Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography

Hughes and Rene were married in Dublin on 7 December 1918 – a photo shows Hughes in full-dress uniform. Rene’s sister Gertie (later Bell) was a witness. On the wedding certificate Hughes gives his army rank, second lieutenant, under ‘profession’, and his address as ‘Marlborough Barracks’. Jean Iris Murdoch was born on 15 July, St Swithin’s Day, the following year, just over seven months later. The marriage was probably therefore hasty.27 Even in October 1918, when Iris would have been conceived, an early end to the war was not certain. Her character Andrew Chase-White in The Red and the Green, born, like Hughes, in a colony and serving, like Hughes, as a young officer in King Edward’s Horse, feels some pressure from relatives to marry and make his wife pregnant before he has to go to the front and a likely death. Arthur Green’s hypothesis that Hughes might have felt he had a comparable duty to perform before his marriage seems unlikely. Iris was probably a happy accident.

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The extended Murdoch family comes out as a very intelligent, middle-class organism, stuffed with independent minds, a model example of Protestant and British Ireland. One group stems from the Brethren and has strong dental and medical associations; the stepson of one of Iris’s aunts was a Unionist politician, while a second cousin lectured in philosophy at Queen’s University.28 Uncle Elias, a Presbyterian married to a Quaker,* and Harold, a Quaker, ran the two well-known ironmongers’ stores at Dun Laoghaire; another cousin, Brian Murdoch, also a Quaker, became Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin.29 Cousin Sybil also married a Quaker in Reggie Livingston; and some Richardsons are Quakers. There are today a mere 1,500 Quakers in the whole of Ireland, and if the frequency with which Quakerism turns up in Iris’s fiction invites comment,† it is also disproportionately reflected in Irish history, being particularly prominent in famine relief, big business and education.30 If Iris was herself touched by Quakerism’s emphasis on integrity, quietness and peace, its belief in the availability of Inner Light to all, that all are capable of growing in wisdom and understanding, it is as likely to be from her headmistress at Badminton School as from her Irish relations that the influence came.

Rene’s family represents another strain in the history of Protestant middle-class Ireland: Church of Ireland rather than Presbyterian, Dublin-based rather than from Belfast, former ‘plantation squires’ rather than ‘plantation farmers’.31 Not yeoman farmers and merchants like the Murdochs, the Richardsons, a complex and highly inter-related family, began as major land-owners in the seventeenth century and became minor gentry in the eighteenth, when Catholics were debarred from sitting in Parliament and holding government office, as well as suffering many petty restrictions, and Protestants had a virtual monopoly of power and privilege. Thereafter, the family’s status declines. It mattered to Iris that she was grandly descended from Alexander Richardson, ‘planted in Ireland in 1616 to control the wild Irish’,32 as she put it, and living at Crayhalloch in 1619. Readers of An Unofficial Rose will recognise the similar name of the house ‘Grayhallock’, with its links to the wealthy linen merchants of County Tyrone. Alexander Richardson’s family motto ‘Virtuti paret robur‘, is proudly quoted in The Oreen Knight, and translated as either ‘strength obeys virtue’ or ‘virtue overcometh strength’.

In the 1990s an amateur genealogist from Ulster, Arthur Green, wrote up his patient investigations into Iris’s family history. He showed, amongst much else, that she was ‘una bambina di sette mesi’, painted her parents’ marriage – almost certainly accurately – as a hasty register office affair,33 and tried to show that her claims to be descended from the Richardsons of Drum Manor, and her identification with an Anglo-Irish background, were, in his word, ‘romanticism’. He also queried whether her father’s civil service status on his retirement in 1950 was as exalted as she believed. Green, at the suggestion of A.S. Byatt, sent these findings to Iris’s publishers, Chatto & Windus.34 Iris defended her pedigree with (at first) some stiffness, later lamenting that she had not asked more questions of her parents, and so been better-informed. She referred Green to O’Hart’s History of Old Irish Families,35 telling him she had lodged copies of relevant pages with her agent Ed Victor for safekeeping. Both Rene’s father Effingham Lynch Richardson and her grandfather Robert Cooper Richardson merit a mention in O’Hart, which is noted for being, before 1800, notoriously untrustworthy, a source of myth, not fact. Given the burning of papers during the Troubles of 1921–22, the chances of establishing the truth seemed remote.

Fortunately, and unbeknownst to Iris, at the start of the twentieth century the Rev. Henry G.W. Scott, Rector of Tullinisken in County Armagh, had documented these Richardsons well.36 James

I indeed granted the original Alexander Richardson Drum Manor, or Manor Richardson, in County Tyrone. Alexander’s son William married Mary Erskine, heiress to the Augher Castle estate, County Tyrone, which in turn descended to their son Archibald. William left Drum Manor to his second son Alexander, who in 1682 married Margaret Goodlatte of Drumgally. His third son William, as well as inheriting lands near Augher, also obtained a lease of lands from his brother Alexander in the townland of Tullyreavy on the Drum Manor estate, where he built a house by the lake known as Oaklands, Woodmount or Lisdhu. O’Hart37 erroneously identified Crayhalloch with Drum Manor Forest Park and also with Oaklands, as if all were different names for one house, instead of separate Richardson estates, from each of which Rene could claim descent.

William (d.1664) and Mary Erskine had three further sons. The eldest, James, married Mary Swan (1671–1740), heiress of William Swan, and their son Alexander (1705–71) succeeded to the estate of over a thousand acres at Farlough Lodge, strikingly situated above the Torrent river: a small five-bay, two-storey Georgian house with a dressed sandstone front and a square central porch38 near Newmills, County Tyrone, not far from Cookstown. Through the eighteenth century the head of the family was churchwarden and member of the vestry of Drumglass and Tullinisken parishes, overseer of the roads and an officer in the militia. Iris’s great-great-great-grandfather, for example, was Alexander’s eldest son John Richardson of Farlough (1727–85), who married Hannah Lindsay in 1757 and was a JP, High Sheriff of Tyrone in 1778, and Captain of the Dungannon Volunteers in 1782. Owning more than a thousand acres, successive heads of the family lived, it can be assumed, in some comfort as modest country gentlemen.

The Richardsons also produced serious artistic talent and had continuing artistic tastes, well before Iris emerged to give them retrospective interest. They formed a large extended family which included two women writers, one of them distinguished. Iris’s great-great-aunt Frances Elizabeth Fisher (née Richardson) published well-received volumes of verse such as Love or Hatred (three volumes) and The Secret of Two Houses (two volumes), also a book about Killarney. The better-known is Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson (1870–1946), who wrote under the name of Henry Handel Richardson. She was the daughter of Walter Lindesay Richardson MD, model for Richard Mahony in her trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917–21). Henry Handel Richardson was second cousin to Rene’s father Effingham Lynch Richardson.39 Like Rene she was musically talented, going to Leipzig to study music before turning to writing. She spent her early life in Australia and then Germany, belonging, like her cousin Iris, to a broad British and European and not merely an Irish world.40 In her unfinished autobiography Myself When Young (1948) she refers to her strongly Protestant Irish Richardson relations, and their penchant for odd names ‘such as Henry Handel and a Duke, more than one Snow and several Effinghams’. In The Unicorn Iris was to award her foolish character Effingham Cooper a key moment of insight.

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The nineteenth century saw a downturn in Richardson fortunes, with the sons of yet another Alexander Richardson (1758–1827) squandering part of the £8,000 realised from sale of the Farlough estate. The phenomenon of downstart Anglo-Irish gentry was so familiar as to earn its own ingenious characterisation. Sir Jonah Barrington, whose racy memories of Irish history both Yeats and Joyce plundered, defines as ‘half-mounted gentlemen’ the small grantees of Queen Elizabeth or Cromwell living off two hundred acres. The Richardsons had been grander, somewhere between ‘gentlemen every inch of them’, whose finances were ‘not in good order’, and ‘gentlemen to the backbone’, from the oldest settler-families, generally also ‘a little out at elbows’.41 Most of Iris’s immediate maternal forebears were minor men-of-law – Dublin was a litigious city with many attorneys – belonging to the Protestant Irish lower-middle class. Rene’s paternal grandfather Robert Cooper Richardson, grandson to Tyrone’s High Sheriff,

born in 1827, and son of Robert Lindesay Richardson, a revenue officer, was a clerk in the Dublin Probate Court. Robert Cooper’s son by his first wife Hannah, Effingham Lynch Richardson, a ‘law assistant’ born in 1857, after a first marriage without issue made a second to Elizabeth Jane Nolan, daughter of William Nolan Esquire.42 Effingham and Jane had two daughters, Gertrude Anna (born 1891)43 and Irene Alice (born 29 March 1899), mother-to-be of Iris.

Rene’s father Effingham Lynch Richardson died on 6 July 1904, not long after Ulysses’ ‘Bloomsday’, one tradition making his death, officially from ‘erphelsocora of the groin’, drink-related.44 The fact that the Rev. A.W. Barton, Rector of St George’s, rather than one of his three curates, took the funeral service, suggests that the family were actively involved in the life of the Church of Ireland at parish level. Iris also claimed – on no evidence – Catholic ancestors.45 Curiously, a second Effingham L. Richardson was shown living at 40 Iona Road, Glasnevin, Dublin, until 1947, and working until 1934 at the Dublin Ministry of Labour. This second E.L. Richardson, a first cousin of the first, was re-baptised as a Catholic before marrying in 1883.46 Rene and her elder sister Gertie took ‘Cooper’, not among the baptismal names of either, as their middle name; they lived thereafter in the house of their grandfather Robert Cooper Richardson, and the twice-adopted name suggests gratitude to him for his generosity in fostering them after their father’s death. The only story Rene would tell of her grandfather was that, though a man of industrious habits who at first kept his family well, when the 6 p.m. mail van arrived he would be facetious about this, in his Dublin manner. It was a signal for his first drink of the evening.

From 1906 the girls lived with their grandfather at 59 Blessington Street, a ‘wide, sad, dirty street’, Iris wrote, with ‘its own quiet air of dereliction, a street leading nowhere, always full of idling dogs and open doorways’.47 It runs parallel to Leopold Bloom’s Eccles Street close by, and is halfway between St Joseph’s Carmelite Church and the Anglican ‘Black’ Church, at the heart of that cheerless north inner city to which the Joyces retreated across the Liffey, with all their baggage in two large yellow caravans,

when their fortunes took a downturn. Within a twilit world there are degrees of gloom and seediness. It is not hard to see why the 1906 move that Rene’s grandfather made, away from the address given as 34 ‘Upper’ Rutland Street,48 where Rene and Gertie were growing up, was propitious. A street of ill-repute, Joyce placed Nighttown and its brothels at the end of it at that time.

The northern inner city49 had been defeated first by the Duke of Leinster choosing in the 1740s to build on the South Side —'Where I build, Fashion will follow’ – and next by the exodus of gentry to England from around Luke Gardiner’s Mountjoy Square after the 1801 Act of Union. But, above all, by the massive immigration into the area of starving country people during and after the Famine, resulting in the division of whole terraces into tenements. In their novel The Real Charlotte Somerville and Ross’s down-at-heel, petit-bourgeois, essentially vulgar Protestant heroine Francie lives, in 1895, around Mountjoy Square, very near Blessington Street — like the Richardsons.50 Today number 59 is divided into seven flats, the ground floor having been around 1990 a betting-shop.

8

A marriage brings two worlds, as well as two people, into collision. Hughes’s cousin Don Douglas, grandson of Elias and so a ‘solid’ Murdoch by birth, regarded the Richardsons as rackety, and recalled Hughes’s marriage as a serious social blunder.51 If Rene had, by the hypocritical standards of the day, ‘got herself into trouble’, such odium would be explained. Her sister Gertie must also have been pregnant when she married, on 22 February 1919: Gertie gave birth at 59 Blessington Street to her eldest child Victor four months later, only three weeks before Iris was born at the identical address, probably in the same room. Gertie’s Scottish husband Thomas Bell, like Hughes, was a Second Lieutenant in King Edward’s Horse. There must have been a double courtship. It is striking that there is no Murdoch witness to Iris’s parents’ marriage certificate, especially as Hughes’s uncle lived close by in Kingstown, and his mother and sisters in Belfast.* Rene’s father is moreover shown, erroneously, as a solicitor (deceased). The Law Society in Dublin has no record of a solicitor called Effingham Richardson. In fact he worked in a solicitor’s office, ‘law assistant’ probably signifying a clerk. Perhaps Rene and Gertie enhanced his status to compensate for any loss of caste on Hughes’s part, or perhaps their mother had misremembered and misinformed them.

Iris’s birth at 59 Blessington Street was probably difficult, perhaps, John Bayley believed, with the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck. Rene had also had a rough time from Hughes’s sisters and mother. She ‘didn’t fit in with the Protestant ethic’, thought Iris’s first cousin Cleaver Chapman.52 As an Elder in the Apsley Hall Brethren assembly, his words come with some authority. Rene was beautifully made-up, cheerful and bright; she loved the coffee-shop, Cardews, in Kildare Street, where she went as a ‘flapper’. Her new sister-in-law, ‘wonderful’53 Aunt Ella, was bossy and critical and on occasion ungenerous, smiling but lacking charity. Rene handled the disapproval very well, with tact, patience and good grace.

