Iris and the Friends

by John Bayley

  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.

  We would have liked to oblige, but we would be needing the coupons ourselves – how many we could not yet say. The friendly grocer appreciated the dilemma. If there were coupons over when we returned, then we would do business. A fortnight or so later we did so. Massive salamis a yard long were pressed upon us, and huge bottles of wine. When we stopped again on the way over the alpine pass Iris unearthed a vast smooth stone – perhaps it had been dislodged by Hannibal’s experiment with the vinegar? She longed to take it home, so I heaved it on top of all the other rubbish that by now cluttered the floor of the van. It must have landed on top of one of the big wine bottles. Unknowing we descended into France with a gallon or so of red wine trickling through on to the road. Much remained behind. I still have an old vest, marbled, despite occasional washings over the years, in a delicate patterning of pink and tuscan red.

  Our appetite for spaghetti pomodoro was insatiable. We seemed to eat or want to eat nothing else on that honeymoon. And eating it very often in the open air, under what Shelley calls ‘the roof of blue Italian weather’. In the afternoons we slept deeply after several lunch-time carafes of cold white wine, Chianti too. The white wine came in carafes beaded with condensation and with a little leaden seal on one side, certifying a mezzolitro. We persuaded the friendly maternal waitress of a trattoria to sell us one of them.

  Our search for rivers continued, and the afternoon we left Susa for the south we found another one. As I later discovered from the map, it was the Tanaro, a branch of the Ticino, where Hannibal’s Numidians had soundly beaten the Roman cavalry. In contrast to our last swim this now idyllic stream ran through the open sun-filled plain, reached after bumping for a mile along on a sandy track which instinct told me must lead to a river. No one was about: we had the whole landscape and the hot afternoon to ourselves.

  Or so we thought. We were about to come out of the water when Iris gave a warning cry. The bank was lined with people – Italian farmers, a uniformed policeman. Some child must have spotted us and called his elders to come and see what these strange foreigners were up to. Conversing animatedly they gazed on us with friendly smiles, teeth flashing in their brown faces and under the policeman’s fine black moustache. It was a frieze from a painting, perhaps the Baptism of Christ. But there we were in the water with nothing on and somehow we had to get out and get to our clothes. And without shocking any local susceptibilities.

  Suddenly the policeman seemed to appreciate the problem. How did he do so? – it may have been the look on our faces. With authoritative gestures he drove the farmers and children – there were no women present – along the river bank and back to the road. When they were gone he remained where he was, just beside our belongings and bedraggled towel, and seemed to smile invitingly. There was nothing else for it. We emerged with what dignity we could, bowing our thanks and smiling graciously as if we were fully clad.

  A day or so later we were in Volterra, the ‘lordly Volterra’ of Macaulay’s Lays,

  Where scowls the far-famed hold,

  Piled by the hands of giants

  For god-like kings of old.

  The mountains were full of marble quarries and there were shops selling alabaster. We used to sit at a café in the square where the waiter looked exactly like photographs of the young Kafka. Iris took a great interest in him. Unlike most Italian waiters he moved with diffidence, as if uncertain of what he was carrying or where to put it. He seemed to like us, but his smile was distrait, a little tormented, as if he were planning some work he knew he would never finish. His head was always surrounded by wasps which he made no attempt to brush away, as if they were visible embodiments of the angst within him. ‘Perhaps he will put us both in one of his stories,’ said Iris.

  It was while asking poor Kafka and his attendant wasps for Punt e Mes, the delicious slightly bitter Italian vermouth we had both taken a fancy to, that I realised a difference, suddenly seeming to me very important, between our sense of him and his interior troubles, and our growing sense of each other. If Kafka were really a troubled soul, and not just worried about the football results, there was nothing we could do about it, no way we could establish contact with him. His sadness, if it existed, was that of an unknown life, a part of life we were familiar with back home and took for granted, but which here had no existence we could ente
r into. Sitting at the sunlit table, the desolation of things, the tears of things of which Virgil’s Aeneas was reminded in passing, seemed all around us, but in an inaccessible almost surreal form, that of young Kafka wandering in and out of the café carrying glasses of Punt e Mes and the tiny cups of espresso.

