The Sea, The Sea
TWO CENTS | APR 7, 2020
The Sea, The Sea
Great books make us feel less alone, put things into words that we are all feeling, and sometimes provide a road map for our behavior.
In recent weeks and months, a lot of people have been immersing themselves - understandably - in plague lit. Friends are digging out their college Camus, cleaning the house to Defoe on audiobook, doing Zoom group readings of the Decameron. In every case, it’s striking to find how enduring human behavior is - to say nothing of government obfuscation. As ever, great books make us feel less alone, put things into words that we are all feeling, and sometimes provide a road map for our behavior. For myself, I keep going back to that bible of quarantine cooking, Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea.
Written in 1978, Murdoch’s nineteenth novel is the story of jaded West End director Charles Arrowby’s escape from London to a remote seaside cottage, where he intends to write his memoirs. Like all Murdoch’s novels (well, at least the fifteen or so I have read - she was prolific) what ensues is a distinctive admixture of philosophy, farce, tragedy and meals. The Sea, The Sea won the Booker Prize, and it’s certainly one of her more readable novels, but even diehard fans will admit the final chapters descend into melodrama. Still, there are passages and images that will haunt you. And for me, the many menus belong in this category.
These are not incidental to the story; they’re central to Arrowby’s self-characterization. Arrowby is a 1970s proponent of what we would now recognize as a highly idiosyncratic form of “self-care.” In an early passage, he lays out his basic attitude towards food, which - while it can verge on a sort of sybaritic nihilism - also seems strangely appropriate to the current moment:
“I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed, eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Every meal should be a treat and one should bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.”
After a lifetime in the theater world, Arrowby is thoroughly sick of rococo restaurant food and wanton food waste - and of other people: “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.”
For this reason, he’s mastered an unusual form of home cooking, and even ponders penning a Charles Arrowby Four Minute Cookbook. (“The sturdy honest persons to whom my book would be addressed would not be able to make a light batter or even to know what it was. But they would be hedonists. In food and drink, as in many (not all) other matters, simple joys are best, as any intelligent self-lover knows.”) Arrowby freely concedes that his rough-and-ready methods and reliance on convenience foods “may scandalize fools” and provoke condescension from gourmets, but while sophisticated friends may dismiss his meals as “picnics,” self-care aficionados may agree with him that ease and self-respect are by no means mutually exclusive - that, indeed, it is the combination which keeps up morale. “[O]f course my guests always sit squarely at tables, never balance plates on their knees, and always have proper table napkins, never paper ones.”
Because his cottage lies several miles’ walk from the nearest village, Arrowby has limited access to fresh food. In his isolation he relies heavily on canned goods and pantry staples. He eats little meat; “but there are certain items (such as anchovy paste, liver, sausages, fish) which hold as it were strategic positions in my diet, and which I should be sorry to do without.” This is an attitude with which many of us agree; I know I’ve relied more heavily on preserved fish in the last two months than in any other period of my life. And yet, you’d hesitate to take the novel’s prescriptions too literally - the food the narrator produces is simply too... bizarre. Take this, the first lunch he shares with the reader:
For lunch, I may say, I ate and greatly enjoyed the following: anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice and olive oil. (Really good olive oil is essential, the kind with a taste, I have brought a supply from London.) Green peppers would have been a happy addition only the village shop could not provide them. (No one delivers to far-off Shruff End, so I fetch everything, including milk, from the village.) Then bananas and cream with white sugar. (Bananas should be cut, never mashed, and the cream should be thin.) Then hard water-biscuits with New Zealand butter and Wensleydale cheese.
It’s almost cozy, the hot toast, the good oil, the thin cream. (Such litanies are always comforting, be they minute descriptions of rooms or the catechism of each girl’s wardrobe at the start of every Babysitter’s Club book.) But there is always an element that moves the otherwise pleasant-sounding menus out of the cozy realm, into the slightly mad. (I have taught this book to several classes of MFA students, and one was kind enough to make that bean salad for us - minus the baked beans, which meant it was both perfectly tasty and considerably less weird than the version in the book. To really get the effect, one would presumably need Heinz beans in the turquoise can.)
