Portrait of a Lunatic (You Wrote About the Wrong Cousin, Iris Murdoch)

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch.  Penguin Classics.  495 pp.  $20.00 *****

The Sea, the Sea has everything going for it.  It’s large and expansive, beautifully written; it contains a wealth of fascinating characters; it traces a wild plot, where things keep happening that you can’t believe, and it comes to an emotionally satisfying confusion.  It is the book most often mentioned by Iris Murdoch enthusiasts and won her the Booker Prize in 1978.

Yet I couldn’t help feeling about the narrator, as I come to the end of a novel that I enjoyed very much: this guy is nuts!  At the age of 60, Charles Arrowby becomes romantically obsessed with his first love, a woman named Mary Hartley Smith, whom he knew when he was twelve years old.  They had been close throughout their teenage years, resolved that they would get married when they were old enough.  But just before they were eighteen, when Charles went off to study acting for a time, she had a sudden feeling—which seems accurate in retrospect—that if Charles pursued that profession he could never be faithful, so she broke off their engagement, which only existed in their heads anyway.  He pursued her, and she found a way to disappear.  He then indeed led a life in the theater, and became quite famous as a director, also as a writer.  At the age of 60 he retired and moved to a seaside resort, to live a life of leisure.

At first that is a promising situation for the reader.  Charles is great at describing his everyday life, which includes elaborate meals (he believes in eating well and choosing his food carefully, but doesn’t like to spend much time cooking, so he has a bunch of ingenious quick-cooked meals); nude swimming in the ocean, which is choppy and dangerous where he lives; and hours devoted to writing this memoir, which he expects to center around a woman named Clement Makin, an older famous actress with whom he had a long and tumultuous affair after his relationship with Hartley (as he preferred to call her) ended.  Clement in many ways made him the sophisticated man he is, though she died many years before, but there are two women from his past (one of whom he seduced away from her husband) who are lurking in the background, longing to have affairs with him.  He is apparently attractive to women—we can see that he might be—but never wants the woman he can have, only the one he can’t.

The only problems for Charles seem to be vaguely hostile surroundings and some possible mental difficulties.  The local people—at least the men in the pub—seem to resent him because of his fame.  As soon as he steps into the place the crowd grows silent, then bursts into laughter and noise when he leaves.  They aren’t above making sarcastic and vaguely hostile remarks.  He also, in his spooky new house, begins to have weird experiences: he thinks he sees someone looking in the window; he thinks he might have a poltergeist (a vase suddenly falls off a table and shatters); and at one point he has a vivid vision of a sea monster in the ocean.  Maybe a solitary life in an isolated seaside house wasn’t such a great idea.

Then, of all things, he runs into Hartley.  He has noticed an old woman in town who seems to be avoiding him, “a stout elderly woman in a shapeless brown tent-like dress” (I was miffed by the fact that people ten years younger than I are described as elderly), and suddenly realizes it’s her.  She’s no longer especially attractive—the women pursuing him are—but he, to his credit, ignores her outward appearance and decides he’s still in love with her.  That is problematic in various ways: she has a whole new life, no longer especially loves him; she doesn’t seem to want to be around him, and she’s married to another man.  None of that makes any difference to Charles.  He must have her.

I’ve read stories of erotic and romantic obsession.  I’ve even known a few people who were obsessed.  But never have I encountered a character, in literature or anywhere else, who so thoroughly ignores the warning signs and all the dangers and pursues the object of his love no matter what.  Charles Arrowby makes Marcel, in Proust’s novel, look like a sane human being.  Even Othello looks good.

Eventually a host of interesting characters show up, including Hartley’s long lost stepson Titus, and Charles’ cousin James, who makes brief appearances throughout the book.  James is a fascinating person, a world traveler, a practicing Tibetan Buddhist, a kind sane and compassionate human being.  Murdoch apparently had a strong interest in Buddhism (as I discovered in Peter J. Conradi’s book Going Buddhist), and somewhat romanticizes who Buddhists are and what they’re capable of.  James repeatedly tries to talk sense into Charles, to no avail.  But he is the most interesting in a host of fascinating characters.

I read this book—and actually reviewed it—when it came out, when I was thirty.  (I just read that review.  Not bad.)  I find it mildly hard to believe that a man of Charles’ age and experience could still be this obsessed (and downright stupid).  But I am full of admiration for Iris Murdoch’s literary skills.  The woman could tell a story.  Here she told one of her best.