Iris

by John Bayley

  This unworldliness is not common among writers and novelists. Tolstoy retained to the end his involuntary fascination with high society. His zest for finding out what dances were being danced and what the girls were wearing persisted long after he had supposedly renounced all fleshly temptation. Among writers the lofty moralists, the politically and socially correct, usually turn out in their private lives to be as pushy as Proust’s Madam Verdurin. Social snobbery in the crude old sense is probably on the way out today, but the need to be in the swim is as strong as ever, itself a product of democratic hypocrisy; the need to oppose fox-hunting now as much the form as fox-hunting itself once was. Many of Iris’s friends and fellow-writers were censorious when she was made a Dame of the British Empire. They maintained such an honour to be unacceptable on democratic or political grounds: but I suspect they really saw it as out of fashion – things like that were simply not done nowadays. Iris didn’t care whether it was the done thing or not. It pleased her mother and her real friends, and that was what mattered to her.

  Colville must have been happy in Canada, for nobody bothered about him there, or took him up, and yet he sold his paintings internationally for what seemed to us large sums. ‘I like being a provincial,’ he remarked once to Iris in his dry way, ‘And you don’t mind my saying, do you, that I loved your books and now you for the same reason. No striving towards Mayfair, if you see what I mean.’ He looked so droll saying this that I could not help smiling, and I teased him by saying that of course only provincials exhibited at the Fisher Art Gallery and stayed at Brown’s Hotel, as he had already told us he was in the habit of doing when he came to London.

  Iris and he were in fact the least upwardly mobile people one could imagine. Neither of them was in the least socially conscious, nor did they have any aptitude for making a good thing out of it. Colville’s remark about provincialism was an unusual spurt of self-satire, prompted by the behaviour at the conference of a smart New Yorker and his even smarter wife, both art critics, who had been laying down the law at the discussion that morning. After it Colville remarked to us in a conspiratorial whisper that he was becoming ‘a mite stir-crazy’, so we got a lift into Hamilton that evening and had some drinks in a bar.

  And yet I never knew Iris to disapprove of anyone on account of their pretensions, or the way they behaved. J.B. Priestley would show off to her outrageously, which she enjoyed in her benign way, without trying to enter into the spirit of things when he made efforts both crafty and elephantine to draw her out on the subject of Plato or religion, politics or feminism. He called her ‘Ducky’, which she also enjoyed, and he affected robust irritation at the sensible and rational answers she gave him. Had he lived a generation earlier, he used to boast to her, before successful writers had their entire income removed by the government’s tax policies, he would have funded an expedition to Antarctica, or set up a Research Institute in Oxford or Cambridge. ‘Cambridge wouldn’t have thanked you for it,’ his wife Jacquetta Hawkes would say dryly, ‘I can tell you that, Jack.’

  They made a most engagingly incongruous pair, and their happy relationship always used to remind me of Queen Titania and Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Iris was deeply fond of them both. I got along well with Jack and was somewhat in awe of Jacquetta, who always made me think of an old don’s remark that they’ll smile in your face in Oxford and stab you in the back, whereas in Cambridge they might do you a good turn, but with a disapproving face. Jacquetta did not exactly disapprove, but her smile, though friendly, was always a little frosty too. Her father had been the eminent Cambridge biologist who discovered vitamins, and she had a way of making unexpected confidences with a sort of scientific calm. She once told me she had jumped out of a window in Cambridge to impress a bumptious boyfriend and had seriously damaged her womb. ‘You have charm,’ she said another time, making it seem like something one’s best friends didn’t tell one about. That discomposed me a lot, but she made up for it by remarking on another occasion in an equally detached way that Iris was the only woman of whom she was never jealous where Jack was concerned. That made Titania sound quite vulnerable and human.

  Jack’s robust tones concealed the same vulnerability. He once asked me with a wistful look if I knew anyone in the British Academy: how could he become a member? I had no idea, but he must have thought that as an academic I should have known the answer. He also said he would once have given anything to have lived in the smart world, like Evelyn Waugh. In a weird way he made being in ‘the smart world’ sound the same thing as having the right views on England or politics or feminism. He could manage those all right, and they had put him on the map, but to be really on the map one should have been in the smart world as well. Such remarks fascinated me but also made me feel uncomfortable, and I think Iris too, although she never showed it. Her way of dealing with Jack was to ask him about his life; and I was reminded of the time a newspaper interviewer told Iris she had found out all about herself, while she had found out nothing about Iris. Iris’s fondness for Jack Priestley was almost like that of a daughter, and she missed him greatly when he died.

  Her fondness for Jack grew with time, but she was equally good at making instant friends. And in a sense still is. The other day a caller rang up from an Irish monastery. He had long admired her work and had written to her, a correspondence I had had to take over. He asked if he could look in briefly on his way from Limerick to pick up a fellow monk from a sister foundation. He was immensely tall, dark-suited, urbane, with that indefinable air many monks have of moving in a distinctly smart world. (I thought of Tolstoy, Jack Priestley, Evelyn Waugh!) He told us the Duchess of Abercorn had sent her love; it seemed she had once met us in connection with a Pushkin Festival.

  All this was momentarily discomposing, but when the tall monk and Iris sat down together, things changed at once. They became extraordinarily animated – she starting sentences, or ending them – he appearing to know at once what she wanted to ask, and filling the words they were failing to make with a professional abundance of loving kindness. And yet his face looked really transfigured: so, a few moments later, did hers. They were soon on about his childhood, why he joined the order, most of all about his plans to make discussion of her works a regular thing at Glenstal Abbey. He assured us that two of her novels, The Book and the Brotherhood and The Good Apprentice, could be said to have inspired the recent setting-up of the monastery, and the way they wanted it to go. For the first time Iris looked blank. Perhaps she had detected a note of Irish hyperbole; perhaps she was simply puzzled about the names of her novels. What were they? From whom? But she didn’t enquire, only asking for the third or fourth time. Where living? Where born? – and did he know Dublin?

  Transfiguration doesn’t last. His enthusiasms soon began to seem no more out of the ordinary than those of most religious people: Iris’s own animation faded into her lost look; she seemed bewildered now by the presence of the tall handsome monk in his incongruous city clothing. Practised in such matters, fully aware that the good minute was going, he rose swiftly, blessed her, and was out of the door. The little van in which he had driven all the way from Limerick to Holyhead, and across Wales to Oxford, was waiting at the kerb. I remarked that we had ourselves once driven about Ireland in such a van, but he was not interested. I felt he had taken my measure, not because he was a clever man but because experience had taught him much about the stupidity of intellectuals, their obtuseness about the things that really mattered. He was off now to pick up his Benedictine colleague, and as a parting shot I remarked that I had heard that the Benedictines were the most learned order. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ he replied with a great laugh, and a look of contempt which I felt I had fully deserved.

  Inside the house Iris had regained her animation and was full of pleasure in the visit. She grasped that the caller had been Irish, but that was about all. I tried to remind her of the time, some years before, when she had gone to lecture at Maynooth, the big Roman Catholic seminary outside Dublin. I
t had been at the height of the troubles in northern Ireland, and her host had made some reference to the IRA detainees there, ‘the men behind the wire’ as they were known in the south. ‘Aren’t we all with the men behind the wire?’ he had observed rhetorically, and his fellow-priests had nodded their heads in approval. Iris had been incandescent with fury. She told me later that she had been hardly able to contain herself and maintain her usual civil and smiling demeanour. I am sure the priests would have had no idea of the passion they had unwittingly unleashed, assuming in their bland way that Iris, like all London intellectuals, would have the fashionably correct attitude towards Irish unity. She did not. It was the one political topic on which the presbyterian atavism of her Northern Irish ancestors completely took over.

  I used sometimes to tease her by reminding her of the misprint a typist had made in one of her essays. Uncertain of Iris’s writing she had substituted ‘Pearson’ whenever the word ‘reason’ appeared in the text, thinking that this was some philosopher Iris frequently referred to. This produced a number of sentences beginning ‘Pearson requires’ or ‘as Pearson indicates’, and Pearson became ever after a familiar figure in our private language. But Pearson certainly had no place where Iris was concerned if any discussion arose among her friends about the future of Northern Ireland. She used to keep silent if she could but often burst out in the end. She once silenced me when I attempted some facetious reference to Pearson in this context by reminding me sharply of Hume’s pronouncement that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be, the servant of the passions.’ It was not a view she held in any other context.

  Iris’s longhand was usually clear, was indeed an excellent and wholly distinctive handwriting with no resemblance to anyone else’s. Bringing her a cup of coffee in the morning at Steeple Aston I sometimes used to stop and watch as her pen travelled across page after page of looseleaf paper. Occasionally it raced, and then her writing did become hard for the typist to decipher. The business of typing her MS was always arranged by Norah Smallwood at Chatto, an admirable managing director who had the reputation of being close-fisted, but who always treated Iris with maternal firmness and kindness – a favoured but rather unpredictable daughter. Norah, who had no children of her own, behaved like a tyrant to her young female employees, except when they were in trouble, or if she found them in tears as a consequence of her severity.

  Iris was always happy to stop for a chat, never minded being interrupted, whereas if I was trying to type something in bed I used to find interruptions fatally dismantled whatever insecure pile of syntax my mind was endeavouring to set up. If it collapsed like a house of cards I had trouble starting over again, or remembering what I had been trying to say. But Iris, good-natured as ever, never minded my snarling at her briefly if she put her head round the door to ask some question about the day’s activities. She would murmur something pacific and withdraw. Nowadays I remember those occasions when she comes anxiously after me in the house, or if I look up from a book and see her peering at me in the doorway.

  Once when I was standing by her side while she wrote I saw a fox strolling about on the lawn and pointed it out to Iris, who was always glad to see the creature, even though our foxes were a well-known family, as much in residence in a corner of the wild garden as the rats had once been in the house. Our neighbour’s cats were also frequent visitors. A cat was crossing the lawn when we heard, a few moments later, a tremendous sound of screeching and spitting. A fox was dancing round the cat, which revolved itself to face it, making these noises. Impossible at first to say whether the fox had intended to attack and perhaps even to eat the cat, or if it was all in play, an idea suggested by the way the fox would lie down between its leaps and manoeuvres and put its muzzle between its front paws. Finally it seemed to weary of the game, if such it was, and strolled off, leaving the cat to its own devices. While the confrontation was going on I had the greatest trouble to dissuade Iris from tearing downstairs and rushing between them, like the Sabine women between their embattled Roman husbands and their Sabine relatives. Fascinated, I had longed to see how the situation would end, even though Iris kept distractedly saying, ‘Oh we must separate them – we must.’

  Her instincts were always pacific, and she hated the idea of animals harming each other as much as she did human beings doing so. When the local hunt killed a fox in the neighbouring field she was up in arms at once, remonstrating with a civil and perplexed huntsman who sat his horse with an apologetic air saying, ‘Oh I’m so sorry, Miss Murdoch, I understood you were a supporter.’ This was perfectly true, but there was a difference between being mildly in favour of country sports and hearing one of her own foxes, as she supposed it must be, despatched close by, especially as she might well have known the creature when it was a cub. If we walked very quietly to that secluded corner of our garden by the drystone wall, where bramble-bushes and elder flourished, and mounds of earth had been mysteriously raised, we would often see a small face with myopic pale-blue eyes peering out at us. The vixen usually raised five or six young there each year.

