being fairly appraised.43 He remembers Irene cooking and washing up, smoking a cigarette, and believes she was competent without being house-proud, taking her housekeeping duties lightly. Cleaver does not recall Chiswick being very untidy. There was no home-help, no car, and no wine at home: the family could not afford it.

Hughes is remembered by John Bayley as asking either Rene or Iris or both, in his mild Ulster brogue, ‘Have you no sense at all, woman?’ The question was good-humoured and rhetorical, and there is a danger of making Hughes sound like Nora’s husband Torvald in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. A biographer wishing to fuel such a comparison would make much of the only facial expression of her father’s Iris recorded, a look of ‘impatient nervous irritation’ which she feared she inherited;44 and of Rene’s lost singing career, a loss that probably caused Iris more grief than it did easy-going Irene. Hughes did ‘baby’ Rene, who would simply say sweetly in her Dublin brogue, ‘If that makes him happy … There’s no point in fighting over a thing like that'; ‘Well, if he wants to do that, let him get on with it.’ Rene got her hair seen to, sang in a choir, joined a swimming club (a photo of young Iris and Irene there survives), played bridge.45 There was a piano at Eastbourne Road. When Hughes died in 1958 the family were very concerned about how Rene would cope. But, as the Belfast cousins wryly put it, ‘it’s wonderful what you can do when you’ve got to’.46 She turned out to be perfectly well able to look after herself, until old age and illness supervened.

Unlike Nora and Torvald, Rene and Hughes were clearly extremely happy together. Rene increasingly saw herself as a ‘duckling that had hatched a swan’ – she didn’t know what Iris was doing, quite, but was all in favour of it anyway.47 Cleaver remembers Rene’s physical and inner beauty alike: ‘welcoming, cheerful, charming … lovely’. She was very pretty and good fun, with a happy temperament, vivacious, often laughing or smiling, a jolly and welcoming and open-hearted person. In early photographs Irene is dark-haired. Later on she dyed it blonde. Once, when Louisa, Irene and Sybil were waiting for a bus, coming home from shopping, both Louisa and Irene burdened with parcels, a gallant young man sprang to Irene’s rescue, taking her parcels for her. Poor elderly Louisa had to fend for herself. ‘Now you see what blonde hair can do for you,’ Irene quipped: if capable of being a vamp, she could also be witty.

Hughes, formal, dignified, interested in everything that was going on in the world, was more serious than Irene but seemed contented, at peace with himself. Elias Canetti would later recall him as ‘thoughtful, tremendously engaging’.48 One of his fingernails was broken and grew in a horny, claw-like shape, in evidence when he counted his cigarettes. Probably he had injured it during the war. He would speak of the long Tube journey into work, where, at a later period, he was known as ‘Old Murdoch’,49 seeming self-contained to the point of isolation, an ‘odd bird’ working on the census with a personal grade of Assistant Registrar General at Somerset House in 1950 when he retired. He did not light any fires, but worked quietly, unassumingly, ably, treating everyone with great courtesy.50 He had a sense of humour, told jokes against himself.51

9

Summer holidays were usually spent in Ireland, ‘a very romantic land, a land I always wanted to get to … and discover’.52 Iris had seven first cousins, three in Ulster, four in Dublin, and doubtless sometimes felt, like Andrew in The Red and the Green, that these Irish cousins

served [her] in those long hated and yet loved holidays of childhood as sibling-substitutes, temporary trial brothers and sisters, for whom [her] uncertain affection took the form of an irritated rivalry. [She] felt [herself] indubitably superior to this heterogeneous, and, it seemed … uncultivated and provincial gang of young persons, always noisier, gayer and more athletic than [herself].53

