Iris Murdoch, one of the most honored British writers of her generation, wrote 26 novels over the course of a 40-year writing career, the earliest of which, Under the Net, is a delightful read and appears on both the Modern Library’s list of the 100 greatest English language novels of the 20th century, and Time magazine’s list of the 100 greatest English language books since 1923. After the 1969 institution of the Booker Prize as the premier award for novels from the British Commonwealth nations and the Republic of Ireland, four of Murdoch’s novels were shortlisted for the award: The Nice and the Good in 1969, Bruno’s Dream in 1970, The Black Prince in 1973, and The Sea, The Sea, her 19th novel, which finally won her the elusive award in 1978. The Sea, The Sea appears as number 82 on the Penguin Classics list of 100 “Must Read” novels as chosen by their readers, and as number 61 on the BBC list of the 100 Greatest British Novels. In 2022, The Sea, The Sea was selected for inclusion in the “Big Jubilee Read,” a list of 70 books by Commonwealth writers in commemoration of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. And I am including it here as book number 63 (alphabetically) on my own list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
Murdoch is unusual in being a respected philosopher as well as a novelist, in the vein of Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus or Simone de Beauvoir. She met and befriended Sartre in the 1940s and later wrote a study of his philosophy, and in 1947 took up graduate study at Cambridge under Ludwig Wittgenstein. As a philosopher, Murdoch’s chief interest was in the field of ethics, and she tended to focus in her novels on issues of the moral life. But she tended to eschew being categorized as a “philosophical novelist”: In her 1961 essay “Against Dryness,” Murdoch suggested that literature “has taken over some of the tasks formerly performed by philosophy,” such as, for example in her own novels, the process of moral development. Nevertheless, she asserted that a novel cannot simply be a kind of allegory in which characters stand for abstract concepts. A work of fiction must be, she wrote, “a fit house for free characters to live in.” Thus her novels tend to be constructed in the tradition of realist novelists like George Eliot.
It’s helpful to keep these things in mind in approaching any of Murdoch’s novels, but especially The Sea, The Sea. The novel purports to be a memoir composed by the narrator and protagonist Charles Arrowby, a famous and successful London theater director who has decided to retire from the stage and take up residence in a small house called Shruff End, in a village on a remote coastal town on the North Sea. He sees himself as Shakespeare’s Prospero, abjuring the “magic” of the theater in order to write his memoirs and to “become a hermit: to put myself into a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.” That “learning to be good” clearly smacks of Murdoch’s philosophical interests, and it doesn’t take long for readers to determine that if Charles’ goal is truly “learning to be good,” he has quite a long way to go.
The title of the novel is taken from the first stanza of a French poem, Le Cimetiere Marin (The Graveyard by the Sea), by Paul Valéry (a stanza Murdoch had quoted in full in her earlier novel The Unicorn). In Valéry, it alludes to the shouts of 10,000 stranded Greek soldiers in Xenophon’s Anabasis, who raise the shout when they see the Black Sea and realize their lives are saved. The point, perhaps, is the suggestion that Charles views his retirement to the sea as a kind of respite or even salvation after the turmoil of his theater career. In any case, the sea plays an important role in the novel’s action, as one character accidentally drowns, and Charles himself is nearly murdered when one of his guests deliberately knocks him into the water.
His retreat is not, however, a place where Charles can simply retire and contemplate the Good. Goodness itself seems to have eluded him all his life, and remains beyond his grasp here. His past keeps encroaching on him here on the sea, and the reader quickly understands that Charles has always been self-deceived, blinded by his own ego, as he is visited by a host of people he has harmed and manipulated over his career. The first of these is an ex-lover named Lizzie, an actress he had found easy to manipulate and whom he even now attempts to convince in a letter inviting her back into his life, even though he admits—or perhaps boasts—to himself that he had found her “surprisingly easy to leave…when the time came.” Imagine his surprise when she responds by showing up at his door. Of course, she shows up only after he’s already moved on from thinking about her again.
And then there is another actress and ex-lover, Rosina, a much more aggressive and menacing character than the self-effacing Lizzie. Charles had stolen Rosina from his good friend Peregrine, who had been her husband, and remains essentially unrepentant about the affair now that it’s all in the past. But this past, too, comes to visit Charles in his retirement in the form of both friend and ex-lover who turn up on his doorstep.
But the most significant blast from his past occurs when Charles finds that his childhood sweetheart and first love, Mary Hartley Fitch, is living in the same tiny village he’s retired to. It is Hartley to whom his thoughts have been returning again and again as he’s been rehashing his past while recording his memoirs. Hartley sparks a different kind of response for Charles: unlike the other ex-lovers, Hartley had left him. He had left his home town for his education assuming Hartley would be waiting for him when he got back. But she was not. She’d left and married someone else. Charles always assumed she had not done so willingly, and that she must have been pining away for him all these years.
The Hartley of the present is an old woman bereft of her former beauty, but Charles still idealizes her and, though she is still married, tries to convince her to leave her husband and run away with him. When Hartley’s estranged adopted son turns up at Charles’ door as well, Charles convinces him to stay awhile and uses him as bait to lure Hartley into his clutches. Shockingly, he proceeds to kidnap her and hold her captive, believing he knows best and that she secretly longs to be with him but is trapped in a bad marriage with an abusive husband—though she continually pleads with him to be allowed to return to her own home.
All of this probably sounds disturbing and perhaps exasperating, which it is, but at the same time it’s quite humorous. Murdoch presents Charles’ increasingly absurd self-justifications by having him speak in his own voice, in a way that only underscores the gulf between reality and his own self-deception and must leave us smiling and shaking our heads.
For Murdoch the philosopher, human beings are trapped in their own egoism that prevents them from seeing the independent reality of other individuals, and leads people to fantasize about others rather than recognizing and appreciating the separate and independent reality of those others. To be truly good, Murdoch asserts in her philosophic writing, one must “unself” the ego—escape the prison of egoism and concern oneself with others. Charles Arrowby, firmly entrenched in his own massive egoism, has a tremendous gulf to breach on the road to goodness. Since I’m pledged not to include spoilers here, I can’t tell you if he ever gets there, or even if he starts along that road.
There is one character I haven’t mentioned here, and that is Charles’ cousin James. James is an “other” whom Charles has always envied, and resented as kind of patronizing and even pompous. But James, who in a life spent pursuing goodness in his own right, has sometimes like his cousin mistaken power for goodness, has also embraced Buddhist mysticism and the negation of the self. When James visits Charles in his retreat, he is the voice of reason, though he does not attempt to force Charles to do anything. Murdoch has a tendency sometimes to include a kind of “savior” figure in her fiction, and one might argue that this is the purpose of James in this novel. At any rate he is a foil to his cousin, a fairly clear moral compass that Charles—and the reader as well—is free to ignore at his own peril. The Sea, The Sea is an entertaining novel, but it’s also a significant demonstration of a philosophical concept about the nature of morality. And a lovable one at that.