Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

Well, I will try to reflect, but not today. When this is all done, will I ever write anything else? The story of Clement? Or that book about the theatre that my friends kindly profess to think so necessary? Or shall I simply sit by the fire and read Shakespeare, coming home to the place where magic does not shrink reality and turn it into tiny things to be the toys of fairies? There may be no saints, but there is at least one proof that the light of self-satisfaction can illuminate the whole world.

A few letters have arrived for James but they are all from scholars. It appears that my cousin was quite a well-known orientalist who corresponded with learned men all over the world. I have sent the letters on to a man at the British Museum who rang me up asking about the fate of James’s books. I asked the BM man round to look at the books and he came yesterday. When he saw all the stuff in the flat he nearly fainted with emotion and cupidity.

I cannot think what to do about James’s poems. Yes, James’s POEMS! I think I have not mentioned these before! So James did, in some sense at any rate, do what he said he would do: join the army and become a poet. There, in the otherwise bare top drawer of this desk, they were, and indeed there they are: all neatly typed out and filling several large looseleaf books. A ‘personal relic’ no doubt, but with no directions, no covering letter. Toby Ellesmere, who, as I think I mentioned, is now a publisher, has got wind of their existence and has rung up about them twice. Perhaps James mentioned them to him sometime. He has never seen them, and I have not shown them to him. In fact I cannot bring myself to look at them, even to glance at them, for fear that they should turn out to be embarrassingly bad! I had almost rather destroy them unread.

It occurs to me that the only lines of poetry I ever heard James quoting, and he quoted them often, were Whatever happens we have got the Maxim gun and they have not!

Of course this chattering diary is a façade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretences are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.

I have had another letter from Angie, sending another photo and repeating her kind offer.

Gradually autumn is taking charge of London. It is remarkable how early it seems to arrive. The leaves of the plane trees, yellow and red and brightly spotted, appear like little messages stuck upon the damp pavements. Cox’s Orange Pippins are to be found in the shops. I am storing them on the top shelf of my larder. I walk down the street to the embankment every morning and evening and see the turbulent skies over the august towers of Battersea Power Station, and the eternal drama of the Thames rising and falling. I wait. Peregrine is to receive some sort of award for his services to peace. Rosina has gone to America on a job. I have had lunch with Rosemary, with Miss Kaufman, with poor old Fabian, with a frenetic young actor called Erasmus Blick. Of course I have not troubled to record that I am constantly badgered by theatre people to return to the old game. When will they realize I am not interested? I have silenced my telephone with a screw of paper. I have not entered a theatre, even to see Mr Blick’s new Hamlet, which is supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread.

Yes, I wonder if I shall ever write that book about Clement? It is as if this book has taken up forever the space which I might have given to her. How unjust this seems now. Clement was the reality of my life, its bread and its wine. She made me, she invented me, she created me, she was my university, my partner, my teacher, my mother, later my child, my soul’s mate, my absolute mistress. She, and not Hartley, was the reason why I never married. She was certainly the reason why I did not seek and find Hartley at a time when it might have been quite easy to do so. Why did I not try harder, longer? Clement stopped me. In memory I have extended the time of my frantic craving for the vanished Hartley well on into Clement’s regime, but the memory must be misleading. How could Clement not have cured me? Clement when I first met her was a dazzling figure, beautiful and clever and at the top of her fame; and still young, though I thought of her as old. I was twenty. She was thirty-nine, forty. My God, she was younger than Lizzie is now. When I first met her I was a green awkward ignorant graceless boy, it is a miracle that she ever looked at me. Later on, I treated her coldly, her possessiveness irritated me, I found her love a nuisance. I went away, she went away, yet I always came back and she always came back. We never really got lost, and at the end when she was dying I drove all the others out.

Clement was a long time dying. They had the headlines set up in type for weeks. I lay on the bed beside her and stroked her face, which had become, just very lately, so much more wrinkled with pain and fear. My fingers can still remember those soft wrinkles and the tears that quietly filled them. She said she wanted to die in a storm of noise and for days we had the hi-fi turned up playing Wagner and we drank whisky and together we waited. It was the strangest waiting I ever remember for it was and it was not waiting. There was a sort of intense timelessness in the way in which we kept each other company. Our fear divided us, her fear, my fear, of the event: two different sharp fears which we had to overcome by a constant force of mutual attention, laying our hands upon each other’s hearts. We became tired and we turned off the noise and we wept and still we waited. My God, Clement’s tears, how much I had seen of them before and how much they had sickened me. Now I felt they would make a saint of me, and perhaps for a month they almost did. In the end she died when I was asleep. Every morning I had thought I might find her dead, but had then seen her breathing, the little rhythmic rising and falling of the bedclothes that covered her body which had become so shrunken and small. Then one day there was no movement and I saw her eyes open and her face changed.

That time of attentive mourning for her death was quite unlike the black blank horror of the thing itself. We had mourned together, trying to soothe each other’s pain. But that shared pain was so much less than the torment of her vanishing, the terrible lived time of her eternal absence. How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.

I did not intend to write about Clement’s death. I have made myself wretched by doing so and am still haunted by it although several days have passed. Of course I recovered from that bereavement, probably quite quickly. She left me her money, but in the end there was nothing but debts.

Since silencing my telephone I have received fewer invitations. In any case I think people have got over the excitement of my return to London. Just lately I have been spending my evenings at home drinking wine and listening to music, almost any music, on the radio. I have a record player, but it was broken in the move. I cook myself a supper of rice or lentils or spiced cabbage. I eat Cox’s Orange Pippins and go to bed early quite drunk. I don’t think I have the makings of an alcoholic. I have a pain in my chest, but I think this is just something to do with Clement.

I wonder if James was mad? I have found myself thinking this for the first time. Would not this hypothesis explain many things? For instance his illusion that he lifted me up out of that whirlpool by some sort of abnormal power? But wait a moment, was not that my illusion? Perhaps I am mad? I am certainly drunk and I was dozing just now. It is later than my bed time. The Buddhas close in. To bed, to bed.