by Iris Murdoch
During the novel many of those whom Charles Arrowby has turned to stone in his mind—loved, then discarded, or hated, then frozen out of his love—appear, to reassert their claims on life, either by courting his recognition as do Lizzie Scherer and his cousin James Arrowby, or by insisting, like his actors Rosina Vamburgh and her former husband Peregrine Arbelow, on vengeance. Charles believed he and his cousin could not breathe the same air (“we could not both be real”), so he has for some time energetically pretended that James was not real, crowding him out to an emotional periphery where he is barely visible any longer; James’s inwardness cooperates in his exclusion. Even the woman Charles claims to love to distraction is crowded out by some muddy and distracted version of her. Charles does not attend to Hartley. He attends—but not to her, rather to his reactions, his elation at her rediscovery, his crazy hope for their chimerical future. Not only does he divert his attention from Hartley; he dismisses evidence he cannot help recording of her unease with his insistent absolutes. She is unmoved by his passionate reversion to their teenage friendship and is patently not attracted to him physically. Furthermore, Hartley is haunted by her own demons, her feckless attempts to enrich her married life by adopting a son, which wound up creating only jealous suspicions in her husband’s mind about the child’s paternity and cowering misery for the little harelipped child Titus. Charles at sixty-plus suggests an unlikely escape for her, one she cannot take seriously, believing as she does that she must remain in her marriage not because it is right but because it defines her. There is also a suggestion that she is given to emotional fits; Titus remembers them, Ben alludes to them, and we witness several extraordinary breakdowns. When Charles ingeniously “steals” Hartley and keeps her incarcerated in the cramped, unheimlich upstairs “inner room” of Shruff End, she and Charles grow shackled to each other in an unhealthy parody of her marital pain. During this long central stretch of days, Andromeda is chained up, to be sure, and menaced by another, but the signification of the painting subtly shifts to accommodate the monster Hartley and Charles create together, like a distorted child. The dragon idea twists somewhat, as the measure of their combined ill-fittedness to one another: it represents his desire and her remorse at leaving him, his jealous possessiveness and her stubborn and uncommunicative retreat. A more forthright woman would never have wound up in this fix, a less selfish romantic would never have persuaded himself that Hartley needed rescuing. This monstrous situation can only be put down by another. That role is taken by James (about whom more in a moment).
The rumpled yellow stones about Shruff End also represent the rubble out of which Charles as artist and stage magician is still trying to create form: He assembles tiny emblems of this impulse when he puts attractive sea pebbles into patterns outside the back door of the always-chilly house. But eventually the house becomes too crowded with demons assembled from the past for him to sort out, and these seem to condense into the sequence of terrible accidents that smash his design. However, a competing figure is also at work as mage and demiurge. Charles Arrowby likens himself to Shakespeare’s Prospero, who announces at the close of The Tempest his intention to deny his powers, to break up his magic, and withdraw from influencing the destinies of others. But the true Prospero, were he to be able to drown his book of necromancy, would hardly settle in at Milan to write a memoir. No, the retirement Charles imitates (minus religious allegiance) is closer to that of Andrew Marvell with his patron or Alexander Pope with his grot—gentle poets who lived intently self-memorializing lives of “remove,” fully relished and artfully described. Like them, Charles Arrowby is posing, trying on a role, toying with a notion about himself. He is hardly preparing to examine his conscience or give anything up. Furthermore, to the extent the islanders in The Tempest emanate from one self, Charles lies closer to the Caliban side of Prospero than to the Ariel side; he is a ruiner, not a releaser.
