The Sea, the Sea Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Dedication

  History - ONE

  History - TWO

  History - THREE

  History - FOUR

  History - FIVE

  History - SIX

  Postscript:

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE SEA, THE SEA

  IRIS MURDOCH was born in Dublin in 1919, grew up in London, and received her university education at Oxford and later at Cambridge. In 1948 she became a Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where for many years she taught philosophy. In 1987 she was appointed Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire. She died on February 8, 1999. Murdoch wrote twenty-six novels, including Under the Net, her writing debut of 1954, and the Booker Prize-winning The Sea, The Sea (1978). She received a number of other literary awards, among them the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince (1973) and the Whitbread Prize for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Her works of philosophy include Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1980), Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1993), and Existentialists and Mystics (1998). She also wrote several plays and a volume of poetry.

  MARY KINZIE is a poet and critic who founded the creative writing program at Northwestern University. Her books of poetry include Summers of Vietnam, Autumn Eros, and Ghost Ship. Her most recent book of prose is A Poet’s Guide to Poetry.

  By the same author

  Philosophy

  SARTRE, ROMANTIC RATIONALIST

  THE FIRE AND THE SUN

  ACOSTOS: TWO PLATONIC DIALOGUES

  METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS

  EXISTENTIALISTS AND MYSTICS

  Fiction

  UNDER THE NET

  THE FLIGHT FROM THE ENCHANTER

  THE SANDCASTLE

  THE BELL

  SEVERED HEAD

  AN UNOFFICIAL ROSE

  THE UNICORN

  THE ITALIAN GIRL

  THE RED AND THE GREEN

  THE TIME OF THE ANGELS

  THE NICE AND THE GOOD

  BRUNO’S DREAM

  A FAIRLY HONOURABLE DEFEAT

  AN ACCIDENTAL MAN

  THE BLACK PRINCE

  THE SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE MACHINE

  A WORD CHILD

  HENRY AND CATO

  THE SEA, THE SEA

  NUNS AND SOLDIERS

  THE PHILOSOPHER’S PUPIL

  THE GOOD APPRENTICE

  THE BOOK AND THE BROTHERHOOD

  THE MESSAGE TO THE PLANET

  THE GREEN KNIGHT

  JACKSON’S DILEMMA

  Plays

  A SEVERED HEAD (with J. B. Priestley)

  THE ITALIAN GIRL (with James Saunders)

  THE THREE ARROWS and

  THE SERVANTS AND THE SNOW

  THE BLACK PRINCE

  Poetry

  A YEAR OF BIRDS

  (Illustrated by Reynolds Stone)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

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  First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 1978

  First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1978

  Published in Penguin Books 1980

  This edition with an introduction by

  Mary Kinzie published in Penguin Books 2001

  Copyright © Iris Murdoch, 1978

  Introduction copyright © Mary Kinzie, 2001

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Murdoch, Iris.

  The sea, the sea / Iris Murdoch ; introduction by Mary Kinzie.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-49565-0

  1. Middle aged men—Fiction. 2. London (England)—

  Fiction. 3. Actors—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6063.U7 S25 2001

  823′.914—dc21 00-061132

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  INTRODUCTION: THE DANCE OF CREATION

  In his portrait from the mid-1980s entitled “Dame Iris Murdoch” Tom Phillips painted the novelist looking out to her right toward the light that falls on her strong, pale face, high Mongol-looking cheekbones, and unsmiling mouth. Murdoch’s hair, as always roughly chopped, looks unattended to; her collar is awry. (One wrinkle in its cloth—a subtle touch—resembles a tendon in the neck.) Her expression is at once mournful and calm. A profound alertness and unflinching quality is created by the almost sweet set of the mouth and the indirect gaze, so unlike the many photographs in which she relentlessly glares out at us—the 1981 portrait by Snowdon, for example, a photo that relishes also the rumpled bulk of the body in a poorly buttoned coat. But the size and disarray of self are not the focus of the image painted by Phillips. The light draws the sitter’s gaze, falling on the broad planes of her face—and on a corner of the painting on the wall behind her. This is the horrifying and majestic late painting by Titian of The Flaying of Marsyas. The light in this painting also comes from the upper left. A further mysterious link is that Murdoch’s head obscures the head of Marsyas.

