There seems never to have been a time when Iris was not capable of identifying with and being moved by the predicament of animals – dogs especially. When the Mail on Sunday invited her in 1996 to contribute to a series on ‘My First Love’,103 her husband John, writing on her behalf, told of her first falling in love as a small girl with a slug. It is not wholly implausible. Cousin Sybil remembers Iris and Hughes carefully collecting slugs from the garden, and then tipping them gently onto waste land beyond. In the autumn of 1963, seeing John’s colleague John Buxton look sadly at his old dog Sammy during dinner, Iris was moved to tears and could hardly stop weeping. The dog died a few weeks later.
‘The strict faith of the Plymouth Brethren appealed to many mid-nineteenth-century Irish Protestant families, including that of Parnell.’ Roy Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage (Oxford, 1997), p-543, n12.
† Told in Gath (Belfast, 1990), reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, 21 June 1991, p.10, ‘A Peculiar People’ by Pat Raine, and by Patricia Beer in the London Review of Books, 23 May 1991, p.12. Iris and Wright met only once, when she received her honorary doctorate at Queen’s University in 1977, although they corresponded thereafter.
Probably his cousins Isabella and Annie Jane, always known as Daisy and Lillie, daughters of Thomas Hughes Murdoch.
Elias married Charlotte Isabella Neale, a Quaker. His sister Sarah married firstly Charles Neale, who was Charlotte’s brother and also a Quaker. One child of this marriage, Mariette Neale, an active Quaker, was step-aunt to Reggie Livingston, also a Quaker, who married Iris’s first cousin Sybil.
† Quakers figure in An Accidental Man, A Word Child, Henry and Cato, The Message to the Planet, The Philosopher’s Pupil and Jackson’s Dilemma. See Arthur Green, ‘The Worlds of Iris Murdoch', Iris Murdoch Newsletter, no. 10, 1996.
Nor did Rene’s mother, Elizabeth Jane Richardson, witness the marriage. Dean’s Grange Cemetery shows that she died, aged seventy-five, on 10 February 1941 at 34 Monkstown Road, where she was living, together with Mrs Walton, with the newly-wed Eva and Billy Lee. The two witnesses are Rene’s sister Gertie and one ‘Annie Hammond’, whose son Richard Frederick Hammond went, often hand-in-hand, to primary school with Rene. Annie Hammond (née Gould) worked as housekeeper first to her husband’s brother Harry Hammond, later to Dr Bobby Jackson of Merrion Square. (Letter from R.F. Hammond’s son Rae Hammond to Iris Murdoch, 4 February 1987.)
See Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (London, 1993), Chapter 11, ‘Protestant Magic’, pp.215ff. The Richardson version of the ‘Butler’ worn by Yeats may be the frequently recurring middle name of ‘Lindsay’, associating them with the Earls of that name. The Australian Dictionary of National Biography, under ‘Richardson (Henry Handel) ‘, notes that Richardsons claimed descent from the Earls of Lindesay. O’Hart gives four different Lindesay Richardsons among IM’s immediate ancestors.
* For Iris Murdoch’s interest in these matters see pp. 277, 451, 525–6.
* Eugene in The Time of the Angels; Willy in The Nice and the Good.
Happy childhoods are rare. Iris was both a happy and a ‘docile’1 child. She led an idyllic life at home. When she wrote about her pre-war life, especially at her two intensely high-minded and eccentric schools, all was, despite a rocky start at the second, golden, grateful and rhapsodic, a cross between late Henry James and Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. These reminiscences were requested by the schools in question – ‘Why did I agree?’ Iris wrote in vexation.2 Moreover, though three friends had already sent their daughters to Iris’s old school Badminton on the strength of her example,3 when the critic Frank Kermode in 1968 wished to send his daughter there, Iris advised against it: ‘she had not been altogether happy there’. Presumably the tone of her written recollections – decorous, nostalgic, pious, suppressing the uncomfortable – owed something to Iris’s desire to please former mentors. With such provisos, and especially by contrast with what was to come, this period was broadly happy, and she was lucky in both her schooling and her family life. She once said to Philippa Foot, ‘I don’t understand this thing about “two’s company, three’s none". My mother and father and I were always three, and we were always happy.’ She pictured her parents and herself as ‘a perfect trinity of love’.4 They were a self-sufficient family unit, contented to be doing things together.
Hughes was interested in reading and study. He loved secondhand bookshops, frequenting one during his lunch-hour in Southampton Row,5 where classics such as Dickens and Thackeray could be picked up for, say, sixpence.6 He bought first editions of Jane Austen,7 and read Ernst Jünger’s First World War fiction.8 Both her parents loved reading to Iris, and Hughes would discuss the stories they read together. Her ‘earliest absolutely favourite books’ were Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Kim,9 which she had a great feeling of living ‘inside’.10 Treasure Island was the perfect adventure story, and she and Hughes would both enjoy being frightened by Blind Pew’s stick tapping along the road, and the exciting moment when Jim goes up the mast – ‘And another step Mr Hands and I’ll blow your brains out.’ This passage later became part of her and her husband John’s private mythology, with its brilliantly observed detail of the fish or two which ‘whip past’ the shot and drowned Hands.
The childlike, visceral excitements of these works travelled with Iris through adulthood. Intellectual though she was, she never despised the old-fashioned, primitive satisfactions of storytelling. She gave Hands’s surname to a favoured character, Georgie, in A Severed Head. Among the first passages to move her was a quarrel between the swashbuckling Alan Breck and David Balfour, the quiet abducted Lowlander in Stevenson’s Kidnapped,11 and a quarrel between two men later fuelled many of her novels. Kim is cited in Nuns and Soldiers when Gertrude and the ex-nun Anne imagine travelling through life ‘like Kim and the lama’. And in her most difficult and intimate novel, The Black Prince, she gave her semi-autobiographical hero the dying words ‘I wish I’d written Treasure Island.’ ‘Stories are art, too,’ he had earlier explained. Perhaps good writers retain their childlike interest in and wonder at the world. Iris’s Belfast cousins were much struck that Iris, though so intelligent and academic, was simultaneously so simple. When cousin Sybil lost her husband and Iris at the Festival of Britain in 1951, she discovered them riding together on the merry-go-round, en route to see the ‘amazing motor-cyclists’ on the Wall of Death. ‘I do like your Reggie,’ Iris pronounced, with the only child’s unconscious egoism.
When the family came to England, their absolute friendlessness there somehow did not matter, since the three of them were such a ‘tight little entity’. Hughes probably did not introduce his office acquaintance into the family circle. Nor did he and Irene miss social life, Hughes being, like many men of his class and time, a home-body. Yet the compactness and intimacy of this family unit is remarkable. Iris had her own names for her parents, unusual for a child in those inter-war days. ‘Rene’ and ‘Doodle’ was how she normally addressed them – ‘Doodle’ being Iris’s coinage, and perhaps a baby’s mispronunciation of ‘Daddy’.
When