Charles may fancy himself as Prospero now aiming to turn (theatrical) magic back into spirit, but he has been the recipient rather than the generator of a deeper current of magic, which, intersecting with his own fate, goes haywire in the plot. The authentic Prospero figure, surprisingly, is cousin James. It is he who inserts himself into the unfolding of time and who takes charge of it. Standing as a fictive type midway between the occluded consciousness of fascinating mage-figures in other novels (John Robert Rozanov and David Crimond, for example, whose thoughts are yet more hidden than his) and the good characters at the apparent periphery of the main action in Henry and Cato and A Fairly Honourable Defeat (Brendan Craddock and Tallis Browne), James Arrowby both works inscrutably at a distance and attempts to help his cousin Charles in real and immediate ways to cope and also to improve. Like Tallis Browne, James is able to see each person as a reality; like Craddock, he has had a classical education and can reason brilliantly. James arrives with several others at thundery, oppressive Whitsun, when the Hartley episode is at an extreme impasse and the company begin to sing in many tongues. He obtains the approval of the others who are there to persuade Charles to “return” Hartley. He arranges the mission, deflects the animosity of the husband, and seeks to instruct Charles in the chimerical quality of his “love” for this dowdy lower-middle-class woman. (She is nothing but a “phantom Helen” invented by Charles’s needs.) Thus far, his rational, insightful, soldierly self, more a liberating Perseus than a devious Prospero. But there are arrangements of James’s that we do not see—although we see their effects: He finds people. (This explains the otherwise unaccountable appearance of the lost son Titus.) Before this, he also “locates” Charles in the Wallace Collection in London (where Charles has been looking at Perseus and Andromeda ) and comes to him there. James seems to materialize out of the profound auditory, visual, and kinesthetic premonitions not entirely owing to Charles’s hangover:
I still had a headache. A sort of brown fuzz and some very volatile darting black spots intermittently marred my field of vision. I felt unsteady and somewhat oddly related to the ground, as if I had suddenly become extremely tall.
Then it began to seem that so many of my women were there . . . [painted by various masters, but] Hartley . . . was not there. And then the clocks all began to strike four.
Some workmen were doing something or other downstairs, hammering a lot, flashing lights swarmed and receded . . .
[T]he light seemed a little hazy and chunky and sort of granulated and brownish.... The gallery was empty....
I began to walk down the long room and as I did so the hammering of the workmen down below seemed to be becoming more rhythmic, clearer, faster, more insistent, like the sound of those wooden clappers, which the Japanese call hyoshigi, and which are used to create suspense or announce doom in the Japanese theatre, and which I often used to use myself in my own plays. I began to walk away down the gallery and as I went my hangover seemed to be turning into a sort of fainting fit. When I reached the door at the end I stopped and turned round. A man had come into the room by the other door at the far end and was standing looking at me through the curiously brownish murky air. I reached out and put one hand on the wall. Of course I recognized him at once. He was my cousin James. (pp. 167-68)
This description, covering three pages altogether, is gripping, intensely detailed, and credibly real. Yet there is also something portentous and deliberate about it (including as it does a subtle echo of the peasant working with metal in Anna Karenina’s nightmare), and the effect on Charles is as if the molecules of his immediate sensory world were being . . . rearranged. This suspicion allows us to interpret the second occurrence of the main symptoms. Before the appearance of the Fitches’ adoptive son Titus, Charles experiences a similar cluster of symptoms as he looks through the binoculars at the sea, awaiting what he is convinced will be the reemergence of his sea monster. The disturbances of sound and visual distortion experienced by Charles are plausibly in the world and not inside him. The hyoshigi sound returns. Then he sees through his glass the foot of the young man who has been br
ought to the sea by James and who is to play such a sad role in the climax of the book. Again, a third time, the accelerating thumping of the hyoshigi precedes a phenomenon we can link to James, his reappearance at Shruff End toward the very end of the book to check up on and say farewell to the cousin it is clear he loves. Since Charles is so fond of noise (“Noise has always been my friend,” he brags when he confronts le mari Ben on the natural stone bridge over Minn’s cauldron, p. 286), it may be that James chose this avenue of preparation for the three experiences of fear and premonition. What is clear is that James is somehow behind as well as mingling in these conjurings of presence.
