A pain-free back and a happy marriage? Or just a lamb in wolf’s clothing all along? I have the signed book here, together with a little pile of papers with his autograph – not sold in the playground after all.
Dahl was one of those geniuses who happen along only very rarely in the world of children’s literature, someone who was totally in tune with the child’s way of thinking, and view of life, and with exactly what children needed from their stories. His language, like his characters, like his plots, is sometimes anarchic, a firework display of inventiveness. He gave permission to children to be true to their real selves, not the selves grown-ups were trying to turn them into, let alone those their parents fondly imagine them to be. That is why children respond to his books and probably always will. His stories are timeless in their appeal because the quality of insight is recognised by each new generation.
Did he actually like children? He did more than that. He respected them for what they were, as relatively few adults ever do.
I revised my opinion of him totally, as who would not, but I daresay the grump was still in there somewhere ready to come out fighting.
Decline and Rise?
IN THE SITTING ROOM are all the Iris Murdoch novels I have kept, all those I have guessed I may one day want to read again out of the twenty-six she wrote. I have kept the ones I love the best (rather than those I think the best) but who knows if those will be the ones that last? At present, her reputation is in the decline to near-oblivion that customarily follows the death of an author. It is the time – and it can last anything from five to fifty years – when novels sink and are forgotten as the reading world moves on, before someone plunges an arm into the depths and pulls up first one then another – and so begins the slow process of reassessment. In one sense, of course, Murdoch’s novels will not have changed. How can they? And yet they have, because until it is read a book is a dead thing, it must be resurrected every time it finds a new reader, and those who read Iris Murdoch in the future will be very different people from the ones who read her now. They will have been formed in times unlike our own and will have different frames of literary reference. The novel and the way it is written will have changed, too. I first read Iris Murdoch’s books as they were published. Novels were different then. People’s tastes were different. The world around us was different.
Her books have not yet re-surfaced; they are not being assessed by new reading generations. Perhaps they never will be. Who knows that, either? There is no telling which writers will sink permanently, which will come up and be appreciated afresh, which ones may languish for seventy years or so before being found by some reader browsing among old books.
If I had to make a bet, it would be that The Bell, surely her best novel, will last, as will The Sea, The Sea, which won the Booker Prize. Perhaps the early ones – The Sandcastle, Under the Net, Flight from the Enchanter – will survive over the later. I have those, as I have The Italian Girl, because of its wonderful opening paragraph. But as time went on the novels became almost parodies of Iris Murdoch, and the last few seem clotted and overwrought.
But how could The Bell not be viewed as the classic that it surely is, ten, twenty, fifty years from now?
She is the mistress of the great set piece, the Dickensian or Hardyean scene in which characters and setting come together at some key moment in the plot, and heightened emotional tension is underlined by some momentous atmospherics – a weather event, perhaps, or some strange visual extravagance. In this novel the moment occurs when Dora and Toby secretly raise the great bell from the depths of the lake by pulling it behind the tractor, gazing at it as it emerges slowly, slowly and the water streams off its sides in the moonlight.
Critics stressed Iris Murdoch’s metaphors, and the philosophy and ethical purpose binding her novels together, both underpinning and restraining the wilder flights of her imagination. Her humour tends to be forgotten but she was a comic writer with a rich sense of the risible in human portentousness and ambition. The Bell is about an informal Christian community based at a country house, Imber Court, situated in the grounds of a convent of enclosed nuns. Some of the mockery of the inhabitants’ lack of self-awareness and spiritual pretensions is achingly funny. She looked at people with a clear, unprejudiced, unjaundiced but generally affectionate eye, a watcher on the periphery of the innumerable dances of friendship, love, courtship, marriage. She is especially good at families and their complex inter-relationships. The early novels are breathtakingly well plotted, so that we read on with a sense of real excitement. Will the pale and beautiful Catherine really take her solemn vows and enter the convent? Is her brother, the sinister Nick, with his shotgun and his dog, a force for evil? What desperate secret drives the man who heads the Imber community? All of her novels race ahead, with the reader clinging on madly through twists and turns and astonishing revelations, among huge casts of characters as varied and strange as those of Dickens.
Halfway through The Bell is a scene in which a group of madrigalists sing:
The silver swan that living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat.
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore
She sang her first and last, and sang no more.
I have only to read that to hear it, sung not by a choir but by Iris herself and her husband John Bayley on one foggy Sunday, after lunch at the house of a friend in Warwickshire. They had arrived in a battered grey pickup van, eaten, talked and drunk copiously, and then, with Iris sitting on a cushion beside the log fire and John in a low chair beside her, quite suddenly and without any apparent signal passing between them, let alone for any apparent reason, had begun to sing. They had light, wavering but not untuneful voices and everyone fell silent to listen. It could have been funny, a madrigal sung by these two small, oddly gnome-like figures, one of the country’s leading novelists, and a distinguished don and man of letters. In fact, it was rather moving.
I interviewed Iris about her work on Radio 4 in the early 1980s. She was her own best critic, explaining, elucidating, but slightly distracted because she was due to meet her mother in a pub after the recording and was anxious not to be late in case harm befell her.
