Authors: John Bayley
Wisely we were not going in the Riley, but in a very small Austin van, which I had recently bought new for a modest sum. It was all the cheaper because being a ‘commercial vehicle’
it was exempt from what was then called Purchase Tax. The same Elaine Griffiths who had asked me to the party at St Anne’s where I met Iris, had recently acquired one of these, and being a
crafty lady had caused a garage to remove the metal side panels at the back, substituting neat glass windows. The vehicle now became officially a saloon car, and as such was not subject to the 30
mile an hour speed limit imposed in those days on all trucks and vans. She recommended this device, but after consideration we rejected it, unwisely as it turned out, because I was soon stopped and
fined by an unsporting policeman for doing nearly forty miles an hour.
Notwithstanding this setback I clung to my idea that it would be better for the van to remain as it was, because then we should be able to sleep in it, at a pinch, when on our travels. In fact
we only did this once, and that was a few years later, in the west of Ireland. We had been to see the famous black granite cliffs of Moher, and a large farmer, whom we christened the Moher giant,
had conscripted ourselves and the van to help him get in the hay from a field almost on the edge of the abyss. He even offered to buy the van, enquiring with interest ‘what price would it be
now’ in England. Escaping at last in a state of exhaustion we found a fishing hotel who could give us a ‘high tea’ of grilled trout, but had no room for the night. So we drove to
a quiet beach, fried a further supper of bacon and eggs in a rugged iron frying pan bought in Belfast market, and settled down for the night. We slept soundly, roused early by the scream of the
gulls meeting the scallop boats as they chugged into the next cove. We then returned to the hotel and had bacon and scallops for breakfast, the favourite morning dish, as I recalled, of good Queen
Elizabeth the First, who used to wash it down with a pint of small beer. We had Irish coffee instead.
It was on this trip, during which we explored the rocky coast of County Clare and the strange stony waste of ‘the Burren’, that Iris conceived the idea of her haunting novel set in
Ireland,
The Unicorn
, and found the landscape that embodied the feel of it. With its fantasy of a woman immured in a kind of sexual cloister near the wild coast,
The Unicorn
has
always been for me the most purely Irish of all her novels, more so even than
The Red and the Green
, her novel featuring the Easter Rebellion of 1916.
It was on this trip that I made the discovery of how to swim comfortably in cold water. Or rather not to swim but to hang suspended in a narrow bay, observing the flora of the seabed with a pipe
and mask. The underwater scene off a rocky northern shore is far more magical than anything in the tropics. Fronds of seaweed, dark red and amethyst, undulate quietly over vast smooth stones,
polished by the storms of the winter. Green crabs as big as dinnerplates limp away sideways. Fish are rare, but a plaice like a freckled partridge lay half hidden on the white sand and looked up at
me obliquely. Enthralled, I was unaware of the cold, but when I came out I shook and shivered uncontrollably. Iris rubbed some feeling into me, clucking like a disapproving parent, but when I
handed her the rubber pipe and mask she became as enraptured as I had been, nor did she feel the cold. She remained in the water for what seemed hours, while with trembling hands I lit a driftwood
fire and crouched beside it, taking swigs from our whiskey bottle. Later I tried going into the sea in all my clothes, and a macintosh, and that worked well, although removing the saturated
garments that clung like an icy shirt of Nessus was far from easy. Hercules had been set on fire by his fatal shirt, and at those moments I quite envied him.
Having acquired the habit I usually kept a vest on when swimming, even in warm water. Once in Pisa harbour, in a drizzle of rain, I was examining the fishes, numerous and even colourful, who
congregated by the side of the harbour breakwater, where one or two anglers were fishing. Iris, who had decided not to follow me into the water, was standing there under an umbrella; and she later
reported seeing one of the fishermen give a start of surprise and peer down intently into the harbour. The reason for this was not clear until I reappeared under my snorkel, clad in an ancient
vest. ‘I saw the fishermen peering down and trying to read the label on your neck,’ chortled Iris. ‘I really did.’ The episode much amused her, particularly the moment
– sometimes mimed by her in later years – when the incredulous Italian fishermen had craned their heads sideways, so as to keep in view the apparition slowly progressing below them in
the harbour.
Half a century ago the roads of France were empty. Long straight poplar-bordered roads, still full of ‘
déformations
’ as a result of wartime neglect, but wonderfully
relaxing to buzz happily down in a reverie
à deux
. No trouble going through towns. A helpful sign promised ‘Toutes Directions’; a bored gendarme blew his whistle
unnecessarily; small restaurants advertised their
repas
with a sign on the pavement. France existed not for the tourist nor for its own people (where were they? who were they?) but for
honeymoon couples like us, without much money, listening together to each poplar saying ‘hush’ as we drove past, as regularly as the telegraph wires of those days used to rise and fall
beside the train. Then we would stop at one of the little restaurants, three-quarters empty, and have
charcuterie
and
entrecôte aux endives
, with unlimited quantities of red
wine which never had to be uncorked or bought by the bottle. Cramped little hotels (
de la Poste
or
du Gare
) had scrubbed floors that smelt of garlic and gauloise cigarettes. Natives
were taciturn, speech formalised and distant; but I noticed that the severest French person (and to me all their faces looked austere, like those of monks and nuns) responded to Iris’s
smile.
Of course she knew France already – another France, inhabited entirely, in my eyes, by writers and intellectuals who sat in cafés and wrote books between drinks. It was not so long
since Iris had been under the spell of Sartre’s novel
La Nausée
and Raymond Queneau’s
Pierrot Mon Ami
. She had met Queneau in Brussels cafés at the end of
the war, and through him had heard of Samuel Beckett’s pre-war novel
Murphy
.
La Nausée
had interested her philosophically, and
Murphy
had bequeathed to her own
first novel
Under the Net
a notional spirit of Bohemia. Along with existentialism, and perhaps partly in response to it, there went at that time with Iris something less
engagé
and more irresponsible, something that made me think of the young person in Boswell’s Johnson who wished to study philosophy, but ‘cheerfulness kept breaking in’.
Our own cheerfulness found a perfect foil in quiet empty unresponsive France, which fed us so deliciously and so cheaply, and sent us on our way down endless roads on which one seemed to cover
hundreds if not thousands of kilometres without any effort at all.
Our first swim was in a river of the pas de Calais, a deep placid tributary of the Somme. Perhaps the place of the poem by Wilfred Owen, where hospital barges had been moored during those futile
offensives of the first world war. The next was much further south, in a steep and wild wooded valley, with pine and chestnut growing up the mountains. The water was warm, and the stream so
secluded that we slipped in with nothing on. Usually cautious, Iris may have felt that now we were in France Anglo-Saxon inhibition could be discarded. It was in this remote spot that my feet
encountered a smooth round object in the shallows. It was half buried in the ooze, but I fished it up without difficulty and found an object like a Greek or Roman amphora, earth-coloured and
cracked in one or two places. It was clearly not ancient – we found a trade name stamped on the base – and I was about to let it sink back into its underwater home when Iris, treading
water beside me, vigorously demurred. Even at that date she wanted to keep everything she found. Wrapped in French newspapers it reposed in the bottom of the little van and lived on for years in a
corner of our garden back home, until its cracks were found out by the frost and it came to pieces.
After setting it down on the bank we slipped in again for another swim. Iris seemed dreamy and absent. ‘Suppose we had found a great old bell,’ she said as we dried ourselves. I
pointed out that this would hardly be likely in such a wild spot, far from any town or village. But her imagination was equal to that one.
‘It could have been stolen from a belfry and buried in the river until they could dispose of it. People at home are stealing lead from country churches all the time, aren’t they?
Then the thieves here never came back.’
‘Quite a recent event? Nothing legendary about it?’
‘No, wait ... The church was desecrated at the reformation by those – what did they call them in France?’ she appealed as she stood beside me, an earnest figure streaked all
over with river mud, which she was vaguely spreading over herself with the towel.
‘Huguenots?’
‘That’s it. The Huguenots got down the bell and wanted to break it up or melt it or something, but some devoted worshippers of the old church managed to steal it away and bring it
here for safe keeping.’
Although she had done ancient history in her exams, Iris was a scholar who had done her best papers in philosophy. So she had often told me; and her sense of the historical was certainly rather
sketchy. But as her novels show, her imagination possessed its own brand of sometimes almost pedantic accuracy.
The most striking episode in her next novel
The Bell
certainly came out of that river. A great bell is found in an old abbey, now the centre of a modern religious community. The symbol of
the bell is enigmatic: not so the penetrating and perceptive account of characters who wish to try to lead the religious life.
Next day we were in a mountain region, nearing the frontier. In order to make an early start for crossing the Alps we decided to stop the night at a small town with a railway junction. In the
dead of night our bedroom door was suddenly flung open and a voice proclaimed in dramatic tones ‘
Georges! C’est l’heure
.’ The unshaded light over the bed dazzled us,
and when he saw how things were the young railwayman who had come to rouse his comrade hastened to switch it off again, muttering in a more subdued way, ‘
Ah – Madame, mille
pardons
.’
As we negotiated the hairpins next day I could talk of nothing but Hannibal. I remembered the story told by Livy. Confronted in the pass with a wall of solid rock, perhaps the result of a
landslide, Hannibal had great fires lighted and attempted to crack open the obstacle by pouring vinegar on it as the stone cooled. ‘But where could he have got enough vinegar,’ demanded
Iris, ‘and in any case would it work? Has any one tried it?’ Her scepticism was an instance of the meticulous way she always planned the more outlandish episodes in her fiction, testing
them in her mind with careful commonsense to make sure they really worked.
The Bell
itself was an example. I always felt there was something wonderfully literal about the discovery of the
great bell, which reminded me of
Alice in Wonderland
, one of Iris’s own favourite books.
We continued to debate the logistics of Hannibal’s campaign, and the difficulties his quartermasters must have had with the vinegar supply. As we drove higher we came into mist, and there
was a sound of cowbells. We had a bottle of sparkling burgundy with us in the van, bought with this ceremony in mind. At the top of the pass we drank it, and laid the bottle to rest under a stone
beside the road. I marked the place carefully, as I thought, for our idea was to retrieve the bottle on our return journey. When it came to the point, Iris did not like to think of the bottle we
had shared being left there. On our return we repeated the ceremony with a bottle of Asti Spumanti, from its home town, but try as I might, and I was sure I had the right place, I could not find
the other bottle. So we put the Italian one in a similar place, Iris hoping they would keep one another company.
The life of inanimate things was always close to her. I used to tease her about Wordsworth’s flower, which the poet was confident must ‘enjoy the air it breathes’. ‘Never
mind about flowers,’ Iris would say, impatiently and somewhat mysteriously. ‘There are other things that matter much more.’ Though good about it at the time, she also felt real
sadness for the abandoned bottles, and I think of it now when she stoops like an old tramp to pick up scraps of candy paper or cigarette ends from the pavement. She feels at one with them, and will
find them a home if she can.
Intellectuals, I have noticed, are apt to dislike in her novels what they regard as such signs of whimsy, even of sentimentality. They misunderstand, or do not bother to be aware of, the
unobtrusive seriousness with which she treats such things, and the way she feels about them. I think of it as her Buddhist side. She has always had a strong regard for that religion, which, as its
enlightened practitioners will tell you, is not really a religion at all. One of the most enlightened is our friend Professor Peter Conradi, who is writing a biography of Iris, and whose devotion
to her novels is certainly connected with his practice of Buddhism. One does not of course ‘believe’ in Buddhism, or even in the sacredness of the Buddha. ‘If you meet the Buddha
on the road, kill him.’ Peter sometimes repeats to us the ancient proverb, with a smile that is far from being whimsical. There seems no doubt that Iris’s own private devotion to things
finds a response in some of the tenets of Buddhism.
Safe down from the Alps, in Susa, we ate our first Italian spaghetti. It was sunny now, after the grey Alps, and hot, even though we were still high up. As we left Susa, full of spaghetti and
red wine, a stout grocer, who had been standing at the door of his shop, stepped out in the road and held up his hand. Did we perhaps require any supplies? Wine? He could let us have jars of very
good wine – his own. Lowering his voice he said we could have it all free in exchange for a few petrol coupons –
coupone
. Petrol was scarce in Italy and extremely expensive.
Supplied by the travel agent at home with these coupons for the journey, the tourist motoring on the continent found himself a popular figure.