by Iris Murdoch
‘Your father sounds a most sensible man,’ said Frances’ husband. ‘I’m sure we would have seen eye to eye on many subjects. I wish I had known him.’
For some reason Frances had never told her husband of the circumstances of Christopher Bellman’s death. Christopher died on April the twenty-seventh, nineteen sixteen. What exactly happened was never very clear. As the days of that interminable week succeeded one another, and the rebels, surrounded, bombarded, shelled, still somehow miraculously held out, Christopher became more and more frenzied. On the Thursday morning he set off on his bicycle for Dublin. That evening someone brought the bicycle back to Finglas, together with the news of Christopher’s death. It appeared that he had attempted to make his way into the Post Office through Moore Street. He was killed by a sniper’s bullet, no one knew from which side.
‘Well, I think those nineteen-sixteen men would have gone to fight in Spain,’ said Frances’ tall son.
‘Yes. But on which side!’
‘You know perfectly well on which side I mean.’
‘Storms in teacups,’ said Frances’ husband. ‘Who’s heard of nineteen sixteen now? You wouldn’t have heard of it if you hadn’t heard your mother going on about it. It’ll be the same in twenty years with these Spanish war events you make such a fuss over. Guernica, Irun, Toledo, Teruel. No one will remember.’
‘Your father may be right,’ said Frances. ‘People will only remember Guernica, and that will be because of Picasso.’
‘I don’t agree,’ said Frances’ son. He had become almost alarmingly good at keeping his temper lately. ‘These names are part of European history. Like Agincourt.’
‘There is no such thing as European history,’ said Frances’ husband. ‘Each country tells a selective story creditable to itself. No Frenchman has heard of Agincourt.’
‘No Englishman has heard of Fontenoy, if it comes to that,’ said Frances.
‘How have you heard of Fontenoy?’ said Frances’ husband. ‘It’s new to me that you know any history.’
‘Some Irish soldiers were there, fighting for the French. The Wild Geese, you know. There was a long poem about it. How did it go?
King Louis drew his rein.
“Not so, my liege” Saxe interposed,
“The Irish troops remain” —’
‘Playing traitors as usual! No, no, I’m only teasing. You mustn’t take me so seriously, my dear. Now I must go for my train.’
Frances’ husband slid the neat square of newspaper into his briefcase, and after it the white handkerchief, fresh every morning, which he used to clean his glasses. The case clicked shut.
He paused at the door. ‘What was the fancy name you used to call Ireland by?’
‘Cathleen ni Houlihan.’
‘Well, in my view Cathleen ni Houlihan is a great bore. In this century, small nations have got to pack up, and the sooner they realize it the better. You’ve got to belong to a big show nowadays, and you may as well do it with sense and with a good grace. I’m sure your excellent father would have agreed with me. There.’ He kissed Frances. He was a kindly man, though much given to sarcasm.
The front door banged.
Frances and her tall son sat down again at the breakfast table with the slightly guilty air of a relieved complicity which was part of their morning ritual.
‘Well, I think nineteen sixteen was wonderful,’ said Frances’ tall son.
‘So do I really. Though I don’t quite see what good it did.’
‘It was a reminder that people can’t be enslaved forever. Tyrannies end because sooner or later people begin automatically to hit back. That’s the only thing which really impresses the tyrant and makes him give way. Freedom belongs to human nature and it can’t vanish from the earth. Even though we forget the details of the fight, the fight goes on, and men have to be ready to go down among the details that are forgotten. And whenever it’s the turn of a country, however small, to rise against its tyrants, it represents the oppressed peoples of the whole world.’
Frances felt the chill touch again. ‘What a speech! You sound just like Cathal Dumay when you say that. He used to say that sort of thing. You’re even beginning to look a bit like him.’
‘What happened to all those people you knew in those days?’ said Frances’ tall son. ‘Do tell me again. I remember you used to tell us all about them, when we were children. But you haven’t talked about them for years now and I’ve got them all mixed up together in my mind. What happened to Uncle Barney, for instance? He was a real comic. I always remember the touching way he told us he’d have been a vegetarian if it wasn’t for his passion for sausages! Something awfully funny happened to him in that nineteen-sixteen business, but I can’t recall what it was.’
Frances gave a long sigh. ‘It wasn’t very funny really. Barney was going to fight with the rebels, but before they reached the place they were going to, he accidentally shot himself in the foot, and he had to be left behind.’
Frances’ son laughed. ‘That sounds just like Uncle Barney as I knew him! I expect he did it unconsciously on purpose. You know hardly anything we do is really accidental. I was reading about it in a book the other day. Nearly everything we do is our unconscious mind only we don’t know.’
‘You might be right that it was somehow on purpose. I couldn’t imagine Barney really harming anyone but himself. He was the gentlest of men.’
‘What happened to Cathal Dumay, the chap you said I was like?’
‘He was killed in nineteen twenty-one, in the Irish civil war.’
