Iris Murdoch's secret love affair

DA THE INDEPENDENT
Revealed: Iris Murdoch's secret love affair

Letters between the late novelist and one of her young students tell of their 30-year relationship

By James Morrison


Intimate details of a tempestuous 30-year relationship between the author Iris Murdoch and a former student are revealed for the first time in today's Independent on Sunday.


A series of alternately sensual and bitter letters from the novelist are published tomorrow in a memoir by David Morgan, who recalls how they fell in love as she supervised his Master's thesis at the Royal College Art.

Morgan, now a lecturer himself at Chelsea College of Art and Design, was a 24-year-old novice from a troubled, itinerant background when he met Murdoch, already a respected author in her forties, in February 1964. But in his book, With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch, he recalls how they "clicked" the moment he entered her office for a supervision – and within weeks were engaged in a passionate clinch at her flat in west London.

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Their first kiss, a spontaneous lunge over an art book they were perusing, signalled the start of a two-year phase Morgan now sees as a "love affair". In a letter soon afterwards, Murdoch writes: "I had intended, earlier, that we should part for the vacation on rather more formal terms. But by last Wednesday it had become impossible not to touch you & to draw you a good deal closer."

In the same missive, she describes Morgan's "singularly good-looking head", and hints at less than platonic feelings for him by explaining she has told her husband, the writer and academic John Bayley, about their encounter. In apparent allusions to earlier lovers, such as Nobel prize-winning author Elias Canetti, she writes: "And I want this to be 'clean-cut': I too have had so many muddled & twisted relationships, and I want ours to be steady & clear, & I think it can be. (I have, by the way, mentioned your existence in general terms to John Bayley, who trusts me absolutely & never wants to hear details...)".

Morgan recounts how, following stints in a school for maladjusted boys and an asylum, Murdoch took him under her wing after he managed to blag his way into the RCA with limited artistic ability. And he describes his painful memories of how a series of clumsy indiscretions on his part – keeping her letters, and boasting to a peer that her patronage would guarantee him a good mark for his thesis – eventually tipped her from "love" into "rage".

Though the pair kept up their correspondence for 29 more years, their meetings became shorter and less frequent. Morgan's last memory of Murdoch is of helping a "doddery" old woman on to a train at Paddington station in 1995 – months before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Recalling planting a kiss on her forehead, he adds: "She only half knew who I was at that meeting."

GOOD QUESTIONS

Martin Scorsese question's. My questions.
“What are we, in a sense? Are we our memories? If we take them away do we still have a persona? Is it imperative that everybody has to remember, that everybody has to suffer?”

LETTERS FROM THE FRONT

Robert Fisk to me is agenius...

DA INDEPENDENT

Robert Fisk’s World: The true eloquence of letters from the front

Is it their humanity, or fear, that spares real soldiers from the clichés of journalism?

Saturday, 6 March 2010

How come old soldiers don't write in clichés? We reporters fill our dispatches with clichés about "gathering war clouds" and guns "falling silent" – read any (and I repeat, any) newspaper, and you'll see what I mean. Is it their basic humanity – or savagery, or fear – that largely spares real soldiers from the clichés of journalism and the ungrammatical shorthand of the email?


Take Hal Crookall, whom readers last met in this column as he tramped with his platoon over the sand dunes of Dunkirk, the first reaction of his soldiers on seeing the thousands of soldiers on the beaches identical to that of the British sergeant in the movie Atonement. "Fuck me!" they roared. Well, Hal has dropped me another note – and be warned, Reader, this is strong stuff, not for the breakfast table – after reading an article by me on the Menin Gate at Ypres, which bears the names of more than 56,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers whose bodies were never found after the First World War.

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Hal's memories were of that same Menin Gate – during the Second World War. Retreating with the BEF rearguard in 1940, he found himself defending Ypres, the very same Belgian city still undergoing reconstruction from the ruins of the 1914-1918 war. And – irony of ironies – he was ordered to take up position next to Lutyens' gloomy monument. "I saw the Menin Gate for the first time, amazed at the number of names on it, with the ghastly thought that maybe our names would soon be added to them."

The stage is set. "I was a very young second lieutenant, and I was sent with my platoon to take up a position to the left of the Menin Gate on what seemed to be a canal bank. There were German snipers on the opposite side ... I got a message from the CO to join him underneath the Menin Gate, for instructions." Second Lieutenant Crookall was almost killed by a German mortar bomb when he arrived and was told that a Royal Engineers unit was placing an explosive charge under the bridge behind the Menin Gate. Hal's job was to take a platoon to the other side of the bridge and hold off Hitler's legions. He ran to the second floor of a house, finding a window that faced up the street with a pile of rubbish under the window covered with a tarpaulin.

"I dived on top of it, poked a Bren gun through the window and started firing... I soon became aware that there was a most dreadful smell in the room. As soon as I was able, I folded back the tarpaulin... I was to have nightmares for many years after what followed. I realised that I was lying on top of a pile of dead bodies. Immediately facing me, inches away, was what was left of an old man's face, covered in crawling white maggots." Then Hal ran back to the great gate, noticing "a magnificent Alsatian dog in a doorway with half its nose blown off", and another human body being eaten "by an animal resembling a polecat".

The explosives went off, blowing up the bridge and damaging the Menin Gate – and though Hal may not know it, the shrapnel marks of that blast are actually still on the gate – before heading for the Channel coast. "So you see, Robert, your accounts about Ypres can also trigger more recent memories than the First World War!" So it would seem. A soldier's-eye view of danger and horror and history. And by chance when I got Hal's letter, I was reading Arthur Stockwin's lovely, deeply sad book about an affair of letters between the woman who would become his mother, Edith Ainscow of Birmingham, and her soldier sweetheart of the Great War, Second Lieutenant Geoff Boothby. He was a tunneller close to Ypres, digging 30 feet into the blue clay of Flanders to attack the German lines from beneath the ground. She was 18, he 21. Edith had known Geoff for only four days and their letters are a moving bond between them. Geoff tries to spare his young lady the darkness of the trenches although he speaks of the death of a young officer, the cold, the damp – this is Ypres in the early spring of 1916: "I've had a mouldy night of it, sinking a shaft under the most trying conditions of wet, cold & bad luck... Huns reported working two yards from my gallery, which meant yours truly lying on his tummy in sodden clay for half an hour and hearing nothing... Yesterday three crumps (shells) made themselves considerably de trop by landing 10 yards from our dugout, one smashing the entrance. But we're getting used to such trifling things as shells." Edith pleads for a picture of Geoff in is uniform. "Geoff Dearest, I've got your photo just now and I can hardly take my eyes off it even to write to you. I didn't know anything could make anybody so happy."

But by 20 March, Geoff was writing: "Nearly all my friends in the Staffords have been killed in the fighting round Ypres a few weeks ago. It's a horrible sad thing how many friendships have been made & broken by this war... But it does make one feel really proud to be an Englishman, when one knows how unselfishly one's friends go west." Ouch. Just two months later, Geoff was killed by a German underground explosion, dying instantly, 30 feet down in the Flanders mud only a mile or so from where – almost a quarter of a century later – Hal himself would be fighting for his life against the Germans. Geoff's body was not recovered but his name is remembered on the monument at Bellewaerde Wood.

When Geoff's officer, Major J M Bliss, writes to his mother Alice, he begins with devastating eloquence. "I am more sorry than I can express to have to send you some very bad news, in fact the worst, of your son Lieut Boothby..."

In Alice's papers, Arthur Stockwin found a handwritten note from Alice, dedicated to her dead son.

Will you come back when

The Tide Turns?

After many days?

My heart yearns to know.

And so I seem

To have you still the same

In one world with me

As if it were part and parcel,

One shadow, and we need not

dissemble

Our darkness: do you understand?

For I have told you plain how it is.

I shall always wonder over you, and

look for you

And you will always be with me.

I think even Hal will be lost for words at that.

