in the present fixing The future’s invincible waking-point.
T.S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’, which had come out in 1936, six years before the other quartets, may lie behind the poem’s visionary attempt to see all time as indivisible.18 What were the ‘unashamed certainties’ whose reality she asserts? They were not always to be those of the left, though vehemence, later yoked to mildness and reserve, accompanied the different phases of Iris’s beliefs. Only-children, she observed, ‘are completely secure in our point of view’.19 One of her ten 1982 Gifford lectures was entitled ‘Certainty’. And to be named ‘Bolshevicka’, even in fun, suggests a recognition of Iris as possessing ‘certainties’. Mary Midgley recalls that Iris (unlike Frank) always championed the USSR; a position easier to defend after 1941, when Russian courage in resisting Hitler saved Britain from being invaded itself.
Throughout the bitter winter of 1939–40, the coldest since 1895, Port Meadow, which had flooded, was frozen. All Somerville, it seemed, skated,20 Mary breaking a leg in the process. And after five terms – in the spring of 1940 – they took ‘Mods’ in the fan-vaulted early-Tudor Divinity Schools, beautiful but, no doubt for wartime reasons, unheated. They brought hot-water bottles but still froze in the three-hour exam sessions. The Eldridges, Noel (involved, like Iris, with student journalism and politics), twin sister Lilian and their mother, visiting Iris for tea in Somerville, found her sitting cross-legged, keening and crying with alarm, sure she had failed. In the event she got a second, and wrote generously to Clare Campbell to congratulate her on her first, vindicating the honour of their sex:
O excellently done. I hope you’re feeling very pleased with life. I suspected I should get a second, but am none the less annoyed at having my suspicions confirmed … I am inebriating myself with French poetry and Malory … Away with [Plato and Aristotle]! Just now I am for Helicon. Before next term though there will probably be a change of heart … Much love, Iris.21
2
Perhaps there was a streak of absolutism in both Iris and Frank: in her, for sticking to the Party line; in him, for ignoring it. Headstrong as she always was, Iris was cross when she experienced the ‘confusion and suspension of judgement’, which she with scornful humour associated only with ‘New Statesman liberals’.22 The sources of some ‘unashamed certainties’ lay in the exigencies of the period, but received expression – very differently – in two immensely influential male tutors. One, Eduard Fraenkel, must have been known to Frank. The other, Donald MacKinnon, she wrote to him about. Their imaginative impact on her was lifelong: both helped mould and form her. Both are ‘larger than life’, and it is hard to convey their uniqueness and present them briefly as more than collections of eccentricities. The relationships with both went awry.
In May 1940 Iris and Mary moved on to Greats. Isobel ('Iso') Henderson was their tutor for ancient history. Lively and interesting, from a fortunate and distinguished background, widowed in the first weeks of her marriage, she lived with her family in Lincoln College, very different from the somewhat boarding-school existence of dons resident at Somerville. Her father J.A.R. Munro was a distinguished historian and Rector of Lincoln. She was very much a child of Oxford, worldly, good at power-broking.23 Physically beautiful, fair, with a lovely voice, polyglot and passionate about music, horse-racing, poetry, cricket, Spanish culture and sailing in the Mediterranean – ‘One is always wrong not to like things,’ she used to say. If you did not like music or horse-racing, she felt, you simply had not taken the trouble to find out enough to make your enjoyment real. ‘She had a basic certainty,’ a colleague recalled after her death in 1967, ‘about what had been best in ancient civilisation, and was still the best in the liberal European civilisation of which she felt herself a part.’24 This certainty that a continuity existed between the ‘brilliant but terrible people’ of the ancient world,25 and those of the modern world, Iris inherited. Frank’s letters abound in it, and are forward-looking too.
Although Noel Martin simply followed Iris into Fraenkel’s seminar on the Agamemnon, tutors normally recommended their better students for it. The seminar had no designed relevance to the syllabus. Iris recalled Isobel Henderson26 saying briskly in the first year, ‘Go to Fraenkel’s classes – I expect he’ll paw you a bit, but never mind.’ Iris did not mind Fraenkel putting his arm about her, or stroking hers. This was before the days when such demonstrativeness was deemed gross moral turpitude. Fraenkel ‘adored’ Iris;27 Iris ‘loved’ Fraenkel. She had private tuition from him, and he gave her Wilamowitz’s Pindar in March 1940. Their relation was chaste. Not all undergraduates had Iris’s confidence, or were so reverential.28 A little later Mary Warnock was disturbed to find Fraenkel’s mixture of superb pedagogy and indiscretion, the marriage in him of the intellectual and the erotic, exciting.29 Preparing for a class was for Warnock like dressing for battle, to ensure that Fraenkel’s ‘pawings’ stayed within the bounds of acceptability, and that tears were, if possible, avoided. Iris had no objection to ‘difficult’ men (or women). She was moreover later to make of the relations between eros and intelligence a whole philosophy.
The German tradition of the Seminar was new to Oxford. Between twelve and twenty people sat around a long table, in the ground-floor room in Corpus ‘so visibly ancient that one had the impression of forming part of a timeless tradition of scholars’.30 Fraenkel presided at the top, for two hours between five and seven, once a week. There was ‘a lot of passion around, including Fraenkel’s passion for dominance’.31 Many distinguished scholars acknowledge these famous Agamemnon seminars, which went on for years, as their own first-beginnings. To Hugh Lloyd-Jones, later Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, the remarkable impact of Fraenkel’s teaching was due to them.32 To the future scholar Kenneth Dover they were simply ‘what mattered most at Oxford’.33 To Iris, Fraenkel gave
ever since the days of the Agamemnon class, a vision of excellence … The tones of the Merton clock striking the quarters still brings back to me the tense atmosphere of that class – and how afraid I felt in case I was asked something I didn’t know.34
The ‘terrifying’35 seminar has also been described as a circle of rabbits addressed by a stoat.36 To try out an idea on Fraenkel was awesome – his head would begin to shake, his cheeks quivered with dissent. Iris’s class-notes include Fraenkel’s expostulations at variant readings from previous scholars: ‘Nonsense’ – ‘Unspeakable!’37 He could be persistent in following up a casual remark and liked to reprove error. Hugh Lloyd-Jones recalled, ‘How terrifying it could be to see him bearing down on one.’38 Yet a note next day might admit that his view needed qualification, and in the preface to his exhaustive and heavy-going three-volume study of the Agamemnon, published in 1950, he particularly acknowledged his indebtedness to the ‘common-sense of the young’. Iris later noted, ‘The best teachers are a trifle sadistic.’39
Dover