The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
Lizzie was terrified to come back to me in case her love should make her my slave. She was afraid of that dreadful tormenting dependence of one human consciousness upon another. Am I sorry that that fear has left her? There is a wicked tyrant in me that is. How did Lizzie manage it? Perhaps she too had to re-enact her love, to suffer it all over again, in order to transform it. Only she seems to have succeeded whereas I have failed; she has perfected her love, I have simply destroyed mine. Was I the destined trial that was to purify her power to love? The speculation is rather too sublime! Perhaps the horrors of the summer simply snapped some thread, Lizzie grew tired. We are all potentially demons to each other, but some close relationships are saved from this fate. My relation with Lizzie seems to have been so saved, by some grace, without my merit, without my will. I think we are both tired, and glad to rest in each other’s company.
We touch and kiss, there is no urge for more. As I said at the start, I am, unlike the modern hero, not highly sexed! I can do without it, I am doing without it, I feel fine without it. Looking back, I must make a confession which would indeed shame the modern hero. I have not had all that many love affairs, and the women I pursued successfully did not always please me in bed. Of course there have been exceptions: Clement, who taught me. Jeanne. What would it have been like with Hartley?
Lizzie and I never speak of James and somehow this does not seem to matter. It is as if the fact that he knew her had been blotted out of both our memories. All the same, and in a sense which is perhaps harmless, James has divided me from Lizzie, he has castrated our relationship. Perhaps this is precisely the unmerited grace, the source of our peace? The demons detailed to disturb our friendship have all been killed. I do not miss them. Sometimes when Lizzie and I smile quietly at each other I wonder if she is thinking just the same thing.
I have had a recurrence of the chest pain which I first experienced on the day when I tried to have a bath in the kitchen at Shruff End. I saw my doctor but he says it is simply caused by ‘viruses’.
Sometimes I sit and wonder whom I should leave my money to. Perhaps I had better start giving it away now. I have sent a cheque to the Buddhist Society and another to the Arbelow Peace Foundation, and will shortly amaze young Erasmus Blick, who is getting married, by my generosity. His Hamlet is still running, I still haven’t seen it. I imagine I shall leave all the oriental stuff to the British Museum, in fact they can have the books now. And I shall leave James’s poems to Toby. Why this anxiety to tidy up? Do I imagine I am going to die soon? Not really—yet it is as if that fall into the sea did damage me after all, not with body damage but with some sort of soul damage. Perhaps James died of soul damage? I am perfectly healthy and do not feel that I am becoming an ‘elderly party’, but I notice that people are beginning to treat me as if I were one, and this must be a reflection of my own sense of myself. They give me presents, potted plants and tins of jellied chicken, and ask me if I am all right. Am I all right? Rosemary has given me some pottery soup bowls.
Last night someone on a BBC quiz did not know who I was.
I must have been a bit under the weather yesterday when I wrote the above. In fact I was feeling a bit queasy after attending a so-called college ‘feast’ in Oxford. I must not give my money away too quickly when I am in moods like that. However I have told the British Museum that they can have the books now. I suppose that is right, though there is a kind of impiety involved in letting any of James’s stuff go away. Do I then suppose he is likely to come back at any moment?
As I write I am touching with my other hand the brown stone with the blue lines on it which James selected from my collection at Shruff End. It was on the desk when I came here and perhaps he handled it a lot, so touching it is a bit like touching his hand (what sentimental nonsense). I hold the stone and play with a kind of emotion which I keep at bay. Loving people, isn’t that an attachment? I do not want to suffer fruitlessly. I feel regret, remorse, that I never got to know him better. We were never really friends and I spent a lot of my life stupidly envying him, nervously watching him, and exerting myself in a competition which he probably never knew existed. In so far as he did not succeed I was glad, and I valued my own success because it seemed that I outshone him. My awareness of him was fear, anxiety, envy, desire to impress. Could such an awareness contain or compose love? We missed each other because of lack of confidence, courage, generosity, because of misplaced dignity and English taciturnity. I feel now as if something of me went with James’s death, like part of a bridge carried away in a flood.