Rene liked to joke about North and South Dublin, and to be ironical at her own expense, socially speaking. When Iris’s husband John Bayley in later life complimented her gallantly by saying that he was sure Rene must have been ‘the toast of Dublin’ when she was a girl, she would jokingly reply, ‘Only of North Dublin.’54 While Dublin north of the River Liffey was seedy and poor, the rich, smart suburbs stretched out to the south, from Rathmines to Dalkey. None the less, Rene had started to make her mark as a singer, and as a charming and modest personality. Like her mother-in-law, she had a happy temperament. There was a great deal of amateur opera about in Dublin, ‘that great singing city’, as Joyce’s own life, and his story ‘The Dead’, display. After her marriage Rene gave up professional performance, although choir-singing continued, and her beautiful voice was most often heard privately. She never said she minded abandoning her training, had ‘no great agony about it’, and appeared indifferent to fame and ambition. She knew she was talented, but did not take her gift too seriously. Iris, on the other hand, minded for her, and grieved for her mother’s loss of career.55 In her fiction she depicted wife after wife who has abandoned career for her husband.56

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The fine comic writer Honor Tracy57 first met Iris and John in Dalkey around 1958. A big jolly woman with rubicund and endearingly porcine features, Honor wore her flaming Anglo-Norman red hair somewhere between en brosse and beehive, had an occasionally combative manner, and appeared to be one (mainly) for the ladies.58 Thus began a close friendship that survived until Tracy’s death in 1989. Over the following thirty years her graphic letters provide an extravagant, loving, tough-minded and unreliable chorus to Iris’s developing self-invention and what Tracy termed her ‘weird extravagant fancies’:

You ask how Irish she is – the answer is, strictly not at all. Her father was of Ulster Protestant stock, but that is really a Scottish race, and Murdoch is a Scottish name. Mr Murdoch was a Civil Servant and happened to be posted to Dublin (pre-Republic) for a short time, during which Iris was born. She makes the most of it, as people are very apt to do: the number of English people who claim ‘Irish grandmothers’ is a famous joke in Ireland.59

The ‘Jean’ of Jean Iris Murdoch must indeed be Scots-Irish, from the Murdoch side, albeit never used. From the first she was known as ‘Iris’, complementing her mother’s ‘Irene’.60 One charm of her name is that ‘Iris’ does not quite belong to ‘Murdoch': ‘Jean’ or ‘Jeannie’ Murdoch might be some tough lady from Glasgow; Iris Murdoch confounds two sets of expectations. An accidental charm is that another ‘Iris’ was goddess of rainbows, many-coloured, protean, hard to pin down.

‘Irish when it suits them, English when it does not,’ was what Honor Tracy’s erstwhile friend and neighbour Elizabeth Bowen said the ‘true’ Irish claimed of the Anglo-Irish – both the Protestant Anglo-Irish like the Bowens, and also ‘castle Catholics’61 like the original Tracys. Tracy, for example, spoke aggressively County English when in England, yet with a brogue when the Bayleys visited her house on Achill Island in County Mayo. Is Tracy’s wit at Iris’s expense partly tribal? It is certainly an irony at the expense of someone who – to an extraordinary degree – was to become the darling of the English, far more than of the Irish, intellectual and cultural establishments.62 She loved to tease Iris about her Irishness in a way that was envious, admiring, combative, ignorant (as in her letter above) and flirtatious. Iris took this in good part – in The Red and the Green she was to create an Anglo-Irish character for whom calling himself Irish was ‘more of an act than a description, an assumption of a crest or a picturesque cockade’.63 Both Iris’s parents showed their Irishness in their voices. Rene had a Dublin voice, a ‘refined’ voice, with that Dublin habit of pronouncing ‘th’ as ‘t’, especially at the start of a word – for example, ‘t’ings like that’. Hughes had a very mild Ulster intonation and idiom: ‘Wait while I tell you!’ he would advise. Young Iris had a slight brogue, acquired from her parents. Well into adult life she would sometimes pronounce ‘I think’ as ‘I t’ink’. On 1 April 1954, on a trip to Glengarriff on the Beara peninsula, most westerly of all the peninsulas of Cork, she noted, ‘I have an only partly faked-up impression of being at home here.’