BELLS IN LITERATURE

Nice, nice, nice!

DA THE GUARDIAN

Ten of the best bells in literature )
John Mullan The Guardian,

The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L Sayers

In sleepy Fenland St Paul, the death of a villager is marked by nine rings of the great bell, Tailor Paul, in the tower of the church. The visiting sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, finds himself challenged by a mystery involving jewel theft and murder that centres on the bell tower. Only Wimsey's knowledge of campanology allows him to decipher the coded message that unravels the tale.


Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo

Quasimodo, the hunchbacked bellringer, lives in the belfry of Notre Dame and has been made deaf by the bells. He loves ringing them, "long morning serenades, which lasted from prime to compline; peals from the belfry for a high mass, rich scales drawn over the smaller bells for a wedding". But when he encounters the beautiful Esmerelda, he abandons the bells for a greater love.


"Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Street Station" by John Betjeman

Betjeman's characteristic celebration of the City of London's "steepled forest of churches" evokes the sounds of bells breaking the "Sunday silence". It begins with the "tingle tang" of "the bell of St Mildred's Bread Street", and ends by drowning in "the roaring flood of a twelve-voiced peal from Paul's".


"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray

One of the best-known opening lines in English poetry is the sound of a bell ringing: "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day." Gray's tolling curfew was the traditional sound of the country parish. Since the days of William the Conqueror, the curfew bell had been rung to signal that it was time for bed.


The Bell by Iris Murdoch

A wonderfully batty cast of characters converges on Imber Abbey in Gloucestershire. According to legend, the abbey bell flew into the lake centuries earlier when a bishop cursed the place because of the sexual misdemeanours of one of the nuns. A new bell is to be installed, but Toby and Dora find the old bell in the lake and decide to effect a bell-swap. Chaos ensues.


Peter Pan by JM Barrie

Tinkerbell the fairy communicates with the sound of a tinkling bell, which can only be understood by initiates. "It is the fairy language. You ordinary children can never hear it, but if you were to hear it you would know that you had heard it once before."


The Magician's Nephew by CS Lewis

In the distant, dying world of Charn, Digory comes upon a small golden bell with a hammer next to it and this needling rhyme: "Make your choice, adventurous Stranger; / Strike the bell and bide the danger, / Or wonder, till it drive you mad, / What would have happened if you had." He cannot resist striking the bell, whose reverberations bring the witch Queen Jadis to life.


Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Macbeth waits for his wife to signal that the sleeping Duncan's guards have been drugged. She rings a bell, and Macbeth exits to do the terrible deed. "I go, and it is done; the bell invites me. / Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell."


"The Bells" by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe's lyric starts cheerily with sleigh bells, proceeding to wedding bells and then alarum bells, before the poem's final section evokes the "iron bells" that make us shudder with terror. "For every sound that floats / From the rust within their throats / Is a groan".


In Memoriam AHH by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

"Ring out the old, ring in the new." In section CVI of Tennyson's elegy, church bells ring out across the Lincolnshire snow at Christmas, lifting the poet from the gloom and pain that have engulfed him. "Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, / The flying cloud, the frosty light: / The year is dying in the night; / Ring out, wild bells, and let him die."

A LETTER FROM OSCAR WILDE

DA THE STAR

The Wilde side of life is worth a fortune

A LETTER from Oscar Wilde to his colourful Sheffield-born publisher is set to fetch

up to £6,000 when it is auctioned later this month.
In the 150-word letter, which the witty Victorian writer posted from France to Sheffield-born Leonard Smithers on March 15, 1898, Wilde says: "There are only two forms of writers in England, the unread and the unreadable."

Leonard Charles Smithers, son of dentist John Smithers, was born at Infirmary Road, Sheffield, in December 1861. By the time he was 10 the family were living at 385 Infirmary Road, with live-in servants named Catherine Layland and Ellen Cordon.

Smithers was in his 30s and living in London when he received the letter from Wilde which is coming up for sale at Bonhams in London on March 23.

Smithers had been educated at Wesley College For The Law in Sheffield and started his working life as a solicitor with the Sheffield law firm Meredith, Roberts and Mills, before he made an unusual career move by becoming a publisher of saucy books.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "although Smithers gained his livelihood for a time as a solicitor, he was far more interested in books and art than in the legal profession.

"In his spare time he rummaged through the bookstalls and haunted the antiquarian bookshops of Sheffield and its environs, increasingly adept at ferreting out the odd rarity that he could afford. Books of erotica appear to have been his major interest."

Eventually, in the late 1880s, when he was in his late 20s, Smithers set up - with the help of a young Sheffield printer and book dealer named Harry Sidney Nichols - the Sheffield-based Erotika Biblion Society.

This was so successful Smithers and Nichols moved the business to London where their bookshop was at Wardour Street, off Oxford Street, while the printing business was in Soho.

There they continued to produce erotic books.

In 1897, renowned book man Bernard Quaritch described Smithers as the "cleverest" publisher in London.

How and when Smithers first met Oscar Wilde is a mystery, but there is no doubt Wilde was a fan.

He said of Smithers that he wore ties "delicately fastened with a diamond brooch of the impurest water - or perhaps wine, as he never touches water: it goes to his head at once".

He added: "He is also a delightful companion and a dear fellow, very kind to me."

In February 1898 - the year after Oscar Wilde's release from Reading Jail, where he had been imprisoned for two years for homosexual offences - Smithers published The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde's epic poem inspired by his spell in jail.

The poem was promptly derided by a one-legged poet and critic named William Ernest Henley - the real-life inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island character Long John Silver - who sneeringly dismissed The Ballad as a jumble of "excellence and rubbish".

Wilde was understandably less than amused and, in the letter to Smithers coming up for sale, wrote: "I don't think I should answer Henley... I think it would be quite vulgar - what does it matter... he is secretly jealous...

"Besides there are only two forms of writer in England, the unread and the unreadable - Henley belongs to the former class."

Sadly, at the time Smithers received the letter, he was just two years from downfall. He was declared bankrupt in September 1900, and illness drove him to drink and drugs.

He died in poverty on his 46th birthday on December 19, 1907, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Fulham.

He left just £99, and was survived by his wife Alice and 16-year-old son Jack.

RITRATTI DI SIGNORA, PORTRAITS D'UNE FEMME

DA NYTIMES MAGAZINE

Portaits of a Lady Baron Adolph de Meyer
Culture, Travel By JORDAN HRUSKA


At the turn of the century, magazine and catalog illustrations of the latest fashion collections were rather dry, using models who acted more like cutout dolls. It took the work of Baron Adolph de Meyer to loosen up fashion editorial with challenging portraits in the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. A rare showing of more than 100 of his society portraits, commercial fashion photography and still lifes recently opened at Robert Miller Gallery (through April 3; robertmillergallery.com).

De Meyer’s beginnings in photography coincided with those of the various Photo-Secession movements in New York, London and Vienna, which all fought hard for photography’s place in the realm of fine art. His early portraits of Edwardian London society and still lifes possessed a luminosity that reflected Symbolist ideals, which sought to transcend reality.

As the first staff photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, de Meyer photographed some of the most powerful society women. Emerging from a constrained Victorian era, these women, with great aplomb, would assert their status in theatrical manners: one de Meyer muse would often drift down Venice’s Grand Canal with a leopard in her lap. A vintage print of Mrs. W.R. Vanderbilt taken in 1919 on view shows her in a prim yet urgent World War I volunteer uniform, while another impressionistic portrait of the actress Betty Lee from 1918 has her dressed in a jet-black frock, bending slightly forward, with a feather plume of her hat and what look to be trails of smoke hanging in the air.

De Meyer delighted in highlighting sinuous forms and in exposing obtuse body angles — both speaking to elements of nascent sexuality and sensual transfiguration. Such poses weren’t only reserved for women. Also on view is an image the photographer took of the Ballets Russes performer Vaslav Nijinksy actively lusting in dance for a nymph.

