target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">68 – romantic idealists in their political hopes, their liking for high diction, but also in what they expect from others. On 20 March 1943 Iris writes: ‘Oh Frank, I wonder what the future holds for us all – shall we ever make out of the dreamy idealistic stuff of our lives any hard & real thing? You will perhaps. Your inconsequent romanticism has the requisite streak of realism in it – I think I am just a dreamer. Shout in my ear, please. Much love, old pirate – I.’
Frank is the more brilliant linguist – indeed at one point, in Bulgaria, he is saved by a bullet being fired into his dictionary. Both learn new languages for pleasure, and Frank their literatures too. He attributed importance to this because, in the new post-war Europe-of-the-heart in which he so passionately believed, the acquisition of languages is to help overcome misunderstanding and mutual ignorance. In learning Russian Iris was probably partly imitating Frank, who had started aged fifteen at Winchester, and now translated not only Pushkin, but also Gogol, Gusyev and Lermontov. Both were of course also intensely pro-Russian for political reasons. After he picks up Italian, she tries to do the same: ‘incredibly easy as you say’.69 Frank also picked up Serbo-Croat, Bulgarian, Polish and modern Greek, faltering only with Arabic. She goes beyond him once, arriving at the Turkish Embassy and demanding to be taught Turkish – in order, mysteriously, to improve her post-war job prospects, about which she feels ‘cynical’. Frank, who refers to this new interest of hers on 2 June 1943, is studying a Turkish grammar by that August.
They tried to share their reading, too. While still at Somerville in 1941 she was reading Proust: ‘He too teaches one to forgive70– a point I’m learning from all quarters just now. Characteristic of all great writers? Shakespeare – Tolstoy – James Joyce – for the last of whom I’m feeling an enormous enthusiasm … and everything that survives of Tacitus – except the Germania. I tremble and adore.’71 On 24 December 1941 she mentions Mallarmé and Gorky’s Mother, which both loved, and ‘I have been reading Virginia Woolf, the darling dangerous woman, & am in a state of extreme nervous self-consciousness. The most selfish of all states to be in.’ She pledges herself on his recommendation ready to read ‘Bachtin’ (i.e. Bakhtin), ‘even if this means borrowing it from Bodley’.72 In November 1942 she read Pushkin (in Russian), Edmund Wilson and Pindar. The following October Proust, Joyce, de Montherlant, Woolf ('quite incapable of writing anything straight again'), Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet ('left me cold') and Celine ('What a gorgeous language – how much one is exiled from. How much more they are exiled from'). He read Penguin New Writing before her,73 sending her his translations from the Russian. Both read Louis Aragon’s Crève-Coeur,74 an iconic text enjoying cult success, banned in Britain probably because it addressed Dunkirk, but smuggled in from France, acclaimed by Cyril Connolly and Charles Morgan for its poetry and patriotism alike.* In 1943 Frank sends her Mayakovsky and she sends him poems by the ‘New Apocalyptics’, the ‘Poetry (London) gang, the sensibility boys who think with their stomach’.75 They argue about Henry James, whom Iris likes considerably more than does Frank. Both accuse themselves of being ‘intellectual snob’. In March 1943 they discuss Antony and Cleopatra.
In October 1943, while undergoing a sabotage and parachute training course in the Lebanon, with a view to helping – as he then thought – the partisans in occupied Greece, Frank requested a photograph. Iris obliged with a visit to Polyfoto, then reciprocated the request. There is an odd sympathetic magic about the fact that both succumbed to jaundice, although this ailment (or, rather, symptom) was commoner then than it is now. Frank suffered it at the Indian hospital near Hamadan in Persia in October 1942 – whence he wrote home about Iris’s first in Greats, joking that the war had saved him from the indignity of getting a lower degree than her – Iris a year later, with her parents in Blackpool: ‘You have had this curious complaint.’76
Frank once wrote: ‘Without going all James Barry, … the real enduring people have kept something of the child within them.’ Here lies one key to their growing affinity. His friend Gabriel Carritt always spoke of Frank’s ‘sancta simplicitas’. Iris saw this. She had her own too.
6
On 22 January 1943, settled alike into her flat and her job, Iris wrote Frank a ten-page letter that is by turns playful – ‘Darling, the mice have been eating your letters again,’ it starts – then serious, lyrical, informative and, in a familiar wartime mode, resolutely undramatic. She does not ‘mind how many dangers you face, so long as I don’t know at the time, & you emerge in good condition – & don’t suffer miseries en route of course’. She shares with him her writerly ambitions, pondering hopefully Aldous Huxley’s doctrine that, for a writer, ‘it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters’. She imparts news of mutual friends, reports on her reading – Wilfred Owen, Ann Ridler, the Beveridge plan ('a fine piece of work, thorough and equitable’, though she is anxious about the chances of this blueprint for the post-war Welfare State being fully realised), ‘numerous moderns’. She describes her life, the emptiness she feels in his absence, and the intellectual intimacy which she strongly implies that only he now offers her (Philippa had not yet joined her in Seaforth Place). After reporting that she is ‘hellishly lonely’, despite being in ‘great and beautiful and exciting London’, she continues:
I should tell you that I have parted company with my virginity. This I regard as in every way a good thing. I feel calmer & freer – relieved from something which was obsessing me, & made free of a new field of experience. There have been two men. I don’t think I love either of them – but I like them & I know that no damage has been done. I wonder how you react to this – if at all? Don’t be angry with me – deep down in your heart. (I know you are far too Emancipated to be angry on the surface.) I am not just going wild. In spite of a certain amount of wild talk I still live my life with deliberation.
If she had cared for him less, Iris would not have thought Frank worth this proximate candour. Her painful belated honesty is a token of love, the more so in that friends thought her loss of virginity had happened before she left Oxford.77 The exact sequence is obscure. Noel Eldridge, whom she had met through Oxford student journalism – Oxford Forward, Cherwell and the short-lived Kingdom Come – had asked her to marry him, arguing light-heartedly that, as he was almost certain to be killed, she could at least enjoy a modest war widow’s pension. Iris later told John Bayley, ‘laughing and weeping’, that she had told Noel she would not marry him, but was willing to sleep with him instead. He was indeed shot and killed by a sniper somewhere along the Bologna-Rimini road, having rejoined the Queen’s Royal Regiment fighting the Germans in Italy, in September 1944.
Noel’s twin sister Lilian Eldridge in 1998 recognised the playfulness of Noel’s bid,78 a playfulness Iris could express too. Noel wrote to his mother around November 1939:
The sanest attitude I think is The Murdoch’s: she is announcing that she wants the literary remains of all her friends and is going to make lots of money with a slim anthology when the war ends. I’ve refused to give her anything yet as I’m holding out for a cash payment.
Iris kept all her life many slim volumes of verse that had belonged to Eldridge: Auden’s 1930 poems, Herbert Read, David Gascoyne, Paul Eluard, Caudwell, Francis Thompson, and an Imagist anthology.
Leo Pliatzky believed, by contrast, that he was Iris’s first lover, very broadly construed, just as she was, after Leonie Marsh,