They disembarked from the Holyhead boat-train in Dun Laoghaire harbour, and a two-minute walk got them to Mellifont Avenue, where at number 16 was the nursing home run and owned by Mrs Walton, Belfast-born foster-mother to Iris’s cousin Eva Robinson, seven years Iris’s senior, and closer to her than Rene’s sister Gertie’s four sons. Eva, who had polio as a child and wore a leg-brace, was protective and kind to the younger Iris. Mrs Walton’s new address at Mellifont Avenue – she had previously had a stationery shop – was convenient, too, for the salt-water baths at the end of the road, where they all swam. Eva and Iris shared a love of ‘stories’, and as they sat on the rocks on Dun Laoghaire beach Eva would make up enthralling tales.54 After marriage in 1941 Eva and her husband Billy Lee shared 34 Monkstown Road with Iris’s grandmother Elizabeth Jane ('Bessie') Richardson and Mrs Walton, until the deaths of the two older women in 1941 and 1944 respectively. Iris used Eva as a model in her only published short story, ‘Something Special’.55 Mrs Walton and Eva worshipped at the neighbouring Anglican Mariner’s Church (now closed), and Iris and her parents almost certainly attended Revivalist meetings run by the ‘Crusaders’

there.* After Dublin there would be a longer stay in the North, whose ‘black Protestantism’ Rene did not always look forward to, but met with good grace. Hughes’s sister Sarah and her husband Willy from Belfast rented a different house for one month each summer for themselves and their three children, Cleaver, Muriel and Sybil, in the seaside town of Portrush. There the Murdochs joined them. William Chapman, from a farming community near Lisburn, had gone to the Boer War with the Medical Corps on the strength of knowing a little pharmacy, and won a stripe there. On his return he taught himself dentistry and, though without professional qualification, did very well. When he was about fifty he contracted multiple sclerosis.

Family prayers featured during these holidays. Swimming in the Atlantic breakers off Portstewart strand was one source of fun,56 board games in the evening, which Iris enjoyed if she won, another. (Presumably, since the Chapmans were Brethren, games with ‘court’ playing cards were excluded.) Iris is not recalled as always a good loser, though she could be even-tempered too. On one occasion she was painting, which she loved. After she broke off cousin Sybil thought she would help by tidying up all her paints. When Iris came back to continue, the special colours she had prepared had been cleaned away. She calmly set about mixing similar ones. The Chapmans recall Iris’s goodness, kind-heartedness, strangeness, strong will and shyness. Self-effacing cousin Muriel, to whom Iris was always closest, a closeness later strengthened when Muriel taught in Reigate during the war, protected her. Saying goodbye, Iris would occasionally ‘fill up’ and be tearful: she cried without difficulty. Sybil never saw this emotionalism in Irene, who was far more happy-go-lucky.

Goethe said, in a little rhyme, that from his father, who was from north Germany, he got his gravitas, his sense of reason, order and logic; from his mother, who came from the south, he got his ‘Lust zum fabulieren’, his love of telling tales. Rene adored the cinema, adored reading novels, liked stories, had the sense of a story. Perhaps Iris distantly echoes Goethe’s mixed inheritance. She had been writing since she was at least nine. An early confident talent for turning life into narrative drama shows in a letter written to a friend from 15 Mellifont Avenue, Dun Laoghaire, on 29 August 1934, when Iris was fifteen.57 It is prefaced by a drawing of two mackintoshed girls walking in the Dublin rain.

Hello! A grey and relentless sky has been pouring rain on us for the last week, and the sun has forgotten how to shine … Great excitement here! Last Sunday week night (that sounds queer) a terrible storm got up, and on Monday morning about 8 a.m. the first maroon went for the lifeboat. I was in the bathroom at the time. I never got washed so quick as I did then. I was dressed & doing my hair when the second maroon went. Then I flew out of the house. Doors were banging all the way down the street, and the entire population of Dun Laoghaire seemed to be running to the harbour. Doodle (Daddy) & my cousin [Eva Robinson] had already left … The lifeboat was in the harbour mouth when I arrived. I asked a man what was up. A yacht had evidently broken its moorings and drifted out of the harbour or something, anyway we could just see it on the horizon. A high sea was running and I was glad to have my mackintosh with me. I dashed down the pier – which by the way is a mile long – and was drenched by the spray and the waves breaking over the pier. The sand whipped up by the wind, drove in clouds and I got some in my eye, which hurt like anything. The lifeboat had an awful job, it was pitching and tossing, and once we thought it was going down but it got to the yacht, which turned out to be empty, and towed it back amid the enthusiastic cheers of the populace. Three other yachts broke their moorings in the harbour, of these, two went down, and the other was saved and towed to calmer waters just as it was dashing itself to pieces against the pier. That was a great thrill. The next excitement was a huge German liner – three times as big as the mailboat – that anchored in the bay …

