have not the vision to look into other people’s minds’, on the other ‘Tolstoi & Chehov went as far into the minds of our fellow-men as it is profitable or seemly to go.’ This seems in context like a caveat against pursuing dangerous lines of enquiry. Iris, who would write to Frank when depressed that she was ‘feeling rather Chehov tonight’, saw in him someone who, like T.E. Lawrence, could rise above the mere introspection to which her desk – and pub-bound life constrained her.
He must have known that, had Iris cared for him less, she would not have thought him worth her confession. The coldness of his analysis is his only mild punishment, and means of self-protection. Before writing it, he went and sat in a Greek Orthodox church. She had earlier enquired whether his apparently inviolable good spirits were ‘stiff upper lip on your part? Give me a line on that.’ His mother Theo also complained to him that ‘You never say when you are down.’ He replied to Iris that he was ‘far too malleable’ to keep a ‘stiff upper lip’.
This is bravado. Three weeks before, on 18 May 1943, Frank had written to his parents asking them to tear up his will,89 together with the letter he had left to accompany it – almost certainly a letter to Iris, or making mention of her. Within a month, also, M.R.D. Foot, to whom alone of his correspondents he was willing to sound vulnerable,90 received from him a ‘wildly melancholiac letter’ which so disturbed him that it prompted two letters in reply urging him not to despair, until Frank angrily persuaded Michael that his fears were ‘baseless’. ‘Faced with stark horror I prefer to grapple with it silently and alone,’ he said, à propos watching a companion parachute to his death. Had he just ‘roman-candled’ in love? ‘Half-man, half-boy’, he had described himself to Iris in 1939, and his growing older did not prevent him from finding tears in his eyes on leaving his unit – his father touchingly wrote that his description of this parting was worthy of Tolstoy. Nor did it prevent him from weeping the following year – in SOE, and with the end of the menace of Fascism finally in view – to think of the new Europe they were to build after the war.
Iris’s announcement of the loss of her virginity did not change the direction of Frank’s attachment. On 22 July 1943 in Libya he met their mutual friend Hal Lidderdale, ‘a small dark-eyed humanist’ and Captain in No. 2 Anti-Aircraft battery, and they agreed about the complacent and stupid ethos of their respective officers’ messes.
Hal and I are really rivals for Iris, but the fair object of our rivalry is so remote in time and space that it only serves to cement our friendship. At the moment I think Hal’s leading quite comfortably, [as] Iris goes to stay with his mother.91
Iris wrote to Frank in spring 1943: ‘As a matter of interest, how have you fared with women in the East? I don’t mean from the grand passion point of view, but just from the sex experience point of view.’ Very ‘Ursula and Gudrun’, this rehearsed casualness, and that cunningly placed word ‘just’, would-be worldly, downplaying the ‘merely’ physical aspects of sexuality. It seems to betoken the hope that an equivalent confession to her own from Frank would lessen any sense of guilt on her part, although she would certainly have been jealous, too. ‘Do you spend your days lying with lovely Iranians? How do you feel about that racket now? It’s terrible, Frank, how little we know really in spite of fairly frequent letters of how the other party is developing in these fast and fatal years. Perhaps we shouldn’t pry into each other’s minds … God what a difference half an hour’s conversation would make.’
8
Frank had other ways of learning about Iris. Leo Pliatzky wrote to him: ‘I have continued to hear from Iris at intervals, though nothing in the last week or two and nothing at all unusual. She finds the world tragic and moving, but that is not unusual. I shall not be writing to her for some time … But when I do I shall convey your undying affection – perhaps a little more articulately than you have so far managed to do.’92
On one of Iris’s visits to Oxford before June 1943,93 when Vera Hoar took her Finals, she thought that Iris looked particularly radiant. ‘Go and sleep with some nice man … it’s a technique that has to be learnt,’ Iris sagely advised, a briskly matter-of-fact memory that might be set against another. There was also the emotional Iris who, as Leo noted, found the world in general ‘tragic and moving’. Iris sometimes found love so, too. A Senior Staff Officer at the Treasury, W.C. Roberts, MBE, saw her travelling home on a bus one winter evening in the 1943 blackout, the bus windows covered in scrim against bomb blast. (The war years found him writing the long – anonymous, of course – His Majesty ‘s Stationery Office Blue Book: A Digest of Pension Law, with whose rulings on Civil Service pensions and conditions of service Iris would have been familiar.) Iris was peering out into the gloom through the little rectangle which was left clear and he realised with distress that she was silently sobbing, the tears running down her face. Treasury reserve was overcome and he moved to put a comforting arm about her.
‘Miss Murdoch, what is the matter? Can I help in any way?’
‘No thank you. I’m quite all right. It’s just this love business,’ she cried.
‘Never mind,’ he said, thinking it indiscreet to enquire further and having faith in both her common sense and her intelligence.94 ‘I’m sure it will work out all right in the end.’95
*Special European Labour Immigration Board. Probably based on the European Voluntary Worker scheme (EVW), through which Iris’s friends the Jancars (see Chapter 9) came to Britain.
*The Swiss and the Wellington, like the Wheatsheaf, Black Horse and Fitzroy, were well-known for their literary-bohemian ambience, and formed part of a familiar pub-crawl. See e.g. Tambimuttu, ed. Jane Williams, Bridge Between Two Worlds (Peter Owen, 1989), pp-75ff.
*Susan Stebbing had died the week before.
*A letter to Paddy O’Regan is also dated 3.30 a.m., and one of her poems was completed at 4.30 a.m.
*An airgraph was written on a single quarto sheet, then microfilmed and taken by flying-boat to its destination (Poole harbour in Dorset to Karachi took only three days), where it was developed, magnified, put into a manila envelope and delivered.
*All three letters are undated, but C1942–43. Iris also wrote: ‘I am more sorry than I can say that your dawning interest in the Party should have coincided with an era of bloodiness really unparalleled in my experience of our extremely imperfect organisation … Oxford is not typical of the Party, & this recent fracas not typical of Oxford'; ‘Serious political work (as opposed to the Labour Party) does tend to shorten tempers, fray nerves, & … produce the text brandishing dogmatist.’ Marjorie was finally deterred from joining the Party by the ten-shilling subscription.
*See Chapter 7.
*Frank to Iris, 14 August 1943: ‘Michael [Foot] has sent me Creve-Coeur. … Aragon has scored several bulls.’ Iris later sent a copy to David Hicks which had to be cleared by the censor.
*Noel