by John Bayley
I recommended Pym’s novels to Iris, and put then in her way, but I don’t think she read them. She hardly ever read a contemporary novel, except when a friend or the friend of a friend had written one, and asked if she could bear to give an opinion, whereupon she would read every word of it conscientiously. Having done so she was very often enthusiastic, sometimes it seemed to me, if I also read the work submitted, disproportionately so. I think this came not only from the warmth and loyalty of friendship but from a kind of innocence: she had no experience of what novels today were like, and was impressed by what I could have told her was just the current way of doing it, a mere imitation of contemporary modes and fashions. I had the feeling that in the past, and before I met her, she had not so much read as absorbed the great classic novels, and in our early days she used to read and re-read Dostoevsky or Dickens, sometimes Proust. We got in the habit of reading at lunch-time, each with a book, and she read them with something of my own absorbed addict’s pleasure, though she never minded my interrupting her with something I was reading myself, and which had entertained me.
She always shared in these moments of entertainment, and during my most addicted Pym period she liked me to read out comic scenes to her, at which she laughed with real amusement, though I think partly because I was laughing so much myself as I read, and she liked that. Having comic passages read to one – by P.G. Wodehouse say – can be exhausting: there is the need to simulate a hilarity which on the spur of the moment it may not be easy to feel. But Pym, like Austen, does lend herself particularly well to the sharing of short passages. We met her only once, with a young friend of hers who had been a pupil of mine. We liked her and her sister very much, within the limitations of a short meeting and the usual English awkwardness. She was a very tall woman, and when her diaries were posthumously published I was amused to find from a letter of hers to Philip Larkin that she felt she had ‘seemed to tower above Iris (though only in height, of course.)’
Barbara Pym was as modest as she was satirical about herself, and in both those modes of being, as one sees in her Diaries, wholly different from Iris. Iris had no need for consciousness of herself as an author; but there is an endearing moment in the Pym diaries when she imagines herself – as it is clear she frequently did, as most of us do – being looked at by persons who might have heard of her, and one of them saying ‘There is Barbara Pym, the writer.’
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There is the kind of literary personality, of the sort the Germans refer to reverently as a Dichter, who is organised on so impressive and heroic a scale that questions of modesty, image, attitudinising, can hardly be said to arise. One such was the writer already referred to, whom I thought of in early days, when I first knew Iris, as the Hampstead Monster (one of his female disciples wrote a novel on the subject of such monsters). This impressive figure had finally won, in old age, a Nobel prize. He had come to be revered, particularly in Germany (he wrote in German), although he had lived when young near Manchester and spent much of his life in London.
I encountered the Dichter on few occasions, and only once, at a literary party, had any conversation with him. He asked me what I thought about King Lear. This is never an easy question to answer. My experience of attempting to ‘teach’ the play to Oxford students was no help at all at that moment. I made some sort of reply none the less, to which he listened with flattering attention. ‘What do you think?’ I asked, after submitting in silence for some moments to his penetrating stare.
He continued to be silent for what seemed a long time. Finally he spoke. ‘Friends tell me that my book is unbearable,’ he said. Fortunately I knew this to be a reference to his long novel Die Blendung, and I nodded my head gravely. There was a further silence. ‘King Lear is also unbearable,’ he pronounced at last.
I bowed my head. Shakespeare and his masterpiece would never be paid a greater compliment than this. The Mage was certainly mesmeric. The solemn atmosphere of our conclave was itself becoming unbearable, and it was a relief when we were interrupted by a bumptious but rather engaging young man, who was on the crest of a wave of self-esteem. His survey of contemporary angst had itself been hailed as a masterpiece, and had become an unexpected best-seller.
‘What did you think of my book, sir?’ he now asked in breezy tones, clearly confident that the great man could not have missed this experience.