  In Titian’s painting, the satyr Marsyas is hung upside down, his goatish legs lashed to a tree’s branches as if in a long, tense stride. Bound at the wrists, his arms rest bent on the ground, framing his head. Near this suffering, shadowy head (the eyes open and luminous, but the mouth rucked down to the chin, as in the mask of tragedy), an ugly lapdog is licking up blood fallen from the long torso. The god Apollo, whom we also see, down to the left, in Phillips’s painting, is wielding the knife that has just begun to flay the skin from the living Marsyas’s body. Titian’s radiant blond Apollo is kneeling and intent—Robert Hughes calls him “prim,” but perhaps it is more accurate to say that Apollo is completely absorbed, for it is his task to extract the true soul, however painfully, out of the husk of even a very beautiful body. As he does so (in fact), he must aim to make the materially beautiful seem like a husk. Rather than being primarily an allegory of the mortal artist punished for hubris by a divine one (Marsyas was tricked into admitting he believed his reed flute might rival Apollo’s lyre), Marsyas represents for Murdoch, as he clearly did for Titian, the pain of yearning endured and terror faced in the ordeal of creation. The artist is being remade with a new kind of beauty as we watch the painting, and a new definition of heroism is born out of this unbearable unselving.

  Murdoch’s Bradley Pearson, the narrator and protagonist of The Black Prince (1973), explains how this unselving works in the artwork he is most drawn by:

  Hamlet is words, and so is Hamlet.... He is the tormented empty sinful consciousness of man seared by the bright light of art, the god’s flayed victim dancing the dance of creation.

  The late Elizabeth Dipple, a Renaissance scholar attracted to Murdoch because of the novelist’s Shakespearean variety and seriousness, has properly identified the source of the dance: “That Shakespeare is Marsyas,” writes Dipple, “flayed, suffering, defeated, dead to the self (drawn out of himself as his skin flaps to the wind) is Murdoch’s image of the genuine artist.” The identification between Marsyas and the artist is made in Tom Phillips’s painting by the placement of Murdoch’s face over the suffering satyr’s. But what are we
to make of the preternaturally gentle expression on Murdoch’s face? Surely this is not the artist as masochist? “Is Shakespeare a masochist? Of course,” Bradley Pearson insists.

  He is the king of masochists, his writing thrills with that secret. But because his god is a real god and not an eidolon of private fantasy, and because love has here invented language as if for the first time, he can change pain into pure poetry.... He enacts the purification of speech, and yet this is also something comic.... Shakespeare cries out in agony, he writhes, he dances, he laughs, he shrieks, and he makes us laugh and shriek ourselves out of hell.... What redeems us is that speech is ultimately divine.

  Shakespeare endures the tortures of imperfection yet renders them in intelligent plots, careful placement of character, and sublime and various language. He is both the delver into the coils of self and the perspective taken by art above self. (To be Apollo is beyond even the great artist’s ability; his is an unearthly music.) All one can do is hope to endure the pain that comes with creation. Furthermore, Marsyas as the type of the artist is being both defeated and redeemed. His rescue takes him out of the husk of a lower form and into a higher. By Titian’s time he had come to represent a religious metamorphosis that might be granted to the painter or poet: “Enter my breast,” Dante had written, “and infuse me with your spirit as you did when you tore Marsyas from the covering of his limbs” (Paradiso I.19-20). The god’s act creates the conditions for a passage into a form of being one does not know about yet.

  When we ask why Murdoch so identified herself with this painting as to return to it in her work and to elect it as the background for her portrait, we might conjecture that Marsyas represents the major artistic paradox of the physical being on the threshold of a spiritual change. The figure of Marsyas is blazing with life, although clearly linked to a satyr’s lower, animal nature. (He is a flawed entity, not entirely human as yet.) Moreover, he is suffering, for this is also part of the artist’s task. He is submitting in terror, yet without struggle, to having the real rind of his symbolically flawed nature sliced away. The process is only just beginning in the painting—it will take a long time before he dies to the flesh. The self released from this body is implicitly linked to the beauty of the kneeling Apollo and to the youth Olympus in the background, a former follower of Marsyas who now plays the viola da braccio, Titian’s version of Apollo’s lyre. To these figures Marsyas is linked by contrast (his pan pipes hang from the branch by his hoof), but also by the promise that in his change, through unspeakable striving, he might aspire to mingle with mind, spirit, and wordless nonnarrative formal perfection.

