Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

If this diary is ‘waiting’ for some final clarificatory statement which I am to make about Hartley it may have to wait forever. It is not of course a full account of my doings, and events and people unconnected with what went before are omitted from it. I have also omitted the dates from this meditation. Time has passed and it is October, with bright cool sunny days and an intense blue northern sky and scattered flying memories of other autumns. It is mushroom weather, and I have been having feasts of real mushrooms, the big slimy black things, not the little tasteless buttons. Crumpets too have appeared in the shops and already one can look forward to the so familiar London winter, dark afternoons and fogs and the glitter and excitement of Christmas. And however unhappy I am I cannot help responding automatically to these stimuli, as no doubt I did in the past in other unhappy autumns.

Since writing that stuff about Clement I have been missing her. Odd that one can identify a pain as ‘missing so and so’. I keep seeing Clement in the street when I am on a bus, on an escalator going up when I am going down, jumping into a taxi and disappearing. Perhaps it will be like this in bardo. My God, if she is there, what a time she will be having! Talk of attachments, Clement had enough torment in her head to last ten thousand years.

Of course I do not believe in those ‘blasphemies’ which I wrote earlier.

When did I begin to relax my hold upon Hartley, or rather upon her image, her double, the Hartley of my mind? Have I relaxed my hold, did it happen before, or is it only happening now, when I can look back over the summer and see my acts and thoughts as those of a madman? I remember Rosina saying to me that her desire for me was made of jealousy, resentment, anger, not love. Was the same true of my desire for Hartley? Was the aim of the whole operation, the whole obsession, that I should be able in the end to see her as a harpy, a semi-conscious trouble-making sorceress, unworthy of my devotion, and whom I would cast off with a relieved disgust? James said I would come to see her as a wicked enchantress and then I would forgive her. But would not forgiving her finally defeat the purpose of this psychological game I have been playing with myself? Have I indeed relived my love simply in order to explain to myself that it was a false love, compounded of resentment stored from long ago and the present promptings of mad possessive jealousy? Was I so resentful long ago? I cannot remember. Hartley said, so strangely, that she had to think of me as hating her in order to reduce the attractive power of my image. Now as I think about it all, trying in vain swoops to recover the far past, it seems to me that perhaps what I felt about Hartley then, at any rate after I had been captured by Clement, was a kind of guilt that I was not suffering enough, not seeking her earnestly enough. Damn it, I was in love with Clement, I must have been, though I tormented her by denying it! Was it possible that, by then, I was relieved that I could not find Hartley? I have no diary to tell me and even if I had I might not believe it. I cannot now remember the exact sequence of events in those prehistoric years. That we cannot remember such things, that our memory, which is our self, is tiny, limited and fallible, is also one of those important things about us, like our inwardness and our reason. Indeed it is the very essence of both.

Whatever the cause, it is now clear that something is over. My new, my second love for her, my second ‘innings’, seemed at its height a thing sublime, even without illusion, when I had seen her as so pitiful, so broken, and yet as something which I could cherish, something which I could hold and be held by, and which would be a source of light even if I were to lose her utterly, as I have indeed lost her utterly. What has become of that light now? It has gone and was at best a flickering flame seen in a marsh, and my great ‘illumination’ a kind of nonsense. She is gone, she is nothing, for me she no longer exists, and after all I fought for a phantom Helen. On n’aime qu’une fois, la première. What a lot of folly I have run through in aid of that stupid gallicism!

What has changed things, simply the relentless movement of time, which so quietly and automatically changes all things? I wrote earlier that Titus’s death had ‘spoilt’ Hartley, spoilt her just by her survival of him. Yes, but it was not that I somehow blamed her for it. Rather there was some sort of demonic filth which had gradually corroded everything, and which seemed to come, without her fault, from her, so that for her sake, for my sake, we had to part eternally. And I seem to see her now, forever disfigured by that filth, untidy, frowzy, dirty, old. How cruel and unjust. Without her fault. The only fault which I can at all measure is my own. I let loose my own demons, not least the sea serpent of jealousy. But now my brave faith which said ‘Whatever she is like, it is her that I love’, has failed and gone, and all has faded into triviality and self-regarding indifference; and I know that quietly I belittle her, as almost every human being intentionally belittles every other one. Even the few whom we genuinely adore we have to belittle secretly now and then, as Toby and I had to belittle James, just to feed the healthy appetite of our wondrously necessary egos.

But of course the pain remains and will remain. We are conditioned beings who salivate when the bell rings. This sheer conditioning is another of our most characteristic dooms. Anything can be tarnished by association, and if you have enough associations you can blacken the world. Whenever I hear a dog barking I see again Hartley’s face as I last saw it, all wrinkled up with pain, then going strangely blank. Just as, whenever I hear the music of Wagner I remember Clement dying and weeping over her own death. In hell or in purgatory there would be no need of other or more elaborate tortures.

A busy week. Had lunch with Miss Kaufman and arranged for her mother to be packed off to a comfortable and expensive ‘twilight home’. I am to pay the bills, it appears. Am I becoming saintly after all? Had a drink with Rosina. She is thinking of entering politics. She says it is so easy to influence people by making speeches. Saw Aloysius Bull and Will Boase. They want me to join their new company. Refused. Went to private view of Doris’s awful paintings. Lunch with Rosemary, who says the Maybelle business may be blowing over. Got another letter from Angie. To Cambridge to visit the Bansteads, and see them showing off their happy successful marriage and their handsome clever children. Dinner with Lizzie and Gilbert. Gilbert is nominated ‘show business personality of the year’. We talked of Wilfred, and Gilbert was becomingly modest, or affected to be.

I must speak of Lizzie. I have been unjust to her in the preceding pages. However, I have kept her letters to me, and the keeping of a letter is always significant. (Why on earth did Hartley keep my last letter but not read it? I suppose she just had to dispose of it quickly. A long letter cannot always be rapidly destroyed, as I have found out in my time.) I have reread Lizzie’s letters, the ones recorded above. At the time they seemed to me to be mere out-pourings of self-deceiving nonsense. Now they seem rather touching, even wise. (Am I, for the first time since Clement, feeling short of admirers?) Since Gilbert became so busy and famous I have been seeing a little more of Lizzie by herself. I now have lunch with her regularly and have at last persuaded her not to cook. This, in almost any friendship, is a very important step. We are quiet and cheerful together. We laugh and joke a lot, we discuss nothing serious, and it may be that Lizzie’s eloquence rings more in my mind than it does in hers.