The Dichter’s appearance was always impressive. Squat, almost dwarfish, with a massive head and thick black hair, he looked like a giant cut short at the waist, what the Germans call a Sitzriese. Gazing up with an air of mild benevolence at the young man, he seemed none the less not fully to understand his question, not to have grasped the point at all, even though English was virtually his first language and he used it as masterfully as he did German. There was a long pause. The young man appeared to wait with growing expectation, but also a growing embarrassment.
The Dichter spoke at last, in a wondering way and without any inflection of emphasis or irony. ‘You are asking me – me – whether I have read your book?’ His sole reason for repeating the pronoun seemed to be to clear up a possible misunderstanding. Perhaps the young man thought he was addressing some ordinary mortal? There was another long pause while he continued to smile at the young man in friendly fashion. At last, murmuring something apologetic, the young man slipped away.
I felt torn between involuntary admiration and strong dislike. Dislike won, as it did on other occasions when I encountered the monster, or Mage. And yet he could exhibit not only an apparent warmth of manner but a shy almost diffident charm which he seemed to keep, as it were, solely for you. No wonder he was worshipped. Certainly I was fascinated myself on that occasion, and I longed to see how he would continue to behave. He did so by ignoring the existence of all the writers, intellectuals, and important people present, seeming to compel them also to ignore him. After that first encounter he moved about by himself with perfect ease, avoided by all, with no one venturing to address him. They might have decided deliberately to snub him, and if so he found that amusing and highly satisfactory. I watched him talk to another young man, who stood on the edges of the party, clearly knowing no one there. Soon they were laughing together and deep in conversation. I could not resist approaching them, and as I did so recognized this man, who at close quarters had a comically villainous appearance, as an actor I had often seen in gangster B movies, to which I was at that time addicted. As this was a talking-point I told him I had often enjoyed his screen performances. He seemed pleased, but said he had never yet had the role of chief gangster, only a subordinate one. Hailed now by a fellow actor who had just arrived he moved off, and the Dichter, who seemed greatly taken with him, enquired from me what he did. ‘The only one here worth talking to,’ he added smiling.
Feeling myself included in this judgement I sought to escape. At that moment our hostess fortunately claimed the Dichter, and the young actor returned to where I was standing. He asked me who the funny-looking cove was. ‘What a really marvellous guy!’ he said. ‘Really interesting. He liked me,’ he added, dramatising in a stage manner his own enthusiasm. ‘We talked about fishing. I’m mad about it – my real hobby. I don’t know how he knew that, but he seemed to ...’
A potent Oxford figure, Isaiah Berlin, was different from the mage-like Dichter in almost every way – for one thing he was truly and unselfconsciously benevolent – but he shared the ability to charm anyone by the interest he took in them. He once told me he liked bores, and was never bored by them. That was probably true, and certainly he made himself familiar, in a warm-hearted spontaneous Russian way, to everyone he met – shy academic wives, worldly hostesses, scientists and intellectuals, philosophers and music-lovers. He had the common touch, and some people spoke patronisingly of him for that reason, implying that his fame and reputation were almost entirely due to his extraordinary powers of getting on socially, rather than to any real originality or achievement of his own.
Isaiah Berlin’s favourite authors were Herzen
, the Russian memoirist whose works were his bible, and the novelist Turgenev. In style and gusto and personality both resembled himself, though he would never have said so. The Dichter’s bookishness was far more mysterious, no doubt deliberately. He would indicate to his followers that a certain text was the thing, the real right thing, without inviting discussion of the matter, or giving any reason why it should be so. In this sibylline manner he once urged on his disciples perusal of the P’ing Ching Mei, a long and complex Chinese novel of the seventeenth century. Everyone, including Iris, hastened to read it, but none of them seemed able to fathom what was so remarkable about it. Was it some sort of key to understanding, like Henry James’s ‘Figure in the Carpet’ – perhaps, indeed, the key to an understanding of the Dichter’s true greatness? Herzen and Turgenev are as open, as brilliant, as palpably fascinating, as Isaiah Berlin himself; but what was the secret of the P’ing Ching Mei, or any other work to which the Dichter gave the seal of his approval or, come to that, himself composed? There seemed no answer to that one. Mystery always remains the hallmark of the Mage.