I did not see her often after that, but every meeting was memorable. My elder daughter shared a birthday with her and Iris once gave me a detailed briefing about their star sign – Cancer. I would see her walking slowly home down the Banbury Road laden with groceries in carrier bags and always refusing a lift. ‘We should all walk more.’ My children’s school was in the next road to their house and she once stopped me to ask my four-year-old if she was learning to sing. ‘You should sing,’ she told her earnestly. ‘It is so good for you.’ I remembered ‘The Silver Swan’. I am saddened that so many people only knew of her from the books and film about her decline into the darkness of Alzheimer’s disease, which stripped her of her wit and humour, her gaiety and genius – but above all of her dignity.
The last time we met, she had indeed begun that decline, yet somehow her dignity was still intact. I was signing books at a charity sale in the Bishop’s House in Oxford when the door opened on John, followed by Iris, dressed, by him no doubt, in a long, beige mac and a funny little tweed pork pie hat. It had been perhaps ten years since I had seen her. She was the same and yet dreadfully different, recognisable and yet a complete stranger. But I did not then know how far away from us she might actually be and I was so pleased to see her that I got up and took her hands and told her so. Her troubled, puzzled eyes looked into mine for a long time, searching anxiously for some clue, I suppose. John brought a cup of coffee and a biscuit, sat her down at my table and fed her, moistening small pieces of the biscuit and popping them into her willing mouth. And then, all of a sudden, a split second of awareness transformed her face, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. Was it recognition? Probably not. But there was a connection between us, as she took hold of my hand and held it very tightly, and smiled. It didn’t seem to matter wheth
er she had any idea that we had known one another in another life or not. I wanted to thank her. I wanted to say something that would remind her of who she was and what she meant to so many of her devoted readers. But I could not think of the right words, just let her hold my hand for a few more moments, and watch the brightness fade gradually from her eyes, leaving nothing but vague panic.
And then John took her away.
I have lined up the novels of hers I have in order of publication. I should not have let any go, I realise, they are all of a piece, the good and less good, and all make up the strange genius of the novelist who was Iris Murdoch.
I have read books about her and somehow every one seems to describe a completely different woman – the fierce, passionate young Iris, the philosopher, the tutor, the lover, the famous novelist, Dame Iris, and I daresay they are all, in their way, true. She was not easily pinned down. I can only remember the Iris I knew, not closely, not well, but with honour and respect and with singular affection.
Forgotten
JOHN BRAINE. ALAN SILLITOE. David Storey … names from the fifties. Storey is remembered as a fine playwright, but does anybody now read his novels, so influential to those of us growing up among books and writers of that decade and the one following? This Sporting Life and Radcliffe sit alongside John Braine’s Room at the Top and Sillitoe’s iconic The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner in old orange Penguin editions, their titles reminding me of the rise of the working-class novelist which changed the ways of publishing for ever. I re-read the Sillitoe a year or so ago and it stands up to the test of time pugnaciously, but sitting alongside it I have found another novel. I thought it a minor masterpiece when I first read it but that was thirty years ago. I have decided that reading from home must include books of which I once had a high opinion of some kind – that is, I once thought them very funny, wonderfully well written, original, or just very enjoyable. I have kept a number which seem to have earned their place, though time changes the books one loves.
Will I still rate John Wain’s The Smaller Sky highly? I have put it on my bedside table. I am going to read it over the next few nights. Will I want to keep it on the shelf of assorted paperbacks next to the pinball machine?
Yes, is the answer to that, a week later. Yes, with some minor reservations. The Smaller Sky is not a perfect novel – but then, how many are? It seems dated, which is fine, but, in a way, not quite dated enough and that is true of a lot of novels of the 1950s and 1960s. I had forgotten how very moving it is. It is a poet’s novel, not because it is written in lyrical language, certainly not because it is over-written which is what ‘poetic’ often means when applied to prose. But John Wain was a poet of some distinction, and that is evident in the way he shapes The Smaller Sky, in its beautifully balanced structure and its imagery, and the wonderfully evocative descriptions.
It seems at first to be a quiet and rather low-key book, yet it is really a passionate plea for individual freedom and a howl of rage at the conventions, restrictions and insensitivities of some human institutions. John Wain was not one of the Angry Young Men for nothing.
The hero, Arthur Geary, is a middle-aged commuter, conscientious and weary, dutifully supporting his wife and family, successful enough and apparently contented. And then he begins to hear drums beating frenziedly inside his head. His response is to run away, to escape into a life of perfect order and calm lived entirely on Paddington station, for here alone the drums in his head are silenced. Geary is law-abiding, he has saved money which he sends regularly to his family. He now wants to save his sanity. But shouldn’t someone ‘rescue’ him? Surely he cannot go on as he is. What about his family, his job, his nice home and his reputation?
Various people – friends, colleagues, experts – try to persuade him to return to the ‘normal’ world but none of them deflects him from his purpose. They are no more annoying than gnats buzzing round. But his relationship with his son David is a different matter. Wain has written an utterly convincing, honest and sensitive account of the deep, inarticulate, agonised love of a father for his brave, confused and lonely child.
Something seemed to break inside Geary. It was as if, inside his chest, he had been carrying his feelings in carefully contrived glass containers. Now the containers shattered and his chest was flooded with blood, mush and broken glass. He opened his mouth to say something but the possibilities jammed his brain. He wanted to say that he would leave the station and come home with David then and there. He wanted to invite David to move into the hotel with him. He wanted to explain to David about the drums. He wanted to promise David that he would leave the station hotel within a week and find a place to live where David could come and stay every school holiday. Beyond all these things he wanted to say something that would lift the cold weight from David’s heart and from his own. Nothing came and he allowed his mouth to close, drooping at the corners. Father and son looked at each other across the impersonal furniture.
John Wain wrote other novels – Hurry on Down is probably the best-known, but I wonder if this, or his poetry, or some very good short stories, have that extra touch of genius that makes The Smaller Sky a classic. Forgotten, probably. But still a classic.
Writing in Books
THE ONLY SORT of writing in books I never do is of my name in the front, though a few books which I owned as a child have my full name inscribed, in ink, and some even have name, address followed by England, Great Britain, Europe, The Northern Hemisphere, The World, The Universe, The Solar System, Outer Space … do children still do that ? I hope so.
Some people continue to write their names in books all their lives, others write in the books they give to others. As I often buy books from second-hand shops, charity shops, bazaars, church fetes and junk stalls, I seem to have acquired many cast-offs with their provenance inked in. ‘To Mr Battle, with best wishes from Form V.’
‘Aunt Em, Happy Birthday from Laura.’
‘Mr John Gregory Mountford, from his mother.’
‘To Annie from Frank. Christmas 1944.’
‘Love to Dad from Ena, May, Jo, Phyl and Rodney, Hoping this will give you something to laugh at.’
‘To Squadron Leader Bendix on his Retirement.’
Who were they? Why did they give this book to that person? Did that person enjoy it? Why did they not keep it?
There was once a fashion for writing on the flyleaf: ‘If this book should chance to roam/Smack its b.m and send it home.’
I stopped putting my name inside my books when I was fourteen and I never inscribe any I give as presents, though I sign plenty of copies of my own novels, as every writer does. It’s a pretty debased currency, the author’s signature. No wonder Roald Dahl only signed for children.
Happily, I can go among all our books without finding a single volume bearing a bookplate. Bookplates are for posers, even when beautifully designed by real artists and engravers, though most people claim they are only there to identify the owner in case of loss. I don’t believe that. Do people put ID plates inside their handbags and wallets, or etch them on the family silver and china? Of course they don’t, and only children have name-tags sewn into their clothes.
Yet the people who deface the front of a perfectly good book with their stuck-on bookplate are always the first to throw up their hands in horror when someone like me writes all over the text. ‘Defacing a book’ was one of the things you promised solemnly on the Bible never to do when you joined the library and that was fine, library books being borrowed, never owned.
But my books are mine to scribble in. When I first went to university, I had to own some textbooks because they were needed for a long, intensive period but the price of new textbooks being then, as now, prohibitive, I did what everyone did and bought secondhand from final-year students advertising them on the college noticeboards. By the time I had my Anglo-Saxon Primer, my Beowulf and Ancrene Wisse and Sir Gawain, Middle English verse and prose, and Robinson’s edition of Chaucer, they had gone through many generat
ions of King’s undergraduates and the margins were thick with annotations, stanzas underlined and double-underlined. It was a badge of honour to own a book in which there were more pencilled annotations and comments and footnotes than lines of printed text, just as it was de rigueur to own a fifteenth-hand red and blue King’s scarf. I wonder whoever bought a new one? Somebody must, but if so, they dropped it into the dust of the Strand and Surrey Street and trampled all over it many times before wearing it. I did not see a pristine, un-annotated textbook outside a library for my three years as a student, and the habit of making notes in the margin was formed for life. I scribble, underline, note, add, cross out, put in exclamation marks, turn down corners – even sometimes jot down phone numbers and PINs, and reminders to buy cat food. Not in every book – some pass through me undigested, bought, read, passed on. There is nothing in them worth noting or underlining.
Perhaps the idea that books are sacred and should never be marked or otherwise sullied goes back to the time when each one had to be hand-copied by a scribe; and then a little later, when they were expensively printed, also by hand and bound in that way, too, so that you would no more have scribbled in a book than you would have carved your name into the gateleg table in your morning room. When books were so rare and costly, people did not spend hours of their lives transcribing and printing rubbish, but once printing became a mass process and books cheap, the book, inevitably, was no longer sacred. If you discount fine, private press books, and expensive coffee-table volumes which are made to be looked at and admired but which only retain their value if they are in near-mint condition, books are not in themselves objects of worth. A paperback blockbuster may be left about, thrown away and scribbled in; and who is to say that my marginalia on the text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight were not of great value to whichever student bought it from me when I left King’s?