Lowbrows’, a subject then exercising Virginia Woolf.54 Iris’s lowbrows follow Arsenal and go to the music-hall. Her highbrows read Dickens and Shakespeare and follow ‘the situation in Germany’ – suggesting how politically aware Badmintonians were. How many other English fourteen-year-olds were then preoccupied by Hitler, who had risen to power only a year before? Iris proposed tolerant understanding through a mutual expansion of pleasure-sources. The lowbrows should read Walter Scott and try Horowitz on the wireless; the highbrows should listen to dance-tunes. She was later to call the songs of the thirties ‘the best pop-tunes of the century’,55 and to regret that Badminton had so much Greek dancing, classical music, quickstep and Viennese waltz, and not enough jazz:56 ‘The most interesting kind of man is the one who knows something about everything.’ This looks forward to the kind of novel she would later hope to write, with, as she expressed it later, ‘something for everyone';57 ‘like Shakespeare’, John Bayley observed.
In the magazine in 1934 Iris celebrated the value of ‘Unimportant Persons’, amongst whom she includes herself. In 1935, as well as taking her School Certificate, she wrote ‘How I Would Govern the Country’, defending constitutional monarchy, criticising imperialism and totalitarianism alike; and after her trip to Geneva attended the League of Nations Junior Branch, published a piece on ‘Leonardo da Vinci as a Man of Science’, telling of his drainage schemes, canal-making machines, devices for measuring distance and wind-force, and for flying; acted as First Citizen in Laurence Housman’s The Peace Makers, played right half at hockey, won fifteen votes as Socialist candidate in a mock election for the Debating Society (Orpen for the National Conservatives won with twenty-two votes: the girls were less left-wing than their teachers*), and published a competent translation of Horace’s ode ‘Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa’.† 1936 sees Iris vice-captain of her house, involved in League activities, the Debating Society, the 2nd XI hockey team, and writing a poem entitled ‘The Diver’ which recalls the 1930s fashion for the aviator as culture-hero but, in true Murdoch fashion, substitutes water for air and celebrates swimming instead. She writes up the activities of the Literary and Architecture Clubs (Lady Precious Stream,≠ Francis Bacon, Chesterton, an exhibition of Everyday Things in Bristol); acts in a parody of Euripides’ Alcestis ('Al’s Sisters') where, arrayed as a butler bearing cocktails, she is noted as ‘among the stars of the cast’, and also plays Hank Eisenbaum in ‘Hollywood Rehearses Shakespeare’. Her dramatic activities at Froebel and Badminton, and later at Oxford, are interesting. Although the adult and puritan Iris disliked theatre, young Iris enjoyed acting and was famous at Oxford for her talent.
7
In mid-January 1937 Iris won joint first prize (£2.125.6d) for an essay on lectures organised at Regent Street Polytechnic by the Education Department of the League of Nations Union. She watched the German (and Nazi) lecturer fatuously explaining that persecution of the Jews was designed merely ‘to make an independent people of them’, and wrote of how the choice between democracy and dictatorship was made urgent by Spain. She is engaged with the Literary Club, and wins her hockey colours. She is now in her eighteenth year, and her political judgements must be thought of as those of an adult, albeit a very young one. She finds space in a piece praising community singing – ‘Music was everywhere,’ she was later to write – to commend ‘that courageous and much maligned country, Soviet Russia’. On the verso page of this eulogy appears, with dramatic irony, one of Iris’s lino-cuts, entitled ‘The Prisoner’, of a man evidently suffering in solitary confinement – but not, of course, in the USSR, which Iris believes ‘is now becoming more and more democratic’. This was a view, horribly wrong-headed as it now appears, that Iris and BMB were scarcely alone in holding.
In 1936–37 alone, we now know, two million died in Stalin’s purges.58 Nor was such knowledge hidden at the time. Two years later George Orwell famously wrote that to English intellectuals ‘such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial, &tc &tc are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.’59 The appeal of the Communist Party – which Iris joined the following year – at the time of the Spanish Civil War is well attested, and not just by Orwell. Yet it is remarkable that Iris, who praised the Communist Party as late as spring 1943 to Ruth Kingsbury, a graduate of Lady Margaret Hall, rarely expressed misgivings about the USSR. She thought Russia on the whole misunderstood over the non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, and even after the Russian invasion of Finland in November 1939 she stayed On the Stalinist line’. Badminton, she later pointed out, had caused her, like many others, to ‘live in a sort of dream world’ politically: they really believed that politics was a much simpler matter than it later turned out to be, and that ‘the Soviet Union was a good state, rather than a thoroughly bad state’.60
By 1945 her view of the USSR had shifted, and in the 1970s she would help campaign for the release of the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, of course seeing Stalinism as a great evil. That she had no such understanding before 1943 may attest a political naïveté some friends61 felt long accompanied her. Tenderheartedness, in politics as in love, may be accompanied by unsettling blindness.
8
By spring term 1937 Iris is head girl, mediating on at least one committee between staff and girls, reporting on the League of Nations Union, determined ‘not to falter in our search for peace’, recording a visit to the home of the millionaire marmalade manufacturer and amateur archaeologist Alexander Keiller, whose taste and Druidic megaliths alike leave her ‘dazed’, playing lacrosse, publishing an untitled poem in which her love of London is apparent: ‘And I watch for the bended bow of the Milky Way/Over London asleep’. In July she wins a distinction in English for her Higher School Certificate, plays a home cricket game against a neighbouring school – probably the match at which Rene made a rare appearance and a great impression. Iris seemed, to Dulcibel Broderick as she did to others, more like Rene’s elder sister than her daughter.
She published an eighteen-line translation from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonos – her Greek was coming on stream. W.H. Auden visited the school and read part of a new play he and Christopher Isherwood were writing – presumably On the Frontier. Iris sat next to Auden, finding him ‘young and beautiful with his golden hair’.62 She soon enlisted his help in writing a foreword to Poet Venturers, her own brainchild, a collection of poems by Bristol schoolchildren published by Gollancz at a price of ‘only one Shilling’ – the proceeds to be given to the Chinese Medical Aid Fund. Iris’s poem, ‘The Phoenix-Hearted’, lyrically hymns China’s powers of recuperation from the invading Japanese ‘hosts of glittering dragon-flies’. She wins an Open Exhibition of £40 a year for three years at Somerville College, Oxford.
For the second year running she won a prize for a League of Nations essay competition, this time entitled ‘If I were Foreign Secretary’ (the second prize of one guinea went to the future critic Raymond Williams, of King Henry VII School, Abergavenny). Apart from advocating, among other measures, recognition of the legality of the Spanish government, her essay is of greatest interest for its pious belief that the Fascist countries can be brought to heel through sanctions alone, after which ‘the world would be calmed and reassured and the menace of war would gradually disappear’. After she joined the Communist Party the following year, Iris’s pacifism would strengthen. ‘Looking back we see the thirties as a time of dangerously