Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography. Peter Conradi J.

post in a semi-skilled sort of way. Sometimes I think it’s quite bloody being a woman. So much of one’s life has to consist in having an attitude (I hope you follow this, which is a little condensed.) …

I should of course like you to be a hero – but I doubt if I could accept the risk – & I am quite certain you have all the qualities of a stout fella, without the necessity of a vulgar display … I miss that unanxious society in which we trusted each other & were gentle as well as gay … The Treasury yields a number of pleasant men and women who, besides being very intelligent (& some of them very beautiful) are good company over a beer or whiskey. But they lack a certain redness of the blood – a certain human gentleness and sensitiveness. On the other hand, my Soho, Bloomsbury & Chelsea acquaintanceship is widening also. ‘The Swiss’ in Old Compton Street, ‘The Wellington’ in Wardour Street* & ‘The Lord Nelson’ in King’s Road are the clubs [sic] which I frequent in search of the Ultimate Human Beings – and knowledge & experience & freedom. A strange society – composed of restless incomplete ambitious people who live in a chaotic and random way, never caring about the next five minutes, drunk every night without exception from 6 o’clock onwards, homeless & unfamilied, living in pubs & copulating upon the floors of other people’s flats. Poetry is perhaps the only thing taken seriously by them all – & the only name they all respect is T.S. Eliot. Politics they do not understand or care about [my emphasis]. Their thought & their poetry is concerned with subtleties of personal relations – with the creation of the unexpected in words – ‘dredging the horrible from unseen places behind cloaks and mirrors’.

      Perhaps it is a betrayal to make friends with these people while our armies are fighting in North Africa. But I cannot help finding these off-scourings of Horizon a goodly company in some ways – they seem, indefinably, to be better human beings than these smiling Treasury people who drink, but never too much, & who never in any sense give themselves away. They are queer & unreliable, many of them – but they meet you in a level human sort of way, without the miles & miles of frigid protective atmosphere between. They have a sort of freedom, too, which I envy. I think it arises from a complete lack of any sense of responsibility – (so of course my envy is not whole-hearted. I may be flying blind at present, but I would not cast all the instruments overboard …) … I write a bit. I read a lot – am having an orgy of Edmund Wilson at the moment —(good on literature, superficial on history) …

      … I feel in a peculiar sort of way that I mustn’t let you down – yet don’t quite know how to set about it. I don’t think I believe any more in clean hands & a pure heart … I am on First Aid Duty tonight at the Treasury – an oasis of peace in a far too full life. I must go down to bed pretty soon (We had one casualty tonight. Great excitement. A man with a cut finger. Christ.)

      I think of you often. May the gods guard you. Goodnight, my gentle Frank – Much love to you. Iris.

      2

One of the first things Iris did when she got to London was to start learning Russian, with Malvina Steen, a White Russian émigrée living behind Peter Jones department store in Sloane Square. While she found Steen ‘learned without being intelligent’, the Treasury intellectuals were ‘intelligent without being learned’.¹⁶ Yet there were compensations. She was pleased to discover, on greeting Peggy Stebbing’s arrival – Iris had a strong handshake – that Peggy was the niece of Susan Stebbing, philosopher-author of the recent Pelican Thinking to Some Purpose.* Peggy later married the poet Walter Pyke-Lees, also in the Treasury, and his war diaries show that, alone among women PAs, the Pyke-Lees called Iris by her first name, without any stuffy ‘Miss Murdoch’. Three or four Treasury personnel had died in the air raids of May 1941, but Iris’s time was quieter, as her ironical comment about the cut finger makes clear. On one of the regular fire-watch duty nights she donned her tin helmet, went up to the roof of the Treasury, and found herself in the company of A.W. Gomme, annotator of Thucydides.

      Few of Iris’s Treasury colleagues seem to have been invited to her flat.¹⁷ The ‘frigid protective atmosphere’ she ascribed to Treasury mores was possibly also created by her shyness, giving an unconscious personal edge to her complaint. Peggy Stebbing, by contrast, was delighted by the relative informality of the wartime Treasury: although the department had a name as a ‘heavy hand’, Peggy thought the Treasury essentially enablers, and found the atmosphere so informal and unstuffy that when the bombing was bad she went into the country with her Principal Assistant Secretary, Edward Hayle.

      Iris’s hair was still shoulder-length, fairish, pinned up in something that was never quite a bun. She hoped that this created an effect ‘less arty and juvenile’.¹⁸ At tea-time each day she would stretch out her arms and yawn, then her hands would come down and pluck out two hairpins, sending her hair cascading down onto her shoulders. Some of the Treasury’s young men, stimulated by this very mild bohemianism, would come by to witness the spectacle – one which recurs at the end of The Right from the Enchanter. Iris was in more than one sense learning to let her hair down, as well as noting that some colleagues found this harder to do.

      Above all there was London. One autumn morning after another night of fire-watching¹⁹ with Pat Shaw, the pair went out to breakfast together. Most Treasury staff crossed the road to the ABC, but Iris instead proposed they walk up to Leicester Square, where she threw back her shoulders, breathed in ‘a deep gallon of air’ and declared, ‘The heart of London! The smell of London!’ She staggered Shaw on another occasion by saying that she was going to be a don after the war. That made her seem both more grown-up than any of her colleagues, and more serious. Untidy hair apart, Iris had an inner beauty, was one of a kind, very alive and somehow fey. She was thought politically aware, very private, intently watchful, empathetic, never casual, always friendly. She dressed neatly rather than smartly, and sometimes her stockings had holes which, by the codes of the day ‘could be the result of an accident. A darn was a sign of poverty.’²⁰ She gave herself no airs, was ‘who she was’. Her voice was Oxford, with a slight but distinct brogue. It is possible that she provided a shoulder for secretaries to weep on.²¹

Iris and her colleagues worked a six-day week, until at least 6 p.m. on weekdays, 4 p.m. Saturdays, fixing, for example, ‘new pay scales for Civil Service nurses’. They got very hungry: it was necessary to queue even for a penny bun. Some Treasury staff ate at the National Gallery where, for those with civil service passes, a meal cost one shilling and tuppence. There were only twelve days off per year, and no Bank Holidays. If you lingered over lunch, you had to stay until perhaps 7 p.m.²² Many were exhausted when they got home and could think of nothing except supper and sleep. Iris later wrote, ‘I was the slave of circumstance at 23.‘²³ Yet she had two advantages over her peers. One was the super-abundance of energy noted at Somerville, an energy that enabled her to write one letter to Frank at 3 a.m.,* and sometimes to write poetry and fiction through the night, until the Tube trains started again in the small hours.† She had wanted, after Finals, to ‘learn jujitso, German, translate Sophocles, learn to draw decently, buy expensive & crazy presents for my friends – really go into the subject of comparative mythology – read many very basic books about politics – learn about America, psychology, animals, my God I could go on for ever’.

      Her other advantage was that she had found for herself a most unusual, magical and much discussed flat, only half a mile from work. Many of her peers had long journeys