Of the many other respects in which James and Charles echo one another, the jumble of their living arrangements is not the least important. (The clicking bead curtain from Shruff End is echoed by the tinkling chimes in James’s place.) James, too, seems to have had trouble settling in. His flat, kept preternaturally dark, is filled with a forbidding and apparently nonsensical mix of fetishes and treasures. Charles says he finds this mess of feathers and sticks “childish” (another example of his failure to gauge the spiritual depth of his cousin). The apartment is quite dusty, perhaps unused, as if it were a place James has been trying to leave or has seldom lived in. The aura of departure surrounds him. Charles calls it a “dumping ground.”
There are also a number of very exquisite have-worthy jade animals which I used to feel tempted to pocket, and plates and bowls of that heavenly Chinese grey sea-green colour wherein, beneath the deep glaze, when you have mopped the dust off with your handkerchief, you can descry lurking lotuses and chrysanthemums. (p. 170)
Things of beauty are being sifted over with the inattentions of time as James has moved deeper into white magic, which he admits is also demonic: “White magic is black magic.” Because he summons Titus to the sea, Titus drowns. On the other hand, because James has magical skill, he might have saved Titus had he been able to “hold on.” But here the demons of Charles’s rotten past crowd in and darken the results of James’s well-meaning magic. As the causality of his sins dawns on him, Charles has to take responsibility for Titus’s death, too: Because he stole Rosina from Peregrine and because Peregrine pushed Charles into Minn’s cauldron and James could not resist expending superhuman effort to rescue him, then had to rest for days, he was unable to prevent Titus from drowning or to summon the strength to administer the kiss of life at the right moment when Titus is found. This failure is so bitter that James almost disappears from under Charles’s gaze; he paces about near the tower among the rocks as if measuring something out. This is part of James’s agon, to suffer to the dregs the resemblance between the loss of Titus and the loss of his Sherpa during a Himalayan blizzard. The ego of the adept also leads to sin.
There is a teaching in Buddhism that suggests a more than personal goal for the Bodhisattva, or Buddha-in-training. It is that by delaying his departure from life he may acquire merit and transfer it to another otherwise less worthy person. (The Teshoo Lama does this for Kim at the end of the Kipling novel.) James has unnaturally protracted his own limbo period out of love for Charles, who interprets James’s beliefs somewhat too narrowly but with chastened rue as his cousin’s desire to tidy up an attachment that would hamper him. Partial like so many of Charles’s insights, it nevertheless recognizes in a scrambled way that he figured largely in James’s life and that James was a profoundly troubled as well as gifted soul. Dr. Tsang, who informs Charles of James’s death, is also from Dehra Dun, in the foothills of the Himalayan range separating northern India from Tibet, presumably also a Buddhist, and someone who recognizes in the willed manner of James’s peaceful death the act of an “enlightened one” who died “achieving all.” Undeniably part of Charles’s change is that he knows how much he has lost. With hindsight, we can see that the “one great light” toward whom Charles has been wending in the dark cavern has been his cousin. “I remembered that James was dead. Who is one’s first love? Who indeed.”
During the last third of the novel both James and Charles Arrowby enter the realm of their separate ordeals. We see James’s indirectly because Charles cannot see directly into it at the time. Illusions are methodically, if violently, stripped away. Each goes beyond himself. Each abjures magic, which Murdoch defines in her work on Plato as “the fantastic doctoring of the real for consumption by the private ego” (this could almost be a definition of novel-writing). Magic, ego, illusion—all of these terms, like the dust that falls on their possessions, come to rest with a difference on James, a more advanced being, than on Charles. But the torment of facing all the loss, for the one who remains, is no less Marsyas-like for that. And if Murdoch’s fictional sophist were to cry, “That’s poetic, just a metaphor!” perhaps her Socrates could again be summoned to remind the reader that “There are deep metaphors, perhaps there are bottomless metaphors.”
—Mary Kinzie
NOTES
Tom Phillips’s painting is in the National Portrait Gallery, London—easier to get to than Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas, which is in a former archepiscopal palace in Kromeriz, Czechoslovakia. (However, the Titian can now be accessed on the Web at artchive.com, and the Phillips portrait appears as a stamp-sized icon on the back of many of the Penguin paper editions of Murdoch’s novels.) For help in thinking about the Titian painting I am indebted to Renaissance art historian Laura Giles of the Art Institute of Chicago, who provided me with the essential essay on this work by Sydney J. Freedberg from FMR, vol. 4 (1984). Robert Hughes’s quip appears in his essay “The Legacy of La Serenissima” on the Royal Academy of Arts, London, show “The Genius of Venice 1500-1600” (Time, 6 February 1984); this show brought to London The Flaying of Marsyas, although Murdoch had earlier written of the painting in both The Black Prince (1973) and A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970). Robert Graves’s two-volume work on Greek myths (Penguin, 1955) provided material about both Marsyas and Perseus when it did not appear in Ovid and Dante. Linguist Seymour Chatman’s suggestion about an “interest point of view” appears in his chapter on non-narrated stories in his Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Cornell University Press, 1978), reprinted in Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, ed. Hoffman and Murphy (Duke University Press, 1990). Quotations from Murdoch’s philosophical and critical prose and her Platonic dialogues are taken from the invaluable indexed compendium edited by Peter Conradi, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, by Iris Murdoch (Penguin, 1998). Professor of philosophy Julius Sensat provided the source for the quotation from David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, Book II (Of the passions), Part iii (Of the will and direct passions), Section 3 (Of the influencing motives of the will), and helpfully explained its context. Jorge Luis Borges’s remark about Tacitus appears in his essay “The Modesty of History,” Other Inquisitions 1937-1952.
I was guided throughout by Elizabeth Dipple’s Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (University of Chicago Press, 1982), a study of all of Murdoch’s novels through Nuns and Soldiers (1980), the novel that followed The Sea, the Sea (1978). These twenty novels would be followed by five more enormous books, The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), the underappreciated The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), The Message to the Planet (1989), and The Green Knight (1993), and then the mysterious and brief postscript to her novel-writing career, Jackson’s Dilemma (1995). Only in The Book and the Brotherhood would Murdoch create additional central characters as resistant to self-scrutiny yet as blindly self-regarding and as sunken into the bog of late middle age as Charles Arrowby, but unlike them, Arrowby, for all his grievous faults, suggests the possibility of insight and the sheer human energy for change.
To Rosemary Cramp
Prehistory
THE SEA WHICH LIES BEFORE ME as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine. With the tide turning, it leans quietly against the land, almost unflecked by ripples or by foam. Near to the horizon it is a luxurious purple, spotted with regular line
s of emerald green. At the horizon it is indigo. Near to the shore, where my view is framed by rising heaps of humpy yellow rock, there is a band of lighter green, icy and pure, less radiant, opaque however, not transparent. We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot penetrate the sea. Where the gentle water taps the rocks there is still a surface skin of colour. The cloudless sky is very pale at the indigo horizon which it lightly pencils in with silver. Its blue gains towards the zenith and vibrates there. But the sky looks cold, even the sun looks cold.
I had written the above, destined to be the opening paragraph of my memoirs, when something happened which was so extraordinary and so horrible that I cannot bring myself to describe it even now after an interval of time and although a possible, though not totally reassuring, explanation has occurred to me. Perhaps I shall feel calmer and more clear-headed after yet another interval.
I spoke of a memoir. Is that what this chronicle will prove to be? Time will show. At this moment, a page old, it feels more like a diary than a memoir. Well, let it be a diary then. How I regret that I did not keep one earlier, what a record that would have been! But now the main events of my life are over and there is to be nothing but ‘recollection in tranquillity’. To repent of a life of egoism? Not exactly, yet something of the sort. Of course I never said this to the ladies and gentlemen of the theatre. They would never have stopped laughing.