A completely new view of Hartley’s second defection, and indeed of her first, has just occurred to me. I think something like it was suggested to me by James. When Hartley said she had to ‘protect herself’ by thinking I hated her and blamed her, she added that she ‘always felt guilty’. When she said she had to feel sure it was all over and to ‘make it dead in her mind’, I imagined that this angry hostile image of me was designed to numb her old love and the attraction which I might still exercise, because such an attraction would be too painful for her to live with. But perhaps the fundamental bond was not love at all, but guilt? Obsessive guilt can survive through the years and animate the ghost of the offended one. Could such guilt even simulate a buried love? Perhaps Hartley herself, in that long interim, did not know what it was that she was so painfully feeling about me. It must have been a terrible and a difficult action to escape from me, to betray our unseparated lives and our devoted vows. ‘I had to go like that, it was the only way, it wasn’t easy.’ Had the shock of that betrayal gone on reverberating in her mind, like the original explosion of the universe? While there was no occasion to define it, how could she know exactly what she felt, whether it was shock, or guilt, or love?
Then I reappeared and made it, quite suddenly, abundantly clear to her that I did not hate her or blame her, that I had gone on loving her without resentment. Her first feeling was one of gratitude, and with this relief came a sense of a love revived. Perhaps this was what she felt on the night when she came to me about Titus. As I learnt in the case of myself and Peregrine, one often feels guilt not because one has sinned but because one has been accused! The withdrawal of the imagined accusation caused Hartley to feel gratitude, affection, at first. But as the guilt, and the vibrating explosive intensity which it had brought into our relationship, began to fade, the more deeply buried reality of her feelings for me became apparent. After all, it had been very hard to leave me and she must have had very compelling motives. It had required great courage to run away to her auntie at Stoke-on-Trent. Why did she go? Because I was in love and she was not; because she simply did not like me enough, because I was too selfish, too dominating, as she put it ‘so sort of bossy’. I had deluded myself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love which did not exist at all. After her liberation from the tie of guilt, that old saving resentment returned to her, she regained that sheer basic indifference to my company which in the past had enabled her to go away, and take her hopes for life elsewhere. And perhaps in that elsewhere she had soon met with a sexual awakening which I had been unable to give her.
But these speculations are too nightmarish. Better to feel ‘I shall never know’.
The people from the British Museum have come and removed all the oriental books. They looked longingly at the other stuff. One even wanted to examine the demon-casket, but I ran forward with a cry. James’s other books, which now conspicuously remain, are mainly history, and poetry in European languages. (I cannot find the works of Milarepa. Is he an Italian poet?) No novels. I have unpacked some of my own books, but they have an unhappy frivolous look and will never fill those empty spaces. Will the place be gradually dismantled, like Aladdin’s palace?
A letter from Jeanne who wants me to visit her in Iran where her husband, a Kurd or something, is some sort of princeling. I may yet be the victim of a crime passionnel.
Shruff End has been sold at last, thank God, to a Dr and Mrs Schwarzkopf. I hope they will have b
The latest gossip about Rosina is that she is living in a canyon in Los Angeles with a woman psychiatrist. I hear that idiot Will Boase has been knighted. I never coveted such ‘honours’, I am glad to say.
I dreamt last night that Hartley was dead, that she was drowned.
Another letter from Angie.
I have talked with Lizzie about Hartley and though nothing important was said my heart feels eased, as if it has been gently prised open. I accused Hartley of being a ‘fantasist’, or perhaps that was Titus’s word, but what a ‘fantasist’ I have been myself. I was the dreamer, I the magician. How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality. Hartley had been right when she said of our love that it was not part of the real world. It had no place. But what strikes me now is that at some point, in order to ease things for myself, I decided, almost surreptitiously, to regard her as a liar. In order to release myself from the burden of my tormented attachment I began, with the half-conscious cunning so characteristic of the self-protective human ego, to see her as a poor hysterical shrew; and this debased pity, which I tried to imagine was some kind of spiritual compassion, was the half-way house to my escape. I could not bear the spectacle of that whimpering captive victim in that awful windowless room which I still see in nightmares. My love’s imagination gave up the real Hartley and consoled itself with high abstract ideas of blindly ‘accepting it all’. That was the exit.