The last of Tracy’s Catholic Anglo-Norman ancestors to have lived in Ireland was Beau Tracy, who left in 1775, when Iris’s great-great-great-grandfather was High Sheriff of Tyrone. Tracy, born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, educated in Dresden and at the Sorbonne, first lived in Ireland at the age of thirty-seven,

when the Sunday Times sent her there as a special correspondent in 1950, and she set six of her thirteen books there. But no one ever agrees about who is entitled to lay claim to Irishness. Iris’s Belfast cousins today call themselves British, not Irish, while Hughes’s humorous comment on a photograph of Paddy O’Regan, Iris’s boyfriend of Irish descent around 1940, was, ‘Typically Irish – he looks as if he wants to fight something.’64 With both parents brought up in Ireland, and an ancestry within Ireland both North and South going back three centuries, Iris had as valid a claim to call herself Irish as most North Americans have to call themselves American, generally after a shorter time on that continent.65

Iris recorded on an early dust-jacket that ‘although most of her life has been spent in England, she still calls herself an Irish writer’. From 1961, with the Anglo-Irish narrator of A Severed Head, and following her father’s death, this changes permanently to ‘she comes of Anglo-Irish parentage’, a doubtful claim if meant to refer to an Ascendancy, land-owning, horse-riding background. Iris never claimed to belong to the Ascendancy as such, and it is doubtful that Rene used the word. Yet Rene certainly knew that her once grand family had, in her own phrase, ‘gone to pot’. Iris’s interest in this pedigree dates from August 1934, when she discovered on holiday in Dun Laoghaire that the Richardsons had a family motto, and a ‘jolly good one’. She noted that, as well as ‘virtue’, ‘virtus’ in ‘Virtuti paret robur’ could also mean ‘courage … But never mind, away with Latin. We shall be climbing the Mourne mountains next week, the Wicklow mountains the week after.’66 Pious about distant glories the family may have been.67 Snobs they were not. Hughes got on very well with Rene’s brother-in-law Thomas Bell, who had been commissioned with him in the same regiment and now worked as a car-mechanic at Walton’s, a Talbot Street Ford showroom;68 one of Thomas’s four sons, Victor, later a long-distance lorry-driver for Cadbury’s, appears with Iris in holiday snaps; a further two, Alan (also known as Tom) and John Effingham Bell, also worked for Cadbury’s in Dublin, as fitter and storeman respectively. They lived on Bishop Street.69 If by Anglo-Irish is meant ‘a Protestant on a horse’, a big house, the world of Molly Keane or of Elizabeth Bowen’s Bowen’s Court, this is not it.

In her first year at Oxford, in an article in Cherwell entitled ‘The Irish, are they Human?’, Iris was to refer to the Anglo-Irish as ‘a special breed’. In her second, after the IRA had declared war on Britain in January 1939, which was to cause over three hundred explosions, seven deaths and ninety-six casualties,70 and at the start of what in Ireland is called the ‘Emergency’,71 she was treasurer of the Irish Club, listened to Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford) talk of ‘chatting with De Valera’ and herself gave a paper on James Connolly, Communist hero of the 1916 Rising.72 To Frank Thompson in 1941 she wrote of Ireland as ‘an awful pitiful mess of a country’, full, like herself, of ‘pretences and attitudes … but Ireland at least has had its baptism of blood and fire’. The Richardson family motto ‘Virtuti paret robur’ is often repeated in her later journals, like a talisman or mantra. Iris saw herself, like her friend from 1956 Elizabeth Bowen, as caught between two worlds and at home in neither.73

To be of a once distinguished Protestant family in Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century still conferred a sense of caste.74 As recently as 1991 Iris defined her mother’s family as Anglo-Irish gentry whose ‘estate in County Tyrone … had vanished some time ago’.75 Insistence that one’s family was still ‘gentry’, no matter how impoverished, was partly tribal Protestantism. Even those Irish Protestants in the early Irish Free State who came of humble stock felt that they emphatically belonged, none the less, to a ‘corps d'élite:

Ex-Unionists – including those who were not very bookish – were proud of the Anglo-Irish literary heritage. They prided themselves … on possessing what were regarded as Protestant virtues, a stern sense of duty, industry and integrity together with the ability to enjoy gracefully and whole-heartedly the good things of life. [This] esprit de corps. … was voiced with vibrant force by Yeats in his famous and thunderous intervention in a Senate debate in 1925. Speaking for the minority, he declaimed, ‘we are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Berkeley; we are the people of Swift; we are the people of Parnell.’76