  Iris felt the foxes were part of her household. To me they were signs, as the rats had been, that the place didn’t belong to us, that we were there on sufferance. This didn’t trouble Iris at all. She was often away, seeing her mother and her friends in London. Possessions sat lightly upon her; she once said to me that she was no more concerned with their existence than she was with her own. I saw what she meant, and yet it was not really true. She was jealous of her things, like her stones, roses and pictures, and yet it never occurred to her to nourish or to visit them, to clean them as real householders clean silver or china, and to give them loving attention. They must never be got rid of or moved, and that was all. So the house always had a look of dereliction, as did the very small pad or perch we acquired later in South Kensington, at the time we found someone to live with Iris’s mother in her London flat and look after her.

  I myself felt no more at home in this London pad of ours than I did in the house at Steeple Aston, although oddly enough I settled down at Steeple Aston much more readily on the days when Iris was away. When in 1980 or so she had her visit to China (going with quite a highpowered delegation and meeting Deng Shao Ping the Chairman) I found myself making serious efforts to clean the house up. It was during the vacation, no teaching in Oxford, and I used to work on Shakespeare in the morning and clean and tidy in the afternoons. I got into quite a bachelor routine, all the more readily from knowing it wouldn’t last.

  Iris was greatly impressed when she got home, and touched too. I think she felt, with a momentary pang, that this was the way I had always wanted things. Not true: I had no idea what I wanted in this or any other respect provided she was there; and her own lack of identity with self or place precluded me from feeling at home there except when she wasn’t. Her novels, and her ceaseless invention, from day to day and month to month, were where she lived. And so, after my tidy interlude as a bachelor householder, married demoralisation swiftly and comfortably returned.

  None the less she loved the place in her own way, far more than I did. Apart from her refusal to go back there, a visit in which I would have felt retrospective fascination and morbid enjoyment, Cedar Lodge was the Camelot where she had the original comforting future in her head: her vision of the badgers breaking in, and herself rushing out to tell me about it when I got home. Perhaps that was her sole wifely vision; and after the vision dissolved and departed with the sale of the house she never wanted to see either again. I once teased her by saying it was the foxes who in fact had broken in, not the badgers, but, as she pointed out, that wasn’t the same thing at all. Oddly enough I did once see a real badger there, though in a wholly inconclusive manner. It was a shabby elderly creature, but unmistakably a badger, who once shuffled past when I was sitting in the long grass down the slope, looking as if he had lost his way and didn’t want attention drawn to himself while he tried to find it. In general they are exclusively nocturnal creatures.

  I t
old Iris about him, but she was not really interested. I suppose it was the Platonic idea that counted with her, not the real example. When UFOs became the fashion she claimed to believe in their existence at once. And she was convinced of the reality of the Loch Ness monster, a fabulous creature adored and probably invented by the British Press, reputed to live in the unfathomable depths, surfacing at intervals to be sighted by local ghillies and lucky tourists. When we visited friends in the Highlands, John and Patsy Grigg, Iris could not be dissuaded from sitting for hours in the heather above the loch, staring down hopefully. I don’t think she was ever disappointed when nothing happened.

  Since a child I had myself taken pleasure in submarines and aeroplanes, without becoming seriously interested in them, and Iris ordered for me a magazine series about the two world wars which lavishly featured the various types. She never wanted to study them herself, but she liked to see me looking at my ‘aeroplane books’, as we called them, and she liked me to tell her about them. She herself was devoted at that time to the adventures of Tintin, the perky young Belgian ‘boy reporter’ invented by Hergé, whose comic strip stories are illustrated with an inspired contemporary detail, reminiscent of some of the old Flemish masters. Iris was introduced to these by the same Greek friend who had once told her how to cook the legendary stefados. Both of us became hooked at once; I think partly because of the French dialogue, which is extraordinarily witty and apt, and does not come over at all into English. I have learnt a lot of French from the Tintin books, mostly idioms now outdated, which we used to repeat to each other on suitable occasions. There was a moment when the villains had hired a diver to go down and attach a limpet mine to the good characters’ ship. Just as he is fixing it the anchor happens to be released from up above, banging him on the head and knocking him and his mine down into the depths. ‘Fichu métier!’ he remarks philosophically into his diving helmet. A comment whose pithiness is as untranslatable as poetry.