On the mail-boat to Dublin in summer 1936, the Hammond and Murdoch families met. Annie Hammond had been witness at Rene and Hughes’s wedding, and her son Richard asked the seventeen-year-old Iris what she wished to do in life. ‘Write,’ she replied.58

* Miriam Allott’s Squire was Garth Underwood, whose sculptor-father Leon provided inspiration for A.P. Herbert in The Water-Gypsies (1930). His names being Garth Lionel, his emblem was a golden lion rampant cut out of a yellow duster, with an embroidered flame issuing from its mouth. Miriam’s Egyptian maiden name, Farris, meant ‘knight’, so surrounding the lion they had two silver knight’s spurs made from balloon cloth, plus seven stars, for ‘Miriam’ (= Mary). They were known as the household of the Silver Knight and the Golden Lion.

* ‘Thereafter all the Court all joined with merriment in the strange game of “Ye Knight he chased ye dragon up ye hickoree tree!” Truly terrible was the advance of the nobel Baron Dane …’ etc., etc. Account of the final Knights and Ladies, Old Froebelians’ News Letter, 1934, pp.3–4.

† Miriam Allott, however, is sure that the wooden sword was at Miss Bain’s belt, and that when jousting it was either wooden swords for all, or rolled-up paper for all.

* ‘Laughing I bear the boar’s head in to the Lord of Praise.’

* Iris invited Allott, if she ever had time, to visit Rene in Barons Court; partly, Allott now (2001) believes, to get straight her understanding of the Murdoch family.

* Eva Robinson (later, Lee) was always close to Iris, while her exact relationship remained unclear. A 1984 letter from Eva to Iris suggests that Eva believed her mother to be sister to Iris’s grandmother Bessie (Elizabeth Jane), making her first cousin to Rene, and first cousin once removed to Iris. She possessed a birth certificate showing that the woman she referred to as ‘Mummie’, who had died in 1912 when Eva was born, was one Annie Nolan, child to Anna Kidd and William Nolan. Recently discovered evidence suggests that this Annie Nolan was one and the same as Annie Walton, who always presented Eva publicly as her foster-daughter. Annie Nolan, a nurse living at 59 Blessington Street, married the saddler George Henry Walton on 19 February 1919, when her ‘foster’ daughter Eva would have been about seven years old. The Murdochs thus had every reason in their own terms to regard the Richardsons – and hence Irene – with some distaste: no fewer than three Richardson marriages between December 1918 and February 1919 seem to have legitimised irregular unions. The capacity of ‘nice’ Irish families to air-brush the past should not be underestimated. Billy Lee, whom Eva married in 1941, believed her father to have been a prosperous Colonel Berry, from a big house near Newcastle in County Down, who looked after Eva’s finances.

* Before the war, and for a time at least after it, the Crusaders were ‘an organisation designed to attract middle – and upper-class children – boys chiefly, I fancy – to evangelical Christianity. There was a badge, possibly some minimal uniforms relating to those of crusading orders, and meetings combined Bible study and religious instruction with activities of a more Boy Scout-ish kind’ (Dennis Nineham, letter to author). Chapter 4 of The Red and the Green starts with such a meeting, and Iris’s journals abound in memories of hymns, some evangelical.

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