Friday Column: Some Notes on Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea

The Sea, the Sea feels like something J.M. Coetzee might have written had he suddenly dropped his minimalist approach for full-fledged realism. The protagonist, whose journal comprises all of The Sea, the Sea, is one of those lonely, casually dismissive, socially upward men that Coetzee excels in describing.

But this isn't Coetzee, which is readily apparent from the start. Whereas Coetzee often seems impatient to get his narratives rolling (Elizabeth Costello simply begins with him irritatedly flicking his hand at realist conventions), Murdoch is admirably true to the journal form that she has selected. Rather than unrealistically propel us into the story, she gives her narrator enough room to tire out from random jottings about the sea, his new home beside it, and his childhood. It is only as he begins to get bored with being alone and randomly jotting that his journal inevitably becomes a chronicle of the new course he sets his life on.

Charles Arrowby is a somewhat famous actor and director who has retired to a creaky old house on a rocky promontory next to the sea. He has decided to get away from London life once and for all, and to simply watch what remains of his life unwind before him. He has vague ambitions to write a memoir, but his jottings are unserious. For about 50 pages he muddles around, discussing his difficulties climbing out of the water and onto the steep, tide-battered rocks, the physical attributes of his new home and its environs, and his mother and father. Near the beginning, Arrowby sets out to describe his new home, but then gets entangled in ramblings on his culinary preferences:

It gradually became clear to me that guzzling large quantities of expensive, pretentious, often mediocre food in public places was not only immoral, unhealthy and unaesthetic, but also unpleasurable. Later my guests were offered simple chez moi. What is more delicious than fresh hot buttered toast, with or without the addition of bloater paste? Or plain boiled onions with a little corned beef if desired? And well-made porridge with brown sugar and cream is a dish fit for a king. Even then some people, so sadly corrupt was their taste, took my intelligent hedonism for an affected eccentricity, a mere gimmick.

These unformed, early sections connote the drift of Arrowby's life and feel true to a retired man who has suddenly found the urge to write about himself. They make clear that Murdoch has done more than simply frame her book as a journal; she is dedicated to miming the look and feel of a journal, as well as how the people who write journals interact with them and how the form shapes whatever narratives they contain. Importantly, these early sections also present Arrowby to us without the life baggage that we will soon find out about--we are given a chance to get comfortable with Arrowby as a somewhat particular but nonetheless enjoyable man before Murdoch unleashes certain facts that will put him into a much darker light. This is quite important, because as The Sea, the Sea progresses our tolerance for Arrowby is significantly tested, and I think that, in my reading, without this initial getting-to-know-you mine would have been broken.

It's not long before Arrowby receives a letter from Lizzie, an actress slightly younger  than him who he has been stringing along for some time now. It turns out that at some point before the story begins Arrowby tugged the string a bit with a letter to her, and she now replies to him by baring her struggles over her love for Arrowby and her conflictedness about his recent letter to a degree that we can be quite confident Arrowby disdains as gushy and feminine.

Lizzie's letter is significant because it offers (after nearly 50 pages) our first view of Arrowby from the outside, so it comes as a surprise when we hear Lizzie say a numbero f things that Arrowby has never implied about himself; notably, she declares "you know you can't keep your hands off women," which conflicts sharply with Arrowby's own claim that he has always treated the other sex fairly and is an "unsexed" individual.

Unreliable narrators are of course to be expected in the first-person and even more so in The Sea, the Sea because it comprises a written account that is subject to whatever Arrowby's sizable ego and fragile memory can do to muddy the waters. Nonetheless, Lizzie's letter brings up just how crucial unreliable narration is to the fabric of Murdoch's story. Up to this point Arrowby has alluded rather romantically and deterministically to a first love named Hartley who was his only true love and which ruined all future chances at happiness in a loving relationship. Shortly after Lizzie's letter we discover that this love ended when, at 18, Arrowby was left by Hartley for no apparent reason. And then, not long after that, Arrowby discovers that in coming to his present home, he has happened to move virtually next door to her and her husband of many years.

What occurs next, and what makes up the bulk of The Sea, the Sea is a protracted, slightly bizarre, attempt by Arrowby to draw Hartley back. Arrowby's justification relies in large part on his belief that he has proven that Hartley's husband is a tyrant who keeps her locked into an abrasive, failed marriage. Though we only know what Arrowby--who has a well-known weakness for jealousy--chooses to tell us, it is nonetheless necessary that we decide the truth about Hartley's marriage and determine our sympathy for Arrowby's subsequent actions. How much of Arrowby's harassment is permitted by the unhappy marriage justification? Do we believe that Arrowby had included everything in his narrative (which is being written as it unfolds)? Has he represented it accurately?

For much of this story, our lack of knowledge is paralleled by Arrowby's. Jealous egotist that he is, he does at times question whether his manner of stealing Hartley is justified and whether he even knows the truth about Hartley's marriage. Certainly he is working with limited information: Hartley gives him precious few details about her own life and steadfastly (but in a manner that perhaps implies domination by her husband) refuses to leave her husband.

The question here is whether all the uncertainty surrounding Arrowby makes him a sympathetic enough figure, whether Arrowby's imperfect information plus his pre-existing weakness for leaping to conclusions plus our own uncertainty about him let us conclude that he's a fundamentally decent person whom we are seeing at his absolute worst. He is certainly one of the more disagreeable narrators I've read of late, and one of this book's challenges is staying true to Arrowby in all his distastefulness while leaving enough room for us to like him and  keep him on as a narrator. (At one point, despite Murdoch's lovely prose and engaging plot twists, I was on the brink of putting the book down and forever concluding my relationship with Arrowby.) There's also the fact that The Sea, the Sea is more tragedy than comedy. In a burlesque we might simply laugh at Arrowby and not care how scummy he is, but here we're made to care enough about him that his life registers as tragic, so if the book is to work we have to retain some sympathy for him. I think that in the end Arrowby is salvaged long enough by omission that we can reach a point in the story in which he sufficiently redeems himself to let Murdoch conclude the novel.

In a way, The Sea, the Sea is simply "about" deciding whether or not we like Charles Arrowby and watching Murdoch keep us off balance long enough that we get to find out, but in another way this novel is a thorough explanation of the way love perverts one's life. In her letter to Arrowby, Lizzie begs him not to impose himself on her because she knows that it will waken "forces which I commanded to sleep." She wants them to "love each other, but not in a way that would destroy me."

The obvious irony is that the old cad Arrowby gets a dose of his own medicine when his love for Hartley is awakened and almost destroys him, but I think Murdoch is after more here than this simple demonstration of the Golden Rule. There's the fact that Lizzie's entrapment by love is designed by Arrowby, whereas Arrowby's own entrapment comes about by an astonishing coincidence. In fact, it strains credulity to believe that Arrowby, who searched in vain for Hartley for years after she left him, would just happen to move next door to her late in life. Coincidence or fate?

There's a strong current of mysticism--albeit, mysticism always quickly discounted--running through The Sea, the Sea. Early in the story, Arrowby records that he becomes terrified when he sees a horrible monster like a 30-foot eel coil up out of the sea. Eventually he puts it down to a flashback occasioned by his use of LSD once when he was younger, but the impression of something else remains. Later, Arrowby is half-convinced there's a poltergeist in his home when items start mysteriously breaking. (It turns out to be an old flame entertaining herself with a bit of playful malarkey.) Arrowby's older cousin James spent a good deal of time traveling through Tibet while in the military; a Buddhist, he is deeply enmeshed in the ancient religious traditions he discovered there, and yet he says that things like the Indian rope trick or being able to change body temperature by force of will are simple tricks that anyone can learn. Seen in this light, it's possible that what appears to be a clunky coincidence--the one flaw in a marvelous structure--it might be yet another one of these ambiguous brushes with the mystical. Perhaps in purposely making Arrowby's rediscovery of Hartley inexplicable The Sea, the Sea is placing that itself into the realm of the inexplicable; making it a force with its own logic that we only see a small part of, just as we only see part of the intelligence that comprises Arrowby.

In addition to telling Arrowby about the rope trick and Tibetan mysticism, James also tells Arrowby about bardo, a sort of holding pen for souls in between their trips on the wheel of life. It's pretty explicitly stated that Arrowby's life in between leaving London and before discovering Hartley is a sort of bardo for him, that in between trips on a wheel of love one enters a lonely, painful sort of place that one is eventually released from. (There's also some indication that at novel's end, after a short period of aloneness after Hartley, Arrowby will soon take another ill-fated venture on the wheel of love.) In addition, Arrowby is not the only one to take trips on the wheel of love--there is the aforementioned Lizzie, as well as a number of other of Arrowby's friends who all fall in and out of love over the course of the narrative. These loves are all linked, dependent on the actions that other people make while completing their own circuits. In that light, perhaps the coincidence that brings together Hartley and Arrowby is both mystical and earthly. Perhaps it is part due to the incomprehensible logic of love and also due to the simple substance of life constantly occurring around us.

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Comments

[Daniel]

Scott – love your reviews. The whole second half of this is in itallics though.

[Scott]

Oops. Well, you can guess what I did wrong.

[Joanne]

"At one point, despite Murdoch's lovely prose and engaging plot twists, I was on the brink of putting the book down and forever concluding my relationship with Arrowby."

This is EXACTlY what happened to me when I read The Sea, The Sea...except I did conclude the relationship and put the book down.

Everytime I see it on the library shelves, or hear reference to the book, I am immediatley drawn in and want to start the book again, but I fear I will tear my hair out "dealing" with Arrowby again.

Great review!

[Mindy Withrow]

Scott, I just discovered your site and stopped to read this post because just this week I reviewed Murdoch's The Bell on my site. It was my first excursion into Murdoch and I am hooked; The Sea, The Sea is next on my list.

Thanks for this perceptive discussion. I'll be back!

[tandy]

I've been wrestling with this book for a month and came on line to see others' thoughts before I decided whether to keep plowing or to chuck it. Your review has been interesting but I'm still ambivalent :) I mean, I adore Iris Murdoch, so if it's a waste of two days of my reading life, it's an homage to her. It won the Booker Prize, so it has got to be worth it, eh? dunno. . . . thanks for your review :)