Iris Murdoch: The Sea, the Sea

Even to enact the role of Perseus, hero and dragon-slayer, entails a connection to a flaw. In the myths, Perseus is the vanquisher of the Gorgon, but the act of killing feeds a continuing destruction of life-as is true of most violent acts. He is a model (of sorts) for the reckless and delusional Charles in the sense that he meets challenges such as the treachery of Andromeda’s parents and their court by pulling from the enchanted wallet the head of Medusa and turning whole palaces into wastes of petrified folk. This is one symbolic origin for the quantities of misshapen yellow boulders that ring the uncanny north-coastal home Arrowby has chosen for his retirement. The boulders suggest a display of something formerly animate, again like the mythic land of the Hyperboreans in which Perseus finds the Gorgons asleep (as Robert Graves has put it) “among rain-worn shapes of men and wild beasts.”

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…