Iris (17 page)

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.’

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.