The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [6]
There has been a subtext to which we were not privy until now—another person beyond Clement Makin whom the narrator believes to have been the “alpha and omega” of his life. This other person has been peripherally present in numerous veiled asides: “someone I had loved and lost”; “I never (except for once, when I was young) considered marriage”; Lizzie was “the only woman (with one exception) who never lied to me”; while cousin James in the war was in India, at Dehra Dun, “I had my own problems, notably first love and its after-effects”; Charles reserves the right to use the phrase “in love” “to describe the one single occasion when I loved a woman absolutely. (Not dear Clement of course.)” Even scattered across seventy pages of text and often occurring when more rambunctious revelations are afoot, these hints reveal the narrator’s reliance upon a still-operative daydream of the past. Gradually Murdoch, through Charles, brings this sweet shadow into the light, where she is given a name: Arrowby’s childhood sweetheart was Mary Hartley Smith, in comparison to whom he writes that “all the rest, even Clement, have been shadows.”
Charles’s decision to think about Hartley, even to place her name on the page, comes about as the subliminal result of his seeing now and then in the village south of him an old woman, who resembles his first love. Exploring the indefinite effect of these “glimpses” leads him to meditate on the imagery of the cave. Hartley is still, for him, a true light-source, whereas his first mistress Clement was only a fire-edged shadow. The terms recall Plato’s in his condemnation of false art (the shadow thrown by the fire of mediocre art), as contrasted with true art (the light of the sun). Murdoch’s long meditation on Plato and on art uses the two terms of this image. However, we would not need the philosophical text to validate the symbolism of Charles Arrowby’s meditation of wandering and discovery in the dark limbo of suspended and omen-filled time he seems to have entered with his removal to the northwest coast of England. He is moving about in his own dark. Then lo! the old woman in the village turns out to be Hartley, and Charles hurls himself into a maelstrom of hilarious conniving to “get her back.” Not once during the two hundred pages of his pursuit and not very edifying capture of Hartley does he reflect on the pertinence of his many earlier cautions about the difficulty of seeing into a family from the outside: “It may be that my uncle and aunt thought that my upbringing was too strict. Outsiders who see rules and not the love that runs through them are often too ready to label other people as ‘prisoners’ ” (pp. 59-60). But Charles reflexively interprets Hartley’s marriage as her prison. Not only this; in stealing her away to Shruff End he literally imprisons her. His defense is that “in the teeth of all the evidence, we belonged to each other.” In the teeth of all the evidence—Charles’s proud banner. As Borges wrote about the great Roman historian, “Tacitus did not perceive the Crucifixion—although his book recorded it.”
To be sure, Charles is a frail vessel, given to fantasy, greed, and unscrupulous manipulation. And while these adjectives suggest a personality that has hardened, we can also see him as unformed, arrested midway. This arresting of development has brought with it all the supersimplified polarities that attend on exaggerated images of ourselves. (There was a “rival” figure, and a “true” mother of more joyous good cheer than his own, a sad, sweet, ineffectual father, and a radiant, innocent sweetheart.) Binding all these extremes together is a series of extreme responses, inextricably