  Iris seemed to be in a reverie too. I took her hand and it pressed mine. What was she thinking? I had no idea, any more than I had in the case of Kafka, and I knew very well there was no way to find out. But this realisation reassured me deeply: it made me as happy as the hypothetical woes of Kafka had made me feel sad. Such ignorance, such solitude! – they suddenly seemed the best part of love and marriage. We were together because we were comforted and reassured by the solitariness each saw and was aware of in the other.

  The hotel we found in a back street was old and shabby; our room with its furniture and its dusty red velvet hangings might have been in a decaying palazzo. It gave no meals, and in the morning we returned to the square, where Kafka brought us coffee and buns. It was in Volterra, I think, that we began to feel really married, as if something in the old grand forbidding little town had reminded us of both good and bad fortune, of short time, and the long wearisomeness of history. It was in Volterra, too, that Iris’s life of secret creation became a reality for me. I felt her at work, with no idea of what she was doing or how, and that gave me the same feel of safe and yet distant closeness. I think she realised then how much I was beginning to enjoy this, and would come to depend on it.

  At a comically lower level we both of us realised then that we daydreamed about the people we encountered together, in my case girls and women, in hers, men. It was another aspect of our closeness, another safe and reassuring one, and in this case an amused one too. And we did then, in fact still do, sometimes show our amusement about it to each other. I think Iris may have dreamed a little about Kafka, and what it would be like to mother him, to encourage him, perhaps have an affair with him.

  I don’t know whether she dreamed about the policeman by the river bank but that too seems quite possible, for he had been in his own way a memorable figure. We had done our best to ignore him when we came out of the river. Iris seized the towel and wrapped it round herself. But our policeman, I noticed, had turned away, and with his hands behind him was gazing into the distance. He combined boldness with delicacy. When we were dressed he had turned with his friendly smile and inquired if we had enjoyed our swim. ‘Non troppo fresco?’ Iris had spent one or two holidays by herself in Rome and Florence and her Italian was considerably better than mine. She engaged him in conversation, and it soon turned out that he would like a lift to the neighbouring town. He had come to see relatives on the farm near the river which, like most buildings in such an Italian landscape, blended in so well that it was hardly visible. I was rather relieved to find that despite his grey uniform and military cap he was not on duty, and was not going to accuse us of violating the civic code of public decency. As he talked his face ceased to look like that of a modern functionary and took on that withdrawn dignified air which portraits and faces possess in Quattrocento painting.

  Were we going to stay in Orbessano? If so he could recommend a hotel kept by friends of his aunt. By this time we were bumping back towards the road, with Iris sitting on the policeman’s lap. The van only had its two front seats and the back of it was thoroughly encumbered. We parted on the best of terms. I thought of the policeman on the way back home, when on a very hot afternoon in Padua we were trying vainly to find somewhere to stay. There were a lot of young conscripts in uniform about, and Iris asked one of them, a scholarly-looking weedy boy wearing spectacles, if he knew of any hotel. He seemed surprised but politely beckoned her to follow him, I trailing behind with the bags. An officer was passing, and he appeared to ask the young soldier rather severely what he thought he was doing. Iris later reported that the young soldier replied with dignity, ‘Sir, I am taking this lady to a hotel.’ The officer smiled, unbent, and uttered what was presumably the Italian equivalent of ‘Vive le sport!’

  The policeman by the river bank entered, I know, into Iris’s imagination. In some of her novels he, or someone very like him, is a ghostly presence, transmuted into a flux of different types and personalities. Such persons are accompanied by water, as if it were their native environment: the story of their spirits seems to arise from sea or river and return to them. Iris never cared for the novels of George Eliot, but her own wholly different plots and beings sometimes remind me of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss saying ‘I am in love with moistness.’ Maggie lives by the river, and in rather contrived circumstances – much more contrived than any comparable scenario in Iris’s work – eventually drowns in it.

  A few years ago a writer called Charles Sprawson sent Iris his remarkable book with the odd title Haunts of the Black Masseur, a title inspired by a story the author had read when young about such a negro massage expert. The tale mingled in his mind with a film he had thought marvellous called The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and became for him a symbol of the whole swimming mystique. Iris had no such mystique, only one about water, but we both liked the book very much and I reviewed it under her name.

  Black masseurs and lagoons were a far cry from sun-filled Italian landscapes, and the green rivers full of rushes and golden sandbars that meandered past hills resembling those in the background of Bellini’s pictures, or Perugino’s. The sea in Italy was by contrast the greatest possible disappointment to us. In most cases it was shut off into holiday camps by barbed wire, and impossible to get at. When we once managed to do so, near Pesaro, we had hardly got into the water before an immense caterpillar of holidaying toddlers came crawling over the beach, engulfing our possessions and undulating onwards as we rushed out to rescue them. By contrast with France, Italy and the Italian seaside were distinctly overcrowded.

  Rivers and pictures were our holiday ideals. We have never been greatly drawn to spectacular or picturesque tourist attractions, but picture galleries are another matter. We visited Borgo San Sepolcro, a small place in those days quite difficult to get at, situated, as I recall, in the heart of Umbria. In a bleak room of its town hall one was suddenly face to face with the Resurrection, the masterpiece of Piero della Francesca. In an essay with that title Aldous Huxley refers to it quite simply as ‘the finest picture in the world’. What awed and amazed us, and must indeed be the first impression the picture makes on the ordinary viewer, is the immense difference between the figure of Christ Piero represents, and that found in any other religious painting. It is a fresco, and was for years concealed under a layer of whitewash, conceivably even because of this startling and almost alarming singularity. When finally brought back to light it was in excellent condition, just as it must have been when first painted.

  Huxley’s essay is by far the best thing ever written about it. He does not emphasise unduly the originality of Piero’s statuesque figures, a product of the painter’s interest in geometry and linear mathematics. Technicians of the art world dwell on this unusual interest, and it might well be that Piero’s impassive geometry was what suddenly brought him into such outstanding favour with the modernists, for whom romanticism meant emotional indulgence and, as T.E. Hulme put it, ‘spilt religion’. No religion is being spilt in Piero’s painting, no human impulses emotionally indulged. We can see why the painter was disregarded in the nineteenth century, as in the later renaissance. The figure in the great fresco that seems to hoist itself effortlessly out of the tomb, one muscular leg poised on its stone coping, is not the Christ of medieval or Catholic Christianity, nor the liberal humanitarian Christ who took over a new human role at the end of the age of faith. He is, as Huxley says, a masterful even an insolent figure, his expressionless eyes fixed on no goal that religion would recognise or aspire to. Huxley calls him the embodiment of the classical ideal, the superb image of man as self-sufficient, immortalised by his own sense of art and form.

  However that may be the picture is not only supremely s
atisfying but electrifying. It inspires awe. We ate our spaghetti that morning with a sense of high achievement, for who can see a great picture or read a great book without taking some of the credit for it himself? – but also in sober mood. The restaurant was almost empty; there seemed to be no other tourists in the sleepy little town. Things are different today: there are phalanxes of buses bearing German and Japanese tourists. The section of the town hall housing the picture has been turned into an arty art gallery; the picture itself lit up, set off, protected. I am glad we saw it before these transformations took place. The picture would have been even more inaccessible when Huxley first saw it, arriving at Borgo San Sepolcro after a laborious train journey. Piero has now become a major tourist attraction.

  The picture fascinated Iris. We talked of it a lot, but however much we talked of it I knew the real impression it had made on her lay below the level of speech, like the iceberg below the water. The god whose own physical strength and dark force of being seemed to be impelling him out of the tomb would inspire in the future many visions and creations of her own. She once said to me when I commented on the importance of the role, visible and invisible, that pictures played in her novels, ‘You’re right. They’re all just pictures really.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say “just pictures”. But I’ve often thought that what some of your readers find spiritual and uplifting in your novels is, unknown to them, a silent fellowship with great art of other kinds. You are the only novelist I know who can make the whole world of art come into your novels without being laborious about it, or making it seem fancy.’