Iris (18 page)

Stratford was memorable less for Shakespeare than for a performance of
The Mikado
, the best that could be imagined. But the real revelation of our Canadian visit was the pictures of
Alex Colville. This quiet reclusive artist, who lived at St John’s in New Brunswick, was then painting one or at most two canvases a year. His art is meticulous in detail, taking infinite
pains over extreme niceties of composition, and this precision contrasts with the statuesque solidity of his human figures, as massive and mysterious as Piero’s, and yet wholly absorbed in
the commonplace activities of contemporary life. Iris was spellbound by them. She and Colville took to each other at once, and he showed her all the portfolios he had brought with him: he had been
coaxed over to take part in one of those symposia on ‘Whither the Arts?’ which are cosy routine for so many writers and academics. It was pleasant enough in the insipid way such events
are; but Colville’s presence and the ease we both found in talking with him, gave the days a sudden individuality. It was almost as if we had been unexpectedly received into one of his own
pictures, where a husband stands naked and pondering, studying a refrigerator’s contents by the dim light from within: or a woman, as massively inscrutable as any in Piero’s paintings,
holds the car door open for her children to enter.

We should much like to have seen more of Alex Colville, and talked to him, but he comes to Europe only rarely. On one such occasion we managed a meeting in London, when he was en route for The
Hague to repaint a tiny damaged area in the corner of one of his pictures, called ‘Stop for Cows’. The paint in this corner had been minutely scratched in the course of handling by the
museum, and the authorities there had been prepared to pay for Alex to come all the way over and put it right. They must have thought highly of the picture, as well they might. A big girl with
plump cheeks and buttocks is raising one majestic arm as she turns to confront an invisible motorist. In front of her are the massive backsides and tails of black and white alderneys, and a wide
sky suggests the sea not far away. In one way the picture is reassuringly Dutch, robustly, even humorously physical. But it also contrives to be full of a magic strangeness in complete contrast
with appearances. How Colville does this, and plans or imagines compositions that reveal it, remains a mystery; and one that I know Iris at once found familiar and friendly with her own. With her
own outlook on art, too. She used once to sit and study her volume of Colville reproductions by the hour. She has lost her interest in painting now that her powers of concentration have gone, but
if I root out the album of Colvilles and put them in front of her she still shows for a brief time something of her old fascination.

Part of Colville’s appeal for her undoubtedly lay in his complete lack of modishness. No other modern painter is so unconscious of the fashion, and so indifferent to what’s new in
the art world. Like the woodland watercolours of our old friend Reynolds Stone, Colville’s paintings have no urge whatever to get on in society, the smart society of the in-group. Nor had
Iris. She never had any instinct for what constituted the Where It’s At of social or artistic success. If a criticism can be made of the social scene in her books it might be that her sense
of it is not so much innocent as non-existent. Her world lacks any true sense of worldliness. In her grasp of how actual people behave her novels can be both shrewd and sharply observant, but there
is no indication in them of knowingness, of having, as it were, got even her own world on a lead. Her feeling for things is far from being streetwise in the manner of Kingsley Amis, whom she knew
and liked, and his brilliant son Martin.

This unworldliness is not common among writers and novelists. Tolstoy retained to the end his involuntary fascination with high society. His zest for finding out what dances were being danced
and what the girls were wearing persisted long after he had supposedly renounced all fleshly temptation. Among writers the lofty moralists, the politically and socially correct, usually turn out in
their private lives to be as pushy as Proust’s Madam Verdurin. Social snobbery in the crude old sense is probably on the way out today, but the need to be in the swim is as strong as ever,
itself a product of democratic hypocrisy; the need to oppose fox-hunting now as much the form as fox-hunting itself once was. Many of Iris’s friends and fellow-writers were censorious when
she was made a Dame of the British Empire. They maintained such an honour to be unacceptable on democratic or political grounds: but I suspect they really saw it as out of fashion – things
like that were simply not done nowadays. Iris didn’t care whether it was the done thing or not. It pleased her mother and her real friends, and that was what mattered to her.

