The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [5]
A more extended example of Charles writing past himself or speaking more than he knows covers longer segments of the book—as in the unfolding of the first seventy pages and their settings. Charles somewhat restively goes through what has become the daily routine of swimming in the dangerous sea, buying groceries in the village, stopping at the Black Lion pub for unsatisfactory gossip with the mocking locals, making his obsessively detailed meals (garnished with fanatical views of right and wrong cookery: “Dried apricots eaten with cake should be soaked and simmered first, eaten with cheese they should be aboriginally dry”), reading the letters he is beginning to receive in retirement, and, sometimes steered by these, putting together rambling oddments of the journal-memoir we are reading. It is a limbo period, ominous, expectant. There are loose ends, half-done projects, things that break, things that are simply let lie when they fall, like the table that tumbled into the crevasse when Charles tried to haul it out across the rocks to his martello tower. He thinks he might restore the tower, provide it with a winding stair and a high workroom (like Yeats’s at Thoor Ballylee?)—but he never does. This time has also been a stage of “portents” during which a large, ugly vase and the silvery oval mirror are smashed, and he has seen a luminous orb, like a face, high in the window of an inner room of Shruff End, the unspeakably sinister house he has rashly purchased to retire to. One of its more creepy furnishings is the sticky, yellow-and-black wooden bead curtain on an upper landing that ominously clicks in undetectable drafts. All these tell even the casual reader something the speaker may not yet realize about himself—that he cannot settle in. Arrowby is restless, half-finished, a sojourner arrested in the aging shell of himself. The place no less than the phrase “Shruff—” (with its etymology of metallic refuse or the kind of scrub wood used for kindling) piling up at an “—End” (where all the ladders start) becomes a speaking emblem of his ragged, foul, and haunted nature. (The dreams he has are part of the haunting.)
A further potent rendering of skewed truth occurs as Charles is gathering his resources (he thinks, to write about Clement); there is another significant page break. (These breaks typically announce a passage of time of fairly short duration—overnight, or at most a few days.) Then he recounts the following half-awake vision about a premonition he ascribes to the wrong “presence”:
Since I started writing this ‘book’ or whatever it is I have felt as if I were walking about in a dark cavern where there are various ‘lights’, made perhaps by shafts or apertures which reach the outside world. (What a gloomy image of my mind, but I do not mean it in a gloomy sense.) There is among those lights one great light towards which I have been half consciously wending my way. It may be a great ‘mouth’ opening to the daylight, or it may be a hole through which fires emerge from the center of the earth. And am I still unsure what it is, and must I now approach in order to find out? This image has come to me so suddenly, I am not sure what to make of it.
When I decided to write about myself of course the question arose: am I then to write about Hartley (p. 75)
One notes the canny device (is the narrative voice of Nicholas Mosley apropos here?) of choosing a strategic point in the utterance for turning a statement of uncertainty into a question: “And am I still unsure what it is, and must I now approach in order to find out?” It is by this device that Charles