Iris’s works, at least to me, are genuinely mysterious, like Shakespeare’s. About her greatness as a novelist I have no doubts at all, although she has never by nature needed, possessed or tried to cultivate the charisma which is the most vital element in the success of a sage, or mage. Her books create a new world, which is also in an inspired sense an ordinary one. They have no axe to grind; they are devoid of intellectual pretension, or the need to be different. They are not part of a personality which fascinates and mesmerises its admirers. Although any of her readers might say or feel that a person or an event in her fiction could only occur in a Murdoch novel, and nowhere else, this does not mean that the personality of the writer herself is in any obvious sense remarkable.
Her humility in this respect seems itself so unpretentious, unlike most humility. She had no wish to dwell apart, but took people and what they told her on trust, at their face value. I was often surprised by how easily she could be, as I saw it, taken in. She never needed to be ‘knowing’, to see through people, to discover their weak spot. Reflecting on Napoleon’s comment that no man is a hero to his valet, Hegel remarked this was true; not, however because the hero was no hero, but because the valet was a valet. For Iris everyone she met was, so to speak, a hero, until they gave very definite signs or proof to the contrary. I have never met anyone less naturally critical or censorious. Her private judgements – if they were even made – remained her own and were never voiced publicly.
This is so rare in academic and intellectual circles that I suspect many more naturally animated and gossipy persons may actually have found conversation with her rather dull, while continuing very much to respect her. Religious people, like her pupils, took to her immediately and instinctively. But she never seemed to discuss religion or belief with them, nor they with her. In some way the ‘spiritual’, as I suppose it has to be called, seemed to hover in the air, its presence taken for granted. When W.H. Auden, whom she had once met when he was giving a talk at her school, came to live for part of the year in Oxford, they met on various casual occasions. ‘He likes to talk about prayer,’ she reported with a smile. I asked if they had exchanged views on how it should be done. ‘Oh no, neither of us do it,’ said Iris. ‘But he jokes about how he would do it if he did.’
Although Iris was a scholar of Platonic philosophy, and it is so much a part of the atmosphere in many of her novels, it had no importance in her life that I could see, any more than did any kind of organised religion. This was true even of Buddhism, which she has come to know a good deal about, chiefly through her great friends Peter Conradi and James O’Neill, both of whom are practising Buddhists. I gather that such a description is in fact irrelevant, just as it would be to speak of a ‘devout’ or ‘serious’ Buddhist. (I have sometimes been struck by the analogy with Iris as a writer: there would be no point in describing her as a practising novelist, or even a ‘serious’ one. The Shakespearean comparison again comes to mind: in what sense was he a ‘serious’ dramatist?) I do not think Iris would ever have taken up meditation, as done in their own way by Peter and Jim. Her sense of things worked differently and in its own way; but she at once fell in love – and that was some years ago now – with their Welsh sheepdog Cloudy, a beautiful animal with a grey and white coat and blue eyes. It appears in her penultimate novel, The Green Knight, as the dog Anax.
Iris is and was anima naturaliter Christiana – religious without religion. She has never made a religion of art, and yet pictures have certainly meant more to her than any other product of the spirit, not excluding literature and philosophy. I mentioned Piero, and our experience of his Resurrection at Borgo San Sepolcro: and by coincidence we were to meet in Canada, five or six years after that honeymoon time, the painter Alex Colville, who had himself been deeply influenced by Piero’s art. It was the first time we had been to the New World together; although a year or so after we were married Iris visited Yale on a month’s Fellowship, travelling alone and reluctantly, but enjoying it when she got there. Until very recently going to America was always a problem, thanks to an Act vigorously restricting the issue of a visa to any former member of the Communist Party. Iris had been briefly a Young Communist while still an undergraduate at Oxford, leaving the Party before the outbreak of war, but her scrupulousness barred her from conveniently forgetting this fact, as many of her Oxford political friends had done, when filling out the visa form. She was duly restricted to single visits, for strictly academic purposes.
