of not being in love with Iris, thought – echoing others including Charlotte Williams-Ellis – that it was Iris’s inner quality that attracted everyone: not a classic beauty, a beauty of soul.63
This would tally with the view of shy and gentle Noel Martin. Martin64 was sitting in a friend’s room on the first floor of Corpus quad one early evening in the autumn of 1938. Aged only eighteen and headed for a first in Mods, he saw a gowned and corn-haired Iris pass the pelican sundial with a Somerville girlfriend, probably Mary. She had a lively gait and looked, he thought, ‘different’. Leonie Marsh, for example, whom he knew, was ‘quite a girl’ – one of those who get noticed. Iris, by contrast, was unassertive, grave,65 reserved. But there was something about her, and he felt attracted. Iris and her companion were on their way to Eduard Fraenkel’s brilliant, towering explication of the Agamemnon on the far left of the quad, on the ground floor.66 Noel simply came down the stairs and followed her. He could not profit from the seminar, but spent his time gazing at Iris. Later, he and Iris talked. Frank Thompson observed that good-natured Noel’s being ‘sick for Iris’ made him ‘dopier than usual’. Twenty years later Iris wrote, ‘[Leo] loved me, in the days when Frank and Noel Martin loved me too. And indeed I loved them. My God, that was a golden time.’67
Philippa Bosanquet, who came up in 1939, recalls that the fascination with Iris then, as later, was general. Many were in love with her, could not get enough of her company. And she struck women, as well as men. Mary Douglas recalls her as ‘dazzlingly pretty and tremendously dynamic in her personal style – with a formidable reputation as a debater’. Milein Cosman, at the Slade, which was evacuated to Oxford, saw Iris – ash-blonde, white blonde, high Slavic cheekbones – at a talk by ‘splendid-looking’ Graham Sutherland at New College: ‘Look at that fantastic-looking girl, I’d like to draw her.’ Milein’s companion egged her on to talk to her, and an invitation from Iris to cocoa at Somerville ensued. Milein, a refugee from the Rhineland, had never heard of the exotic Oxford custom of inviting people for cocoa – but out of it came her first lithograph, of Iris’s head, executed on the steps of the Ashmolean. Iris looks solemn, preoccupied, fey, melancholy, jolie-laide.
6
Iris sent an account of her first year at Oxford to her old school magazine.68 She ‘loves her work passionately, and … takes a zestful interest in the life of the University. She … finds a day of twenty-four hours quite insufficient for her needs. She represents the First Year on the Junior Common Room Committee, is a member of the College Debating and Dramatic Societies – is to play Polixenes in next term’s A Winter’s Tale.69 The Classical Association, the Arts Club, the B.U.L.N.S [British Universities League of Nations Society] claim other parts of her day. She helps run Somerville Labour Club. For 4 terms she was advertising manager to Oxford Forward, progressive University weekly, has joined the staff of Cherwell, and hopes next term to sub-edit that paper.’ In her first summer she contributed four reports about events at Somerville to Oxford Magazine,70 and attended a one-week Communist Party summer school in Surrey, where the future historian Eric Hobsbawm, then studying at Cambridge, was deeply impressed by her looks, character and intelligence, noting that she associated there with the daughters of Ulster grandees.71
Franco won the war in Spain that April. In that love-fraught May Iris continued to publish poems. ‘Lovely is earth now, splendid/With year-youth’ casts her in the role of world-watcher, and shows the imprint of Housman and Hopkins: ‘to like,/To breathe, is pain and wonder’. ‘Oxford Lament’ begins:
Deliver me from the usual thing,
The clever inevitability of the conversation, The brilliant platitudes and second-hand Remarks about life.
She expresses both the self-conscious world-weariness behind which the averagely intelligent student in so many periods hides unconfident immaturity, but also a brave revulsion from the pose of having-seen-through-all-poses, and a longing for an intensity of expression that might strike the reader as unmediated and fresh. A frustrated longing, in a sense, for the powers of a ‘grown-up’ sensibility that might still evoke intensity:
O for the tangent terror
Of the metaphor no one has used – The keenness of cutting edges On fresh green ice of thought.
Gradually, the young men at Oxford were called up for the war. The summer of 1939 was the last of Oxford for Frank. One of his last nights was spent at Corpus with Leo and Noel.
In Corpus everyone stands one drinks and I was pretty whistled … After I had eaten two tulips in the quad and bust a window, they dragged me into Leo’s room and sat on me. I calmed down and they thought I was safe enough to take on the river. The red clouds round Magdalen tower were fading to grey, when we met two people we didn’t like. We chased them and tried to upset their canoe. We got slowed up at the rollers, and then I dropped my paddle. With the excitement all the beer surged up in me. Shouting the historic slogan, ‘All hands to the defence of the Soviet fatherland!’ I plunged into the river. They fished me out but I plunged in again. By a series of forced marches they dragged me back and dumped me on the disgusted porter at the Holywell gate.
After Frank had burst into ‘an important meeting of the college communist group’ Comrade Foot, by a unanimous vote, was given ‘the revolutionary task of putting [him] to bed’. Such jokey accounts make Frank sound like a rugger ‘hearty’. His inclinations, in fact, were political, passionately humanistic and aesthetic, and he spent much of that year putting his idealism to the test. That Easter he had worked in a school for refugee Jewish boys at New Herrlingen in Kent: ‘I like the Jews … They have a queer fascination for me. They’re so alive, so intelligent and so generous.’ (Iris shared this impassioned philo-Semitism, which belongs to its epoch: ‘I find my pro-Semitism becoming more & more fanatical with the years.’72)
Frank was understandably struck and unnerved by a request from two of the boys for help in getting their parents out of Germany. In July, as Secretary to New College Boys’ Club in impoverished Hoxton, in London’s East End, he spent ten days supervising activities in the boys’ camp, then a fortnight working in a camp for the unemployed at Carmarthen in Wales ('thundering good value'), finally a week at the Communist Party summer school near Guildford, for political education.73 Such experiences left him more than ever critical of the government’s failure to address the issues of unemployment and Fascism.
On 31 July 1939, just before his nineteenth birthday, Frank completed a sonnet dedicated to Iris, entitled ‘To Irushka at the Coming of War':
If you should hear my name among those killed
Say you have lost a friend, half man, half boy
Who, if the years had spared him, might have built within
Courage, strength and harmony.
Uncouth and garrulous, with tangled mind
Seething with warm ideas of truth and light,
His help was worthless. Yet had fate been kind,
He might have learned to steel himself and fight.
He thought he loved you. By what right could he
Claim such high praise, who only felt his frame
Riddled with burning lead, and failed to see
His own false pride behind the barrel’s flame?
Say