The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [14]
I must make no attempt at ‘fine writing’ however, that would be to spoil my enterprise. Besides, I should merely make a fool of myself.
Oh blessed northern sea, a real sea with clean merciful tides, not like the stinking soupy Mediterranean!
They say there are seals here, but I have seen none yet.
Of course there is no need to separate ‘memoir’ from ‘diary’ or ‘philosophical journal’. I can tell you, reader, about my past life and about my ‘world-view’ also, as I ramble along. Why not? It can all come out naturally as I reflect. Thus unanxiously (for am I not now leaving anxiety behind?) I shall discover my ‘literary form’. In any case, why decide now? Later, if I please, I can regard these ramblings as rough notes for a more coherent account. Who knows indeed how interesting I shall find my past life when I begin to tell it? Perhaps I shall bring the story gradually up to date and as it were float my present upon my past?
To repent of egoism: is autobiography the best method? Well, being no philosopher I can only reflect about the world through reflecting about my own adventures in it. And I feel that it is time to think about myself at last. It may seem odd that one who has been described in the popular press as a ‘tyrant’, a ‘tartar’, and (if I recall) a ‘power-crazed monster’ should feel that he has not hitherto done so! But this is the case. I have in fact very little sense of identity.
It is indeed only lately that I have felt this need to write something that is both personal and reflective. In the days when I wrote in water I imagined that the only book I would ever publish would be a cookery book!
I might now introduce myself—to myself, first and foremost, it occurs to me. What an odd discipline autobiography turns out to be. To others, if these words are printed in the not too distant future, there will be in a superficial sense ‘no need of an introduction’, as they say at meetings. How long does mortal fame endure? My kind of fame not very long, but long enough. Yes, yes, I am Charles Arrowby and, as I write this, I am, shall we say, over sixty years of age. I am wifeless, childless, brotherless, sisterless, I am my well-known self, made glittering and brittle by fame. I determined long ago that I would retire from the theatre when I had passed sixty. (‘You will never retire’, Wilfred told me. ‘You will be unable to.’ He was wrong.) In fact I am tired of the theatre, I have had enough. This is what no one who knew me well, not Sidney nor Peregrine nor Fritzie, not Wilfred nor Clement when they were alive, could either foresee or imagine. And it is not just a matter of sagely departing ‘on the crest of the wave’. (How many actors and directors pathetically overstay their welcome.) I am tired of it all. There has been a moral change.
‘All right, go’, they said, ‘but don’t imagine that you can come back.’ I don’t want to come back, thank you! ‘If you stop working and live alone you will go quietly mad.’ (This was Sidney’s contribution.) On the contrary, I feel completely sane and free and happy for the first time in my life!
It is not that I ever came to ‘disapprove’ of the theatre, as my mother, for instance, never ceased to do. I just knew that if I stayed in it any longer I would begin to wilt spiritually, would lose something which had travelled with me patiently so far, but might go away if I did not attend to it at last: something not belonging to the preoccupations of my work, but preciously separate from it. I remember James saying something about people who end their lives in caves. Well, this, here, is my cave. And I have reached it bearing the precious thing that has come with me, as if it were a talisman which I can now unwrap. How grand and pompous this sounds! And yet I confess I scarcely know what I mean. Let us break off these rather ponderous reflections for a while.
The above observations have been written on a sequence of different days,