  Murdoch believed that the threefold task of the novelist was to see ourselves not as romantically separate beings but in the context of the world about us (“Civilization is terrible,” one character writes to the protagonist in The Sea, the Sea, “but don’t imagine that you can ever escape it”), then to witness ourselves through the ordeal of an introspection that must be painful to our human natures, bent as we are on self-satisfaction, and finally to intuit patterns emerging from random necessity, chaos, confusion, rubble—the “wandering causes” with which the demiurge must work in making the world. Murdoch extends the idea of external chaos to the internal realm: To be an artist means working against—as well as working with—the miserable nonsense that fate and accident make of our lives, no less than the nonsense our own foreshortened insight makes of the patterns in which we are embroiled. “To see misery and evil justly,” Murdoch writes in The Fire and the Sun (1976), “is one of the heights of aesthetic endeavor”:

  How this becomes beautiful is a mystery.... Shakespeare makes not only splendour but beauty out of the malevolence of Iago and the intolerable death of Cordelia, as Homer does out of the miseries of a pointless war and the stylish ruthlessness of Achilles.

  But the typical Murdoch protagonist—male, middle-aged or older, with some artistic inclinations and a long history of skewed self-regard—seldom begins with such high aesthetic capacities, and certainly never sets out to follow Marsyas into torment. On the contrary, her men of middling sensibilities are originally on the wrong path entirely. Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince does not realize the connection to Marsyas until he has already begun to be drawn out of his old self. He is a limited being, selfish, fastidious, opinionated (Murdoch links him to Humbert Humbert), also desperate for change, eager to retire from the civil service to the seaside so that at last he can add to his thin trickle of artificial poetry. The protagonist-narrator of The Sea, the Sea (1978), Charles Arrowby, is on a path yet more false, since he assumes he can now rest from having been a great theatrical artist and interpreter of Shakespeare. But despite these limitations, he backs into the making of real art, presenting us at last, as the earlier hero had done, with the book we read.

  In an important sense Charles Arrowby’s is the story of someone who violently and bullheadedly persists in all the wrong directions until time and experience—both under great pressure—and love from an unexpected quarter partially redeem him. His memoir, which covers one late May and June, and then a bit of an early-autumnal August, describes a series of derailments from his original intentions. He planned to leave the London theater scene, live solus, perhaps indulging in a poignant interlude with a sweet, boyish woman who used to be a (not very good) actress, Lizzie Scherer, whom he has kept on a string; he had twitched that string by sending her a lying, seductive letter just prior to the book’s opening. And he also plans to tell the story of his central love affair with an older actress, Clement Makin, now dead. Clement “made” him both professionally and personally, and despite their infidelities and separations, Charles was with her when she died. But before so much as a page can follow this orderly focus, Charles is visited by a horrifying vision. So distressed is the narrator that he can neither tell us immediately what it was nor continue with his original narrative plan. This derailment is a harbinger of the deluge of occasions when Charles’s experience vaults out of his control, and his narrative veers off its course into unmapped accidents as a veritable throng of Londoners appear at his doorstep (a convergence that peaks at a Whitsun revel both comic and eerie). These accidents are then interwoven with an almost equally strange sequence of daily routines, obsessively exact in their rendering, as if thereby to regain the thread that his fate has started to unravel. The story of Charles and Clement is never fully told. Charles does not succeed in a renewed affair with Lizzie. He does leave the theater scene but does not escape the moral aftermath of his time there. (Indeed, his past leads to his own near-death and to the actual death of a young man.) And finally, he moves tentatively into a state of solitude he has only begun to test. None of his plans works out—including the great last failed adventure at the novel’s core. “The country of old age” one critic called Charles’s environment, where everything he has done and left undone crowds in, like the dead in the underworld around the living hero. His attempt to steal happiness results in horrors. The gifts reserved for his age are destruction and remorse, what Yeats called “violence” and “bitterness.”