Some meals are relatively unremarkable - “lentil soup, followed by chipolata sausages served with boiled onions and apples stewed in tea, then dried apricots and shortcake biscuits: a light Beaujolais.” Others are fairly appetizing:
For lunch I ate the kipper fillets rapidly unfrozen in boiling water (the sun had done most of the work) garnished with lemon juice, oil, and a light sprinkling of dry herbs. Kipper fillets are arguably better than smoked salmon unless the latter is very good. With these, fried tinned new potatoes. (No real new potatoes yet.) Potatoes are for me a treat dish, not a dull everyday chaperon. Then Welsh rarebit and hot beetroot.
“Lunch: frankfurters with scrambled eggs, grilled tomatoes and a slight touch of garlic, then shop treacle tart squeezed with lemon juice and covered with yoghurt and thick cream.”
By turns tempting and unhinged, the meals take up much of his diaries, becoming a sort of stand-in for self-reflection. As his solitude continues, Arrowby feels “a little depressed, but was cheered up by supper: spaghetti with a little butter and dried basil. (Basil is of course the king of herbs.) Then spring cabbage cooked slowly with dill. Boiled onions served with bran, herbs, soya oil and tomatoes, with one egg beaten in. With these a slice or two of cold tinned corn beef.”
With this he drinks retsina.
Then, “For dinner I had an egg poached in hot scrambled egg, then the coley braised with onions and lightly dusted with curry powder, and served with a little tomato ketchup and mustard (only a fool despises tomato ketchup.) Then a heavenly rice pudding.”
For many years, I read this litany of meals chiefly as character study. What did it mean that he ate boiled onions with bran? Was there some particular significance to the stewing of apples in tea? Did the poaching of an egg in hot scrambled egg indicate a descent into madness? (How would this even work? Wouldn’t the eggs - if hot enough to poach an egg, and for long enough - get much too dry?) While Murdoch’s novels tend to be strong on food description, they never do so much work as in The Sea, The Sea. This spring, as we sheltered in place, I grew to believe more than ever that the recipes bore some secret message. About Charles Arrowby, and about ourselves.
Now, I’m not sure. Recently, by chance, this novel came up in a telephone conversation with an English friend. It turned out he had known Iris Murdoch and her husband, John Bayley, very well. The meals were mentioned. “That was exactly how they ate,” he said. “Those are - exactly - the meals Iris and John cooked for themselves.” What’s more, he added, Bayley always had a lot of old food in his jacket pockets: he had a habit of grabbing hors d’oeuvres at cocktail parties and hoarding them for snacks, which he would then offer people sometimes days later. It now strikes me as possible that, to Murdoch, her protagonist’s tastes were, for lack of a better word, normal.
The Sea, The Sea makes good reading right now. In the end (spoiler alert), Arrowby’s solitude makes him a beacon for the people he tried to leave behind - they bring the world, disastrously, to him. As the gears of the plot turn inexorably towards tragedy, we are treated to far fewer menu descriptions. Without the succession of meals cooked exactly to his own tastes, for him alone, by him alone, Arrowby’s ordered existence begins to spiral out of control.
As I write this, I have on the stove a fridge-clearing soup that contains, among many other things, a cheddar rind, some week-old German potato salad, a sad old bunch of Cavolo Nero, a soft yam, a few chicken bones, and enough red cabbage to turn the entire thing an unappetizing gray. intend to serve this with some highly-suspect radish-leaf pesto I made last week and a toasted hamburger bun. This time has changed the way we cook and eat; we are all Charles Arrowby now.
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Sadie Stein is a freelance writer and personal book shopper based in New York City. Peep her romantic Upper West Side lifestyle and darling son Hal on Instagram @sadieo.
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