Colville must have been happy in Canada, for nobody bothered about him there, or took him up, and yet he sold his paintings internationally for what seemed to us large sums. ‘I like being
a provincial,’ he remarked once to Iris in his dry way, ‘And you don’t mind my saying, do you, that I loved your books and now you for the same reason. No striving towards
Mayfair, if you see what I mean.’ He looked so droll saying this that I could not help smiling, and I teased him by saying that of course only provincials exhibited at the Fisher Art Gallery
and stayed at Brown’s Hotel, as he had already told us he was in the habit of doing when he came to London.

Iris and he were in fact the least upwardly mobile people one could imagine. Neither of them was in the least socially conscious, nor did they have any aptitude for making a good thing out of
it. Colville’s remark about provincialism was an unusual spurt of self-satire, prompted by the behaviour at the conference of a smart New Yorker and his even smarter wife, both art critics,
who had been laying down the law at the discussion that morning. After it Colville remarked to us in a conspiratorial whisper that he was becoming ‘a mite stir-crazy’, so we got a lift
into Hamilton that evening and had some drinks in a bar.

And yet I never knew Iris to disapprove of anyone on account of their pretensions, or the way they behaved. J.B. Priestley would show off to her outrageously, which she enjoyed in her benign
way, without trying to enter into the spirit of things when he made efforts both crafty and elephantine to draw her out on the subject of Plato or religion, politics or feminism. He called her
‘Ducky’, which she also enjoyed, and he affected robust irritation at the sensible and rational answers she gave him. Had he lived a generation earlier, he used to boast to her, before
successful writers had their entire income removed by the government’s tax policies, he would have funded an expedition to Antarctica, or set up a Research Institute in Oxford or Cambridge.
‘Cambridge wouldn’t have thanked you for it,’ his wife Jacquetta Hawkes would say dryly, ‘I can tell you that, Jack.’

They made a most engagingly incongruous pair, and their happy relationship always used to remind me of Queen Titania and Bottom in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Iris was deeply fond
of them both. I got along well with Jack and was somewhat in awe of Jacquetta, who always made me think of an old don’s remark that they’ll smile in your face in Oxford and stab you in
the back, whereas in Cambridge they might do you a good turn, but with a disapproving face. Jacquetta did not exactly disapprove, but her smile, though friendly, was always a little frosty too. Her
father had been the eminent Cambridge biologist who discovered vitamins, and she had a way of making unexpected confidences with a sort of scientific calm. She once told me she had jumped out of a
window in Cambridge to impress a bumptious boyfriend and had seriously damaged her womb. ‘You have charm,’ she said another time, making it seem like something one’s best friends
didn’t tell one about. That discomposed me a lot, but she made up for it by remarking on another occasion in an equally detached way that Iris was the only woman of whom she was never jealous
where Jack was concerned. That made Titania sound quite vulnerable and human.

Jack’s robust tones concealed the same vulnerability. He once asked me with a wistful look if I knew anyone in the British Academy: how could he become a member? I had no idea, but he must
have thought that as an academic I should have known the answer. He also said he would once have given anything to have lived in the smart world, like Evelyn Waugh. In a weird way he made being in
‘the smart world’ sound the same thing as having the right views on England or politics or feminism. He could manage those all right, and they had put him on the map, but to be really
on the map one should have been in the smart world as well. Such remarks fascinated me but also made me feel uncomfortable, and I think Iris too, although she never showed it. Her way of dealing
with Jack was to ask him about his life; and I was reminded of the time a newspaper interviewer told Iris she had found out all about herself, while she had found out nothing about Iris.
Iris’s fondness for Jack Priestley was almost like that of a daughter, and she missed him greatly when he died.

Her fondness for Jack grew with time, but she was equally good at making instant friends. And in a sense still is. The other day a caller rang up from an Irish monastery. He had long admired her
work and had written to her, a correspondence I had had to take over. He asked if he could look in briefly on his way from Limerick to pick up a fellow monk from a sister foundation. He was
immensely tall, dark-suited, urbane, with that indefinable air many monks have of moving in a distinctly smart world. (I thought of Tolstoy, Jack Priestley, Evelyn Waugh!) He told us the Duchess of
Abercorn had sent her love; it seemed she had once met us in connection with a Pushkin Festival.