This proved to be inconvenient when we were in Canada, where no sort of restriction applied. Our hosts at McMaster University had planned to take us to the Buffalo Art Gallery and to see Niagara from the US side. These pleasures she had to forgo, since we planned to visit Chicago on the way home, where Iris was to give a philosophy paper. She also longed to visit the Chicago Art Gallery – she had managed to visit the Washington Gallery while on her visit to Yale. Such an expedition could only be made if we did not use up her precious single visa on a Buffalo visit. She insisted the rest of the party should go as arranged, and stayed on the Canadian side herself until we returned. There was a compensation next day when we were to go to Stratford for the Shakespeare Festival; it had been arranged that I should give a talk there on the plays to be performed. We made a detour to Lake Huron, and plunged into waves which were uncannily like those of the ocean but had no salt savour about them.
Stratford was memorable less for Shakespeare than for a performance of The Mikado, the best that could be imagined. But the real revelation of our Canadian visit was the pictures of Alex Colville. This quiet reclusive artist, who lived at St John’s in New Brunswick, was then painting one or at most two canvases a year. His art is meticulous in detail, taking infinite pains over extreme niceties of composition, and this precision contrasts with the statuesque solidity of his human figures, as massive and mysterious as Piero’s, and yet wholly absorbed in the commonplace activities of contemporary life. Iris was spellbound by them. She and Colville took to each other at once, and he showed her all the portfolios he had brought with him: he had been coaxed over to take part in one of those symposia on ‘Whither the Arts?’ which are cosy routine for so many writers and academics. It was pleasant enough in the insipid way such events are; but Colville’s presence and the ease we both found in talking with him, gave the days a sudden individuality. It was almost as if we had been unexpectedly received into one of his own pictures, where a husband stands naked and pondering, studying a refrigerator’s contents by the dim light from within: or a woman, as massively inscrutable as any in Piero’s paintings, holds the car door open for her children to enter.
We should much like to have seen more of Alex Colville, and talked to him, but he comes to Europe only rarely. On one such occasion we managed a meeting in London, when he was en route for The Hague to repaint a tiny damaged area in the corner of one of his pictures, called ‘Stop for Cows’. The paint in this corner had
been minutely scratched in the course of handling by the museum, and the authorities there had been prepared to pay for Alex to come all the way over and put it right. They must have thought highly of the picture, as well they might. A big girl with plump cheeks and buttocks is raising one majestic arm as she turns to confront an invisible motorist. In front of her are the massive backsides and tails of black and white alderneys, and a wide sky suggests the sea not far away. In one way the picture is reassuringly Dutch, robustly, even humorously physical. But it also contrives to be full of a magic strangeness in complete contrast with appearances. How Colville does this, and plans or imagines compositions that reveal it, remains a mystery; and one that I know Iris at once found familiar and friendly with her own. With her own outlook on art, too. She used once to sit and study her volume of Colville reproductions by the hour. She has lost her interest in painting now that her powers of concentration have gone, but if I root out the album of Colvilles and put them in front of her she still shows for a brief time something of her old fascination.
Part of Colville’s appeal for her undoubtedly lay in his complete lack of modishness. No other modern painter is so unconscious of the fashion, and so indifferent to what’s new in the art world. Like the woodland watercolours of our old friend Reynolds Stone, Colville’s paintings have no urge whatever to get on in society, the smart society of the in-group. Nor had Iris. She never had any instinct for what constituted the Where It’s At of social or artistic success. If a criticism can be made of the social scene in her books it might be that her sense of it is not so much innocent as non-existent. Her world lacks any true sense of worldliness. In her grasp of how actual people behave her novels can be both shrewd and sharply observant, but there is no indication in them of knowingness, of having, as it were, got even her own world on a lead. Her feeling for things is far from being streetwise in the manner of Kingsley Amis, whom she knew and liked, and his brilliant son Martin.