‘The Irish civil war? I’d forgotten there was an Irish civil war. What was it about?’
‘Some of the Irish thought that we, they, shouldn’t accept the Treaty, that it didn’t give Ireland enough freedom, and they were prepared to fight about it. And the English helped the more moderate Irish, who accepted the Treaty, to put down the extremists.’
‘I bet Cathal was with the extremists.’
‘Yes, he was with the I.R.A. He was very brave, he led a flying column. He was only nineteen when he died.’
‘Was he killed in a battle?’
‘No. A Black and Tan officer came up and shot him one night in his bed.’
Frances’ son looked thoughtful. ‘A civil war—that must be a dreadful thing to have in your own country. Were you in Ireland then?’
‘No, I was married. I was over here. You existed. It was a terrible business. Your father says the Irish have managed to hush it up completely, and in a way that’s true. It was too painful to think about.’
‘Well, no one will be able to hush up the Spanish civil war. We’re not going to forget that. What about Cathal’s brother, what’s his name, Pat Dumay?’
‘Oh, he was one of the nineteen-sixteen rebels, he was with Pearse and Connolly in the Post Office. He was killed in the fighting, on the Thursday of Easter week, the day before they surrendered. He was killed by a shell.’
‘And then there was that other fellow, the English chap—’
‘You mean Andrew Chase-White? He wasn’t English, he was Irish.’
‘I always think of him as English. What happened to him?’
‘He was killed at Passchendaele in nineteen seventeen. He got an M.C.’
‘I remember now. And his mother died of grief.’
‘I don’t know whether Aunt Hilda died of grief. She developed cancer very soon after the news of Andrew’s death.’
‘Heroic lot, weren’t they?’
‘They were inconceivably brave men,’ said Frances, suddenly gripping the table.
‘And all those leaders, Patrick Pearse and company?’
‘They shot most of them. Pearse, Connolly, MacDonagh, MacDermott, MacBride, Joseph Plunkett—And they hanged Roger Casement.’
‘It’s rather a miracle de Valera survived. Up Dev! You remember how you used to say that to us when we were children?’
Frances smiled, relaxing her hold. ‘Up Dev!’
She did not really think al
l that much about the old days; and yet now for a moment it seemed to her that these thoughts were always with her, and that she had lived out, in those months, in those weeks, the true and entire history of her heart, and that the rest was a survival. Of course, this was unfair to her children and to the man with whom she had journeyed so far into this workaday middle of her life. They, those others, had a beauty which could not be eclipsed or rivalled. They had been made young and perfect forever, safe from the corruption of time and from those ambiguous second thoughts which dim the brightest face of youth. In the undivided strength of their first loves they had died, and their mothers had wept for them, and had it been for nothing? Because of their perfection she could not bring herself to say so. They had died for glorious things, for justice, for freedom, for Ireland.
‘Yes, I do muddle them up though,’ said Frances’ tall son. ‘I remember you said you were in love with one of them. Which one was that?’
‘Me?’ said Frances. ‘Oh, I was in love with Pat Dumay.’
She got up and went to the window to hide some sudden tears. She looked out at the neat garden and at the houses opposite. Tears flowed more freely now; and she heard drumming in her ears, heard, as she had heard it all through that dreadful week in nineteen sixteen, battering and breaking her heart, the thunder of the English guns.
THE END
A Biography of Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was one of the most influential British writers of the twentieth century. She wrote twenty-six novels over forty years, as well as plays, poetry, and works of philosophy. Heavily influenced by existentialist and moral philosophy, Murdoch’s novels were also notable for their rich characters, intellectual depth, and handling of controversial topics such as adultery and incest.
Born in Dublin, Ireland, Murdoch moved to London with her parents as a child. She attended Somerville College in Oxford where she studied classics, ancient history, and philosophy. While at Oxford, she was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (which she later left, disillusioned) and, in the 1940s, worked in Austrian and Belgian relief camps for the United Nations. After completing her postgraduate degree at Newnham College in Cambridge, she became a Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where she lectured in philosophy for fifteen years.
In 1954, she published her first novel, Under the Net, about a struggling young writer in London, which the American Modern Library would later select as one of the one hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century and Time magazine would list as among the twenty-five best novels since 1923. Two years after completing Under the Net, Murdoch married John Bayley, an English scholar at the University of Oxford and an author. In a 1994 interview, Murdoch described her relationship with Bayley as “the most important thing in my life.” Bayley’s memoir about their relationship, Elegy for Iris, was made into the major motion picture Iris, starring Judi Dench and Kate Winslet, in 2001.
For three decades, Murdoch published a new book almost every year, including historical fiction such as The Red and the Green, about the Easter Rebellion in 1916, and the philosophical play Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues. She was awarded the 1978 Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea, won the Royal Society Literary Award in 1987, and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987 by Queen Elizabeth.
Her final years were clouded by a long struggle with Alzheimer’s before her passing in 1999.
