The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [9]
During the novel many of those whom Charles Arrowby has turned to stone in his mind—loved, then discarded, or hated, then frozen out of his love—appear, to reassert their claims on life, either by courting his recognition as do Lizzie Scherer and his cousin James Arrowby, or by insisting, like his actors Rosina Vamburgh and her former husband Peregrine Arbelow, on vengeance. Charles believed he and his cousin could not breathe the same air (“we could not both be real”), so he has for some time energetically pretended that James was not real, crowding him out to an emotional periphery where he is barely visible any longer; James’s inwardness cooperates in his exclusion. Even the woman Charles claims to love to distraction is crowded out by some muddy and distracted version of her. Charles does not attend to Hartley. He attends—but not to her, rather to his reactions, his elation at her rediscovery, his crazy hope for their chimerical future. Not only does he divert his attention from Hartley; he dismisses evidence he cannot help recording of her unease with his insistent absolutes. She is unmoved by his passionate reversion to their teenage friendship and is patently not attracted to him physically. Furthermore, Hartley is haunted by her own demons, her feckless attempts to enrich her married life by adopting a son, which wound up creating only jealous suspicions in her husband’s mind about the child’s paternity and cowering misery for the little harelipped child Titus. Charles at sixty-plus suggests an unlikely escape for her, one she cannot take seriously, believing as she does that she must remain in her marriage not because it is right but because it defines her. There is also a suggestion that she is given to emotional fits; Titus remembers them, Ben alludes to them, and we witness several extraordinary breakdowns. When Charles ingeniously “steals” Hartley and keeps her incarcerated in the cramped, unheimlich upstairs “inner room” of Shruff End, she and Charles grow shackled to each other in an unhealthy parody of her marital pain. During this long central stretch of days, Andromeda is chained up, to be sure, and menaced by another, but the signification of the painting subtly shifts to accommodate the monster Hartley and Charles create together, like a distorted child. The dragon idea twists somewhat, as the measure of their combined ill-fittedness to one another: it represents his desire and her remorse at leaving him, his jealous possessiveness and her stubborn and uncommunicative retreat. A more forthright woman would never have wound up in this fix, a less selfish romantic would never have persuaded himself that Hartley needed rescuing. This monstrous situation can only be put down by another. That role is taken by James (about whom more in a moment).
The rumpled yellow stones about Shruff End also represent the rubble out of which Charles as artist and stage magician is still trying to create form: He assembles tiny emblems of this impulse when he puts attractive sea pebbles into patterns outside the back door of the always-chilly house. But eventually the house becomes too crowded with demons assembled from the past for him to sort out, and these seem to condense into the sequence of terrible accidents that smash his design. However, a competing figure is also at work as mage and demiurge. Charles Arrowby likens himself to Shakespeare’s Prospero, who announces at the close of The Tempest his intention to deny his powers, to break up his magic, and withdraw from influencing the destinies of others. But the true Prospero, were he to be able to drown his book of necromancy, would hardly settle in at Milan to write a memoir. No, the retirement Charles imitates (minus religious allegiance) is closer to that of Andrew Marvell with his patron or Alexander Pope with his grot—gentle poets who lived intently self-memorializing lives of “remove,” fully relished and artfully described. Like them, Charles Arrowby is posing, trying on a role, toying with a notion about himself. He is hardly preparing