Like all things fashionable, de Meyer’s work fell out of vogue with the onset of Modernist aesthetics, despite his attempts to employ them. His name remained legendary, however, and his work can be thought of as informing the styles of his contemporaries Man Ray and Cecil Beaton. For vanguard publications like Vogue, he not only made portraits but helped these publications become portraits of an age.

PARIS, SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY

DA THE GUARDIAN

by Stephen Emms

Shakespeare and Company, a creative sanctuary

Long after Hemingway and the Beats, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop is still encouraging Paris to read and write

I've been to Paris many times. But, while I invariably wind up at La Belle Hortense for a browse over a glass of red, I'd yet to sample the charms of legendary English bookshop Shakespeare and Company.

The first Shakespeare and Company, run by Sylvia Beach at rue de l'Odéon, was the base for Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the gang, but closed in the second world war. In 1951 George Whitman opened his own shop, Le Mistral, in a former 17th-century monastery overlooking Notre Dame. It became the base for Beat generation writers such as Burroughs and Ginsberg. He changed the name after Beach's death in 1962.

I stand outside. Its Seine-side location is idyllic, even on a freezing February morning, with workmen on ladders outside its bottle-green facade, mending the electricals, and a skeletal tree wreathed in a string of bulbs. Summer must be wonderful here: there are empty garden chairs strewn between trays of hardy books.

28-year-old Sylvia Whitman, George's daughter, has agreed to show me round. Signs at the entrance marked "Beat" and "Lost" are a reminder of both stores' heavyweight associations. A wishing well, around which a handful of customers shuffle, glistens with pennies.

Her father, Sylvia says, hoped to work until he was 100 but, forced to retire at 93, now lives on the second floor. He no longer gives interviews. We wander past shelves devoted to fiction, biography, art and French interest. "It's more organised that it looks," she says, with a laugh.

Paperbacks line red wooden steps leading upstairs to what Sylvia calls the "non-commercial" floor: a library in which you could lose yourself, with one rule: books mustn't leave the premises. Here, as on the ground floor, single mattresses lurk between the shelves, and, in the children's section, a bunk bed. It's on these that young authors sleep each night.

"We have six at any one time," says Sylvia, "generally in their early 20s. They come to write from all over the world while doing a couple of hours in the shop a day. Generally they stay a week to a month, but one English poet stayed seven years." Seven years – really? "If someone's reading and writing, we encourage that," she says. "It's a different life after closing time. They all come out of the woodwork! And for us, it's an organic cycle: aspiring writers tapping away upstairs and books being sold downstairs."

Everything here encourages creativity. A tiny enclosed bureau, lined with rugs and a blue painted chair, bears the sign: "Feel free to use the typewriter for your lovely writing/creative ventures." Notes from customers are scrawled in all languages. "A friend told me if I ever felt lonely to come to Shakespeare & Company," one says. Visitors are so effusive that a few years ago George installed what he calls a "mirror of love", where hundreds more scribblings are pinned, from the surreal to the touching: "Dear Granny, I would like you to come to Paris with me", reads one. "Books insulate this nest of wandering dreams", reads another, "there should always be a place where stories reign over commercial enterprise."

We stand in the beamed reading room, the light soupy. George's mongrel, Collette, smart in a red neckerchief, snoozes on a rug lining the stone floor. A white cat arches its back on a desk overlooking the river. Sylvia explains that when it rains the room fills with readers and writers, all jostling for the handful of cushions scattered along the wooden banquette. Her image only sharpens the silence of this morning.

As I leave, the western facade of Notre Dame is noisy with tourists. I cross the square, haunted by one of the messages tacked to the mirror. Hand-written by the mother of a 21-year-old bipolar man who killed himself by jumping off Brooklyn Bridge, it read: "I've spent the last hour trying to decide if I should end my life. If he could have discovered your bookshop, perhaps he would have survived. I want to thank you for this place and the hope it gives." Not only does that seem to underline the redemptive power of literature, but also something less tangible: the balm of environment