to act ten years older than he was. He now wrote to his brother: ‘The OULC looked needlessly bohemian to outside observers. The men (I was a very bad offender) were often unwashed and wore the most ridiculous clothes. Many of the women did the same and both conducted the most tangled and nauseating love affairs in public, while the rest of the university kept its sex life fairly decorous behind closed doors.’58 He could measure the distance between the callow youth he once had been and the young man he was becoming. When Iris wrote to Frank that ‘the more letters I get from you, the more I admire you’, she was expressing no more and no less than the truth.
What of Frank? He wrote to Iris that there were only four people in England to whom he could speak almost as clearly on paper as with his lips: ‘Three of them are my closest kin and the other one is you.’59 He got close to other women, corresponded with a number, but did not cherish their letters as he did hers.60 Even his family was told that, if they wished, they should make copies of their letters before sending them to him. He had acquired so many sackfuls that he could not keep them all. Iris’s letters alone, he kept.61
A relationship maintained only by letter must be precarious. How much belonged to the realm of fantasy? Iris after all had not been a body to him ‘for nearly 4 years’, he wrote in April 1944. The sinister vagaries of wartime postal delivery alone might delight a Thomas Hardy. Just as Frank may never have learnt that he had in 1944 been gazetted Major, so Iris does not understand that he had, in September 1942, been promoted Captain, until half a year later. These were frustrations to which both refer. Letters matter intensely to Frank. He gets ‘down’ when they are delayed, feeling it impossible to believe he has ‘kin’ anywhere; then, when a letter arrives, ‘feels as though home were only a five minute walk away’. In October 1942 he wrote to Iris:
Three years and a bit since I joined the Army. More than that since you & I first exchanged Weltanschauungs in a room in Ruskin. Now I am 22 instead of 18, and you are 23, almost a matron. Looks like being another three years straight before we meet again. We shall probably find we have both changed out of all knowing and have nothing any longer in common. Write whenever you can. An airgraph is a pleasant way of saying ‘I havent forgotten you’. But a letter is a golden gift, a winged gift – worth more than a half the world to a mortal in depression.62
Iris wrote that she had found that reciting Homeric hexameters went very well with the rhythm of the Tube train. Frank replied:
I’m greatly cheered by the picture of staid Iris Murdoch reading Homer in the Underground. Does the train ever stop suddenly, leaving your words to ring out in all their natural clarity? If so, many must be the tired stock-broker whose heart is melted and his vision beautified. Doubt if I could construe a line of Homer now.
Iris and Frank’s four-year correspondence betokens the tenacity of their feeling, as does the quality of their letters. In January 1942 he translated Pushkin’s short early poem ‘I loved you once’ ('Ya vas Lyubil'), managing to convey the explosive compression, and also the calm, peace, and sheer stylishness, of the twenty-year-old Pushkin’s Russian:
I loved you once in silent desperation.
Shyness and envy wracked me numb with pain. I loved you once. God grant such adoration So true, so gentle, comes your way again.
He also wrote a story about a certain Gunner Perkins who wishes to express his passion by letter to his girlfriend Helen, rather than thoughts about books and politics. ‘If only he had had the courage before he left. Now it was too late, you could never break down barriers by letter.’ ‘Helen’ is an interesting nom-de-guerre for Iris: the Greeks died at Troy for another Helen. Interesting too, in the light of Frank’s wartime career, is this passage from Iris in a letter, of 24 November 1942, in which she celebrates Allied progress, but worries that it is terrible to ‘rejoice in something which totals up to such a sum of human anguish’ – especially when one is ‘snug in Whitehall’ oneself:
[L]ately I reread The Seven Pillars [of Wisdom]. I feel a sort of reverence for that book – for that man [T.E. Lawrence] – which it is hard to describe. To live such a swift life of action & yet not simplify everything to the point of inhumanity – to let the agonizing complexities of situations twist your heart instead of tying your hands – that is real human greatness – it is that sort of person I would leave everything to follow. [My emphasis.]
Iris is unusual among liberal novelists in admiring soldiers. She later recalled lying on the floor and watching the Vis ‘tottering past the window’ – a brilliantly chosen phrase for the movement of the mass-produced buzz-bomb, propelled by its unsteady ‘pulse-jet’.63 While destroying many wartime writings, she saved a brief account of her reactions when bombs fell near the Hungarian economist Nickie Kaldor’s flat in Chelsea Cloisters64 in March 1944: the thirty-second crash, the rocking of the house, the pattering fall of debris which taps the window, and the fact that ‘I cannot stop watching my own reaction even when there is no-one about before whom I want to keep up appearances.’
Iris’s obsession with T.E. Lawrence – an acquaintance of the Thompsons, whom Frank met as a child – shared by Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil, was lifelong, and the ascetic warriors in her novels – Felix in An Unofficial Rose; General James Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea; Pat Dumay in The Red and the Green; even James in The Bell, whose simple piety relates to his coming from ‘an old military family’ – owe something to this ‘world-changer who never lost his capacity to doubt’,65 as well as something to the figure of Frank. Iris’s encouragement helped persuade another admirer, Paddy O’Regan, to join the Special Operations Executive (SOE),66 set up by Churchill in 1940 to ‘set Europe ablaze’ by supplying arms and other support to guerrilla and sabotage groups. This was a dangerous move, to say the least; Hitler had ordered in the autumn of 1942 that any Allied soldier found involved in clandestine activities could be shot on sight, and part of the routine training involved an explanation of the extreme risks involved.67 O’Regan would win an MC and bar. Frank had his own motives for volunteering for SOE, on 5 September 1943. The unfolding logic of his and Iris’s love-at-long-distance may also have played a role in his deciding to make this move, as his choice of the name ‘Helen’ suggests. Iris began as the ‘unmoved mover’. By 1943 she was, in some sense, increasingly in love with the absent Frank.
5
They felt affinity. During 1942 Iris’s forms of opening address to Frank move from ‘Greetings, my brave and beautiful buccaneer’ (January), to ‘Dearly beloved’ (April), to ‘Frank, my wild & gentle chevalier’ (October), to ‘Frank, my brave & beloved’ (November), to, on 22 January 1943, a simple ‘Darling’. Her valedictions are mostly pleas to him not to get hurt: ‘Frank, old friend, I love hearing your voice crying in the wilderness – cry often, & at great length – & oh, for Christ’s sake don’t get hurt in this business’ (April/May 1942); ‘And oh, Keep Safe. The gods protect you’ (29 July 1943). He is for his part no less inventive: ‘Irushka, flaxen-haired light of wisdom!’ (June 1942); ‘My green-haired Sybil’ (July 1942), though shyer of open displays of affection.
Both are highly intelligent, politically aware – ‘Old Campaigner’ is another of Iris’s soubriquets for Frank – both by 1942 believing the war is not only to protect a bad old world from Fascism, but to help forge a new one. Both are writers in the making. His father had some of Frank’s letters published in the New Statesman, and a story in the Manchester Guardian, and Frank thought he might be a journalist after the war. Iris reviewed for the