Great Female Writers - Iris Murdoch: The Perfect Travelling Companion

By Elisa Lodato (Elisa is a published author, her debut novel shortlisted for the Costa First Novel award in 2018!)

I discovered Iris Murdoch in my first year at Cambridge, where I was studying English at Pembroke College. I was about to board a National Express coach home for the weekend. I wasn’t as fastidious then as I am now about having something to read while travelling.  I consider a good book as invaluable as my keys, money, my phone and - if travelling abroad - my passport. But this was 1999 and my best friend had just finished The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch and passed it to me as I waved my goodbye before leaving. 

‘It’s great,’ she said simply.  ‘Sort of magical.’ 

I set off for the coach station on Drummer Street, my bag on my back and my borrowed novel under my arm. And so began my life-long devotion to a truly extraordinary writer.

The Fleeing Artist who escapes to the sea 

You see, Iris Murdoch is different. And everyone who writes about her, who was fortunate enough to know her, even love her, says the same thing.  But on that coach in 1999, I knew nothing about her. I didn’t know that she had been a philosopher before taking up the pen and becoming a writer of fiction. I didn’t know that she was married to the Oxford academic, John Bayley. I didn’t even know who John Bayley was. All I knew was that she was different – and by different I really mean special – and I knew this simply by reading the opening paragraphs of The Sea, The Sea, her extraordinary Booker Prize-winning novel. 

Charles Arrowby is a retired theatre director who decides to abandon his London lifestyle and go to live in a ramshackle old house with no heating, and no real comforts to recommend it, called Shruff End. Arrowby chooses Shruff End because he wants to be alone and swim in the sea every day. He eats strange concoctions and drives to a nearby hotel where he buys cases of wine and slowly, slowly the people from his professional life in London, the actors he has loved and been loved by, follow him to his place of solitude and re-populate it. 

But what makes it different? Charles soon discovers that living nearby is a woman he used to love. She is called Hartley, Mary Hartley to be more specific and with this chance meeting he re-experiences his boyhood passion and becomes obsessed by her. And this is where Murdoch diverges from the familiar, well-trodden paths of contemporary fiction. Just as Charles won’t have a ham sandwich when he can have ‘sausages served with boiled onions and apples stewed in tea,’ Murdoch will not deliver the conventional love-pursuit a reader might expect.  Her fiction is driven by an extraordinary vision, a deep and unrelenting understanding of what propels men like Arrowby to do what they do. And in Hartley she presents us with a character who does not want to be pursued or rescued or loved. Hartley wants to live her quiet, unremarkable life in a bungalow with an equally unremarkable husband called Ben.   

That coach journey was the beginning of my love for an extraordinary writer but it also influenced my life in ways I could not have predicted. When I wrote my first novel, An Unremarkable Body, seventeen years later, I wrote a scene in which my main character Katharine, who has kept her homosexuality a secret from everyone in her life, is meeting her daughter Laura under the arches of Waterloo Bridge. I knew she would wander over to the second-hand books arranged on the tables and in that moment of writing, I knew exactly what book Katharine would pick up. I knew that someone like her, an intensely-private, middle-aged woman in the closet about her sexuality would appreciate a book like The Sea, The Sea. That she had spent her life in search of her own Shruff End:

            ‘What is it?’ I asked, bending my head to read the title.

            ‘The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch.  I read it when I was just eighteen.  Before I had you,’ she added, already busy reading the back.

            ‘Is it any good?’

            She looked up, almost annoyed again. 

            ‘Oh yes.  It’s wonderful.  It’s about a theatre director who just gives up on his London life and goes to live by the sea.  And he eats all sorts of crazy things. I loved it.’  She had begun leafing through the first few pages.

The Pained Intellectual who lives in Soho

After The Sea, The Sea, I moved on to The Black Prince and my admiration grew.  The Black Prince, another prize-winning novel of Murdoch’s opens with a murder or rather, what appears to be a murder. The main character, Bradley Pearson is summoned by his friend Arnold Baffin because he thinks he has killed his wife. 

But here is another reason to read Murdoch: she will open vistas that have long closed, whether that be through the onward-march of technology or the sky-rocketing price of London property, she will introduce you to a world where it was only possible to get hold of someone by ‘phoning them up’ on a landline, by knocking on their door or sending a telegram.  She will introduce you to a writer like Pearson who has, in his own words, ‘published very little,’ yet lives ‘…in a ground-floor flat in a small shabby pretty court of terrace houses in North Soho…an area of perpetual seedy brouhaha.’  Murdoch takes you inside the homes of writers, both failed and successful ones. She shows you their notebooks, typewriters, their unkempt bedrooms and cluttered living rooms and this is where the details of her own life, many of which emerged in the volumes of biography published after her death from Alzheimer’s in 1999, intersect with the vivid world of her characters. You see, Murdoch knew what it meant to live in the world of the mind and care little for the external circumstances of one’s life.  Many reported her house was always messy and often dirty.  Many more questioned why that even mattered.

I have written about just two of Murdoch’s novels, the two that have had the most transformative effect on me as a reader and writer but they are all worthy of attention. Her reputation as a deeply-philosophical writer of fiction needs no polish from me but it is enough to say you really should consider packing one of her novels in your bag the next journey you take.