All this was momentarily discomposing, but when the tall monk and Iris sat down together, things changed at once. They became extraordinarily animated – she starting sentences, or ending
them – he appearing to know at once what she wanted to ask, and filling the words they were failing to make with a professional abundance of loving kindness. And yet his face looked really
transfigured: so, a few moments later, did hers. They were soon on about his childhood, why he joined the order, most of all about his plans to make discussion of her works a regular thing at
Glenstal Abbey. He assured us that two of her novels,
The Book and the Brotherhood
and
The Good Apprentice
, could be said to have inspired the recent setting-up of the monastery,
and the way they wanted it to go. For the first time Iris looked blank. Perhaps she had detected a note of Irish hyperbole; perhaps she was simply puzzled about the names of her novels. What were
they? From whom? But she didn’t enquire, only asking for the third or fourth time. Where living? Where born? – and did he know Dublin?

Transfiguration doesn’t last. His enthusiasms soon began to seem no more out of the ordinary than those of most religious people: Iris’s own animation faded into her lost look; she
seemed bewildered now by the presence of the tall handsome monk in his incongruous city clothing. Practised in such matters, fully aware that the good minute was going, he rose swiftly, blessed
her, and was out of the door. The little van in which he had driven all the way from Limerick to Holyhead, and across Wales to Oxford, was waiting at the kerb. I remarked that we had ourselves once
driven about Ireland in such a van, but he was not interested. I felt he had taken my measure, not because he was a clever man but because experience had taught him much about the stupidity of
intellectuals, their obtuseness about the things that really mattered. He was off now to pick up his Benedictine colleague, and as a parting shot I remarked that I had heard that the Benedictines
were the most learned order. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ he replied with a great laugh, and a look of contempt which I felt I had fully deserved.

Inside the house Iris had regained her animation and was full of pleasure in the visit. She grasped that the caller had been Irish, but that was about all. I tried to remind her of the time,
some years before, when she had gone to lecture at Maynooth, the big Roman Catholic seminary outside Dublin. It had been at the height of the troubles in northern Ireland, and her host had made
some reference to the IRA detainees there, ‘the men behind the wire’ as they were known in the south. ‘Aren’t we all with the men behind the wire?’ he had observed
rhetorically, and his fellow-priests had nodded their heads in approval. Iris had been incandescent with fury. She told me later that she had been hardly able to contain herself and maintain her
usual civil and smiling demeanour. I am sure the priests would have had no idea of the passion they had unwittingly unleashed, assuming in their bland way that Iris, like all London intellectuals,
would have the fashionably correct attitude towards Irish unity. She did not. It was the one political topic on which the presbyterian atavism of her Northern Irish ancestors completely took
over.

I used sometimes to tease her by reminding her of the misprint a typist had made in one of her essays. Uncertain of Iris’s writing she had substituted ‘Pearson’ whenever the
word ‘reason’ appeared in the text, thinking that this was some philosopher Iris frequently referred to. This produced a number of sentences beginning ‘Pearson requires’ or
‘as Pearson indicates’, and Pearson became ever after a familiar figure in our private language. But Pearson certainly had no place where Iris was concerned if any discussion arose
among her friends about the future of Northern Ireland. She used to keep silent if she could but often burst out in the end. She once silenced me when I attempted some facetious reference to
Pearson in this context by reminding me sharply of Hume’s pronouncement that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be, the servant of the passions.’ It was not a view she held in any
other context.

Iris’s longhand was usually clear, was indeed an excellent and wholly distinctive handwriting with no resemblance to anyone else’s. Bringing her a cup of coffee in the morning at
Steeple Aston I sometimes used to stop and watch as her pen travelled across page after page of looseleaf paper. Occasionally it raced, and then her writing did become hard for the typist to
decipher. The business of typing her MS was always arranged by Norah Smallwood at Chatto, an admirable managing director who had the reputation of being close-fisted, but who always treated Iris
with maternal firmness and kindness – a favoured but rather unpredictable daughter. Norah, who had no children of her own, behaved like a tyrant to her young female employees, except when
they were in trouble, or if she found them in tears as a consequence of her severity.