  There is a contradiction built into the literary use of what we might see as the mode of Marsyas, the mode of lifelikeness or a realism of the physical as it leads to the edge of the spiritual: The catch is that although an artwork needs a shape, the ordinary world and our experiences within it are unformed and inartistic, an ill-sorted jumble of events and crisscrossing motives and roughly joined disguises—false and foolish integuments. Beauty of form is far removed from most lives. The texture of consciousness is sluggish when not venal (nobody really thinks in the shaped linguistic patternings of Hermann Broch’s Vergil or Beckett’s Watt or García Márquez’s patriarch or Coetzee’s magistrate), while the many occasions in literary art for tempting closure in the shaping of event are all too often triggered by fantasy or will. Paradoxically, it is this willed closure or neatness of finish that the true artist needs to resist, fending off the urge to smooth out the rough surfaces of pain, necessity, and
accident. Instead, as in Shakespeare, exemplary in bearing witness to the terrible even in those plays most given over to a maniac tidying up of bodies in marriage and death, the goal is to render clearly and without flinching the truth of all the infinite varieties of untruth. Like Shakespeare, Murdoch canvasses the truth of untruth—human vanity, jealousy, idleness. “People lie so,” says James Arrowby to his cousin Charles, “even we old men do. Though in a way, if there is art enough it doesn’t matter, since there is another kind of truth in the art” (p. 173).

  Does this model of the true art-of-the-untruth pertain in The Sea, the Sea? How far can Charles Arrowby, the scot-free predator upon other men’s women, theatrical Tartar and tyrannus tonans , enter into an understanding of the backwardness—the lies—of his own character? On the surface, he admits he has nothing extraordinary to show for his sixty-some-odd years, that he leaves nothing of lasting value behind (no offspring, for example), that he has not been generous or ever, really, courageous—and certainly not “good.” Yet he cannot seem to get up and move elsewhere with this recognition; he remains sanguine about his prospects, sunk in that self while lavish in his criticisms of traits in others that resemble his own bad ones. The hard, the necessary, and the fated truths of existence do not seem to affect or even brush against him—or when they do, they do so in beckonings of apparent reprieve or unanticipated blessing (as in his two visions of the starry night, the second ending with a visit from the selkies).

  The first of Murdoch’s ways of telling the truth-of-an-untruth is to perfect and thicken and verify the world in which the play is played. Murdoch (and Arrowby with her) is a genius of texture and description. The world Charles enters—even the sea—is fresh, strange to his touch, on every page of his narrative exactly and eloquently delineated. We believe in this person in large measure because he can see the natural and material world in its intricacy and persistent changing. The “untruth” lies only in its transience as a handhold. Another technique is to present through Charles images of truth, which he misinterprets—or fails to see. (Because this is a first-person novel, it therefore seems as if Charles can notice as a record-keeper what he cannot absorb imaginatively.) A brief instance, already quoted, is his cousin’s comment on how much people lie to themselves, which occurs at a point where, as memoirist, Charles feels especially robust in his truth-telling. His response to James is therefore one of pique. More comically, he misinterprets James’s quotation from “some philosopher”: “ ‘It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of one’s finger’ ” (p. 72). Charles recalls this unidentified mot (it comes from Hume) in light of the reckless mood he shared with one of his mistresses in which “we definitely preferred the former”; the woman even “hurled herself downstairs in a fit of rage.” But in fact, Hume was speaking of desires large or small as logically separate from reason, although he also believed natural benevolence and common sense would militate against preferring the world’s destruction to a minor irritant. (In Charles’s defense, James may well have thrown out the quotation knowing that his cousin would misconstrue.) Psychologically telling too are the occasions when Charles cannot take the point home, making “untrue” the echo in his own repetition of Lizzie’s loving and melancholy admission about herself, “You feel you can compel the beloved, but it’s an illusion,” at which Charles of course does not feel compelled by her or under any obligation to assuage her sorrow. Yet Charles will stormily try to compel his beloved later on. Nor can Charles take the point when he overhears the husband tell the woman he loves, “You’ve made me bad,” when he had already said of her, “she made me faithless.” Any cross-reference within Charles’s text is diminished into a sort of renvoi bandé, blind to its doubleness.