a time when Leo tried to undress her in his rooms at Corpus, and she wept. Noel Eldridge and Leo are not the only contenders,79 and the different stories which different friends were told reflect Iris’s intention not to cause hurt, as much as a positive desire to mystify, though she was certainly capable of mystification.80 It is hard to know how much weight to give to her jest, delighting in her own ‘modernity’, to Margaret Stanier81 that there was perhaps only one man in Oxford she had not had an affair with:82 bohemianism was for her generation often part of the same revolt against bourgeois conventionality as Communism.83 Walking across Westminster Bridge one midnight in 1943, Iris told Clare Campbell that she had recently lost her virginity and was sad about it (though the man ‘was very kind’, she added when they recapped this decades later). Clare had no idea how to respond. She recalls that Iris could not at this time hear without crying the theme song from a film, ‘Oh the Pity of it All’.
Frank knew and disliked Noel Eldridge, whom he once, probably from jealousy, called to Iris ‘that snake’, but Leo was his good friend. Indeed Leo and Frank ran into each other in a Field Army Workshop in North Africa in September 1943, and drank a can each of warm beer together. One perplexity of Frank and Iris’s friendship is that almost all the male friends to whom she refers in her letters to him – Leo, Noel Martin, David Hicks, Noel Eldridge, Michael Foot – were at some time in love with her. A number were at some point her lovers. When, in a letter dated 29 January 1942, she asks Frank for news of Leo, Hal Lidderdale and David Hicks, she is in sober fact asking him for news of three of his many potential rivals. Frank and Hal also met during the war, in Libya in July 1943; Iris heard of this meeting through Hal. The imaginative importance she accorded each man is another matter. She lost touch with Eldridge, for example, well before his death – he married after a brief courtship in 1943.* Hal and David became her lifelong friends. Frank, on the other hand, never her lover, preoccupied her all her life. And she played her cards close to her chest, one admirer rarely being told of rival-claimants.
The war, like the decade following it, was a period of sexual and emotional experimentation – something long claimed as a natural right by men, with whom Iris in some ways easily identified. The ‘wild talk’ she tells Frank about shows in an early letter to Philippa, two months after they had first properly met:
I have a great many friends in London – I have lunch or dinner with a different person every day – but I get no satisfaction or consolation from them, & our relations seem superficial & even chilly. I feel like going out & picking up the first man I meet that’s willing, simply for the sake of a more intense relationship of any description with another human being.84
This has an air of Lawrentian bravura, indicative of the itch for emancipation. Fifty years after the war Iris recalled ‘Hammersmith Palais de Danse with Susie Williams-Ellis, and we danced with soldiers, and they were so sweet and gentle. Waltz.’85 This was dancing for the love of it: her own range of acquaintance was large enough to provide her with a lover if she needed one. It is a paradox about Iris that she managed to run an increasingly complicated love-life, while continuing to appear to many observers chaste if not chilly. Anne Cloake and Leonie Marsh were two Somerville friends from the OULC. Anne, who thought she had taught Iris the facts of life, always referred to her as a prim blue-stocking.86 Leonie found Iris in 1942 virginal, and as late as 1944–45 the novelist Mulk Raj Anand, later a Minister in the Indian government, remarked to Vera Hoar in a pub that ‘Iris was always virginal.’ Frank, too, in his complex reply to Iris’s confession, reports his fear that she had been wedded to ‘a cold virginity’.
The myth of a cold virginity was one Iris had difficulties in dispelling. She had written to Frank one year before: ‘Gentle gloom bloody hell. I get so sick of that myth. I’m not a Blessed Damozel you know, at least not any more. There isn’t even a trace of Burne-Jones – & the faint aroma of incense has perished in the high wind …’ The ‘Blessed Damozel’ reference amounts to a standing joke in their circle, possibly an uncomfortable one.*
Iris had also written to Frank from Oxford: ‘I haven’t a face any more. I am prepared to give up the clear contours & the cutting edge which were formerly my ideal. I feel generally iconoclastic, and the eikon I most want to smash is the pretty golden image inside myself I’ve preserved so carefully. Completeness terrifies me – I have no more pat answers – I want to hurl myself down into the melee & the mud & I dont care how filthy it is …’ It was the Blessed Damozel image of herself she wished to smash, one in which, with its pressure of intense sexual idealisation, Frank had some investment. Iris’s nostalgie de la boue is one reply.
7
Iris’s letter took twelve weeks to reach Frank in the Levant. He replied at comparable length on 22 April: ‘I could have no cause for anger. Nor can I, since I am not conventional after the modern fashion, be unreservedly glad without due reflection.’
Rossetti’ for the wombat, and wishes Rossetti had painted wombats instead of ‘Blessed Damozels & all that poppycock’.
He lists two ‘stumbling-blocks’ or possible problems. He understands that his is not the only tendency towards idealisation: ‘I know of course, that your men are not ordinary men but parfit gentle knights. But it will take years of sorrow to realise how violently misogynistic most men are au fond.’ His second ‘stumbling-block’ points to the impact of her news on him. He writes of ‘a theory which I’m still engaged in formulating … I, you see, have messed up my sex-life … [with] a most terrible dichotomy by which women fall into two categories – Women it would be rather nice to sleep with provided one didn’t have to talk with them for more than five minutes/women one really likes avec lesquelles il ne vaut pas s’embeter dans un lit.'* This classic dualism, he perfectly realises, insults both kinds of women. He had expressed it three years earlier to his brother:
My chief concern is looking for a woman … There are plenty to pick up on the streets but few one wants … The trouble is, I expect rather a lot of a woman. She’s got to be one I can talk to, and if she is, she’s probably not sexual enough or else she’s clever enough to see through me. I’ve had friendships with several girls, like my beloved Iris, but it never gets farther than that. That’s the trouble with idealistic women, and if a woman’s not an idealist, I don’t want her. Enough of this muck. A few months in the army is bound to lower my standards.87
Three years had not lowered his standards, and his biographer believes that they were never so lowered.88 Frank goes on to refer Iris to the oft-hymned joys of a honeymoon in which both parties are virgin: ‘To medicine me from this would probably take years of psychotherapy combined with the best type of free love … But having suffered all this, I am coming to the conclusion that it is better to abstain altogether until one falls head over heels in love … I remember thinking … often … that a good love-affair would do you the devil of a lot of good.’ He feared that she was wedded to ‘a cold virginity from which it would be yearly more difficult to free yourself. So, on balance, it is obviously a subject for joy. If I’ve said anything here that is clumsy or stupid, forgive me. I’m afraid there is no finesse about me, Irushka.’ He ends, tellingly: ‘Do write me more long letters like your last. I talk a lot of baloney when I answer, but maybe I understand more than I let on.’
Frank’s reply contains an interesting