had several lovers, often apparently at the same time. I also intuited – quite how I don’t
know but it turned out to be correct enough – that she usually gave her favours out of admiration and respect: for, so to speak, the godlike rather than the conventionally attractive or
sexual attributes in the men who pursued her. Men who were like gods for her were also for her erotic beings, but sex was something she regarded as rather marginal, not an end in itself.
— 3 —
I had no illusions about being godlike. I realised that she loved to be with me as if we were children again, and was tender when she saw with what childlike eagerness I had
come to desire her. She sensed I had next to no knowledge of lovemaking (how absurdly oldfashioned it all seems today!) A little while before our own swimming expedition on that hot morning she had
remarked with brisk indulgence ‘Perhaps it’s time we made love,’ and she had shown me how, although as I had no condom with me (they were known as French letters in those days and
a good deal of guilt and secrecy hung about their supply and use) she did not permit me to get very far. We had done better once or twice after that, but in a genial and wholly unserious way that
did not in the least mar for me the unfamiliar magic of the proceedings: doing this odd and comical thing with someone whom one really loved. The paradox was itself comical, though not at all
depressing.
What was a trifle depressing was the growing knowledge that I was far from being the only one with whom she was doing it – probably only on occasion: she was much too busy and interested
in other things to make a habit of it, so to speak. But to me in those days she seemed at the negligent disposition of these unknown and godlike older men, whom she went humbly to ‘see’
at times when it suited them. Here, I began dimly to perceive, was where her creative imagination lay, and it was to feed it – almost, it seemed, to propitiate it – that she would make
what appeared to me these masochistic journeys to London; and chiefly to Hampstead, for me the abode and headquarters of the evil gods.
As my own feelings became closely involved I saw all such matters in an absurdly lurid light. In reality the people Iris went to see were not gods or demons but intellectuals, writers, artists,
civil servants, mostly Jewish, mainly refugees, who knew one another and formed a loose-knit circle, with its own rivalries, jealousies and power struggles. They loved Iris and accepted her as one
of themselves, although she remained inevitably an outsider, living and teaching as she did in humdrum academic circles, away from their own focus of attention. In time I met most of them and got
on with them well, surprised and in later days amused when I looked back at the storm of fears and emotions they had once aroused in me. It was Iris’s own imagination which had in a sense
created them, and continued to create and nurture them as the strange and unique characters of her wonderful novels. It was the second of these,
The Flight from the Enchanter
in 1955,
which first showed me how the genius of Iris’s imagination did its own work, in its own way. And all the teeming complex variety of her later novels continued in its own mysterious fashion to
be distilled from the alembic of those original obsessions and enchantments.
But Maurice Charlton was quite different: a sunlit character whose spiritual home was that hot but never oppressive Oxford summer, even though he lived for the moment, as if himself the
beneficiary of some enchantment, in that gloomy exotic flat, surrounded as it seemed to me by heavy glittering cutlery and tall green Venetian wineglasses. When first in love one feels attended on
all sides, almost jostled, by such unexpected and incongruous symbols of romance. That morning marked a turning-point, however little I realised it at the time, in the way in which Iris behaved
towards me. The lunch
know but it turned out to be correct enough – that she usually gave her favours out of admiration and respect: for, so to speak, the godlike rather than the conventionally attractive or
sexual attributes in the men who pursued her. Men who were like gods for her were also for her erotic beings, but sex was something she regarded as rather marginal, not an end in itself.
— 3 —
I had no illusions about being godlike. I realised that she loved to be with me as if we were children again, and was tender when she saw with what childlike eagerness I had
come to desire her. She sensed I had next to no knowledge of lovemaking (how absurdly oldfashioned it all seems today!) A little while before our own swimming expedition on that hot morning she had
remarked with brisk indulgence ‘Perhaps it’s time we made love,’ and she had shown me how, although as I had no condom with me (they were known as French letters in those days and
a good deal of guilt and secrecy hung about their supply and use) she did not permit me to get very far. We had done better once or twice after that, but in a genial and wholly unserious way that
did not in the least mar for me the unfamiliar magic of the proceedings: doing this odd and comical thing with someone whom one really loved. The paradox was itself comical, though not at all
depressing.
What was a trifle depressing was the growing knowledge that I was far from being the only one with whom she was doing it – probably only on occasion: she was much too busy and interested
in other things to make a habit of it, so to speak. But to me in those days she seemed at the negligent disposition of these unknown and godlike older men, whom she went humbly to ‘see’
at times when it suited them. Here, I began dimly to perceive, was where her creative imagination lay, and it was to feed it – almost, it seemed, to propitiate it – that she would make
what appeared to me these masochistic journeys to London; and chiefly to Hampstead, for me the abode and headquarters of the evil gods.
As my own feelings became closely involved I saw all such matters in an absurdly lurid light. In reality the people Iris went to see were not gods or demons but intellectuals, writers, artists,
civil servants, mostly Jewish, mainly refugees, who knew one another and formed a loose-knit circle, with its own rivalries, jealousies and power struggles. They loved Iris and accepted her as one
of themselves, although she remained inevitably an outsider, living and teaching as she did in humdrum academic circles, away from their own focus of attention. In time I met most of them and got
on with them well, surprised and in later days amused when I looked back at the storm of fears and emotions they had once aroused in me. It was Iris’s own imagination which had in a sense
created them, and continued to create and nurture them as the strange and unique characters of her wonderful novels. It was the second of these,
The Flight from the Enchanter
in 1955,
which first showed me how the genius of Iris’s imagination did its own work, in its own way. And all the teeming complex variety of her later novels continued in its own mysterious fashion to
be distilled from the alembic of those original obsessions and enchantments.
But Maurice Charlton was quite different: a sunlit character whose spiritual home was that hot but never oppressive Oxford summer, even though he lived for the moment, as if himself the
beneficiary of some enchantment, in that gloomy exotic flat, surrounded as it seemed to me by heavy glittering cutlery and tall green Venetian wineglasses. When first in love one feels attended on
all sides, almost jostled, by such unexpected and incongruous symbols of romance. That morning marked a turning-point, however little I realised it at the time, in the way in which Iris behaved
towards me. The lunch
Similar Books