Lizzie said when we talked, ‘Of course a marriage can look terrible but be perfectly all right.’ Yes, yes. But had I not evidence? Of course I never told Lizzie about my eavesdropping, and how I heard Hartley saying again and again, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ Ben never settled down in civilian life. He got a medal for killing a lot of men in a prison camp in the Ardennes. There was talk of unnecessary brutality. Some people are better at killing than others. Hartley said she had lied about Ben’s violence, but perhaps that was a lie, uttered out of loyalty, out of irrational fear? Can one not recognize the smell of fear? Where can such speculations lead and under what light can they even attempt to be just? The door is closed against the imagination of love. The fallibility of memory and its feeble range make perfect reconciliations impossible. But there is no doubt that Hartley was afflicted, and no doubt that she did, as I thought at first, sometimes feel sorry that she had lost me. She came to me, she ran to me, that was no dream. That was no phantom that I embraced on that night. And on that night she said that she loved me. My idea of her return to an ‘original resentment’ is too ingenious. One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story. She was not able to be my Beatrice nor was I able to be saved by her, but the idea was not senseless or unworthy. My pity for her need not be a device or an impertinence, it can survive after all as a blank ignorant quiet unpossessive souvenir, not now a major part of my life, but a persisting one. The past buries the past and must end in silence, but it can be a conscious silence that rests open-eyed. Perhaps this is the final forgiveness that James spoke of.
Last night I dreamt I heard a boy’s voice singing Eravamo tredici. When I awoke I still seemed to hear that ridiculous pima-poma-pima-poma chorus still ringing in the flat. How differently I would feel about all these possessions if Titus were still alive. Unpacking some more of my books I came across his de luxe edition of Dante’s love poems.
What innumerable chains of fatal causes one’s vanity, one’s jealousy, one’s cupidity, one’s cowardice have laid upon the earth to be traps for others. It is strange to think that when I went to the sea I imagined that I was giving up the world. But one surrenders power in one form, and grasps it in another. Perhaps in a way James and I had the same problem?
I keep trying to remember things which James said, but I seem to be forgetting them at an unusual rate. The flat looks dreary without his books. I think it is going to be rather cold here in the winter. Already the days are blank and yellow. I must try to learn how to raise my bodily temperature by mental concentration!
I have been to my doctor again and he can still find nothing wrong with me. I was beginning to wonder whether all this ‘wisdom’ was a preliminary to physical collapse! It has been raining all day and I have stayed at home. On my present stores of rice and lentils and Cox’s Orange Pippins I could last the winter. I am still silencing the telephone bell. Am I after all alone now, as I intended to be, and without attachments? Is history over?
Can one change oneself? I doubt it. Or if there is any change it must be measured as the millionth part of a millimetre. When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm no one. I cannot think of any tiny good thing to do at the moment, but perhaps I shall think of one tomorrow.
It is very foggy today. The other side of the Thames was invisible when I went down this morning. The cold weather is making me feel better. The shops are already preparing for Christmas. I walked to Piccadilly and bought a lot of cheese. Came back to find a long effusive cable from Fritzie, who is on his way to London. He wants me to direct something he calls ‘neo-ballet’. The Odyssey is on again.
Took Miss Kaufman to Hamlet and enjoyed it. Have had a very tempting invitation to Japan.
Decided to release the telephone bell and instantly Angie was on the line. Arranged to have lunch with her on Friday.
Fritzie arrives tomorrow.
Yes of course I was in love with my own youth. Aunt Estelle? Not really. Who is one’s first love?
My God, that bloody casket has fallen on the floor! Some people were hammering in the next flat and it fell off its bracket. The lid has come off and whatever was inside it has certainly got out. Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder?
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)
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea