Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea (Part 1--Introduction)

I started reading Iris Murdoch's, The Sea, the Sea yesterday. I'm about 50 pages in and nearly finished the first section, "Pre-history." This is the third Iris Murdoch book I've read. I first encountered her work in Peace Corps when I borrowed The Black Prince from a fellow volunteer. The timing was auspicious. I had just come across Murdoch in Harold Bloom's recently published Genius. She was one of the 100 figures Bloom chose to represent literary genius. Bloom's description of her as a romance writer in the mode of Spenser's The Faerie Queene and the poetry of the High Romantics captivated me. Books for Peace Corps volunteers are hard to come by and we regularly shared the few books we were able to bring with us. The friend I borrowed The Black Prince from had just finished it and found it somewhat disappointing. He felt the combination of narrative and philosophical asides were jarring. He preferred authors who followed the old rule of "show it, don't tell it" citing Kafka's short story, The Hunger Artist as a perfect example. He had just finished Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim and couldn't help gushing over it, exclaiming how much better of a book it was than Murdoch's.

I loved it though. I chalk up my interest in the book up to a difference in temperament. The first books I had been truly obsessed with had been philosophical novels: Dostoyevsky's and Thomas Mann's foremost amongst them. My interest in Romantic poetry also made me susceptible to the vivid imagery of the book. Many scenes from The Black Prince still return to me even now, ten years later. The protagonist himself is memorable as a perfectionist author who, if memory serves me correctly, only finished one novel and has been laboring for years to complete a second. His friend and rival is a successful author who has consistently publish well-received books. I have always been of the opinion that great artists are usually outsiders and generally unpopular. There are of course rare exceptions: Shakespeare, Byron, Austen, and Dickens. My Peace Corps friend pointed out the irony in that Murdoch herself was a prolific author of popular books. Surely there are other ways Murdoch distanced herself from the protagonist. He has an aversion to music, something I doubt Murdoch shares. There is a vivid scene of him running from the theater, tormented by what sounded to him like screeching and screaming. This is, oddly enough, repeated in The Sea, the Sea, when Charles Arrowby confesses to hating the sound of the human voice. And then there is his infatuation with his rival's teenage daughter, whom he imagines as a kind of surrogate for Hamlet. Another eccentricity not likely shared by the author. 

I didn’t read another Murdoch novel until at least 6 years later. I had met a doctor who was passionate about her. Out of the blue he approached me while at a Christmas party and said, “You have to watch this video.” I was surprised to see it was Iris Murdoch being interviewed on the BBC. It was an old video, I think from the 70s, but still popular. If you search for Iris Murdoch on Google it is one of the first videos to come up. Murdoch was discussing her role as a professional philosopher and novelist and what she saw as the relation between philosophy and art. The doctor and I talked a bit about what we each knew of Murdoch. I confessed to having only read one novel and decided it was high time to start another. 

It was another several years when, on a whim, I picked up The Good Apprentice. Like The Black Prince, I found the book almost immediately engaging, both aesthetically and intellectually. The image of the two brothers, both struggling to attain goodness--one inadvertantly through sin and the other intentionally through discipline--has stayed with me. I remember the household of the brothers' father as being like something out of one of the holy sanctuaries of The Faery Queene. The father, I cannot remember his name now, was a great artist, revered by the women of the house (his wife and daughters?). The women had an orderly way of keeping everything together, leaving items at the bottom of the stairs and only bring them up when they were already heading that way. I remember the mother discussing the father's art phases, especially his heroic phase. The whole scene was very magical and supports Bloom's argument that Murdoch is more of a fantasist than the realist she claimed to be. Lastly, I seem to remember a character having a nightmare that was very vivid to me. Somewhere in the middle of the novel. I should look up the scene, as it has left a deep impact on me. It goes something like this, that the dreamer imagines terrifying figures all around him only to realize that they are not terrifying but terrified and that he is the object of their terror. 

So, what do I make of this third book? So far it is very intriguing. Murdoch has done a wonderful job of patterning images of the sea. The environment is vivid and varied enough to sustain my interest.  Charles is a Shakespearean Prospero retiring to his craggy cliffside home. He expresses an interest in permanence, but I think it is fair to question his sincerity. He seems thoroughly content to live a life "writ on water." His mistress, Lizzie represents the kind of directness and permanence that his nature is both drawn to and also repelled by. 

I am thoroughly enjoying the book. Iris Murdoch is the kind of author I would like to be. I enjoy an author who deals so directly and clearly with ideas. There is both narrative drama as well as rich complexity of thought. I will admit that I do feel aware of the effort involved in her creation. It does not distract me from appreciating the book though. With an ambition as large as hers it is forgivable to fall short of perfection. When I say I am aware of her effort, what I mean is that in striving for a Shakespearean resonance she is almost doomed to fail. There are also allusions to Wordsworth and a general atmosphere of Romanticism in the opening. These are all very general reflections. I hope to be more specific (maybe even systematic) in my next post. I'll conclude with Bloom's reading of Murdoch as a writer of romance: