Shruff End… an interview with Miles Leeson

As a companion piece to the first of our essays by Anna Iltnere about literary seaside houses – Shruff End from The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch – we present an interview with Miles Leeson, lead editor of the Iris Murdoch Review:

“Having lived all my life near to the sea I’m in the same mind as Murdoch; the importance of the sea to mental health and wellbeing, and to freeing the creative part of the mind. Iris Murdoch always wishes in her letters to friends that she could have a cottage by the sea and one wonders why she didn’t as she could have afforded one.”
– Miles Leeson, director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester

Interview by Anna Iltnere: 

What was Iris Murdoch’s relationship with water and with the sea? What the sea meant for her?

A very long relationship! I can’t think of any novels in which water isn’t mentioned or used as a symbol in some way. It’s always connected with boundaries, whether it’s the Thames that Blaise crosses to meet his mistress Emily, or the gap between reality and the unconscious in The Sea, The Sea which Charles constantly struggles with. Iris herself was, as we know, drawn to the sea throughout her life and regularly swam in the wild – near Oxford, in lakes, in the Sea, or indeed in the pond in the back garden at Steeple Aston! It’s her most enduring image I think, and one which the film Iris from 2001 makes much of as well.

 “To be able to swim, for Murdoch, is within her fiction almost to possess moral competence,” Peter Conradi writes in his essay “Iris Murdoch and the sea”. Is there more to swimming, near drowning and drowning in Murdoch’s books than just thrilling plot turns?

As I’ve hinted at above water is much more than just a useful fictional device for Murdoch. Peter is right of course, a sense of the moral life is tied up with images of confidence, or lack of confidence, in water. We remember that early scene in The Unicorn when Marion has her experience on the beach below the cliffs at Gaze, she meets the seal perfectly happy in his environment whereas Marion is very much a fish out of water in the space she now finds herself in. Effingham in the same novel and his revelation as he sinks slowly into the bog. Quite often our male protagonists, Blaise, Charles, Bruno in Bruno’s Dream, Tim Reed in Nuns and Soldiers, and others have a complex relationship with water and find themselves faced with set-pieces – who could forget Tim’s near-drowning in France? – that force them to face reality. 

What role does the seaside house Shruff End play in The Sea, The Sea?

Oh, Shruff End, and the immediate landscape, is the setting for all of the central action; it’s very much the ‘stage’ and everything else really happens ‘off stage’ in a sense. What is little known is that Murdoch wrote a stage version of The Sea, The Sea that was never put on in her lifetime. Much has been said about what Murdoch takes from Shakespeare and here, of course, it’s The Tempest. We have our Prospero who has, of course, recently retired from the Theatre and his ‘court’ who end up following him out to the seaside. One way of reading the house is the mind of Charles writ large; how the rooms relate to his conscious and unconscious thought and so on; especially once he captures Hartley. That’s only interesting in part I think, we lose much if we give a simplistic psychoanalytic reading to the text; it should be enjoyed as a comedy in form, with Charles as a quasi-tragic figure.

Would you agree to spend a summer at Shruff End? Why or why not?

Oh, I think so, so long as Charles was no longer resident! The setting is rather bleak in some ways but at least I could get down to some serious writing. Having lived all my life near to the sea I’m in the same mind as Murdoch; the importance of the sea to mental health and wellbeing, and to freeing the creative part of the mind. Iris Murdoch always wishes in her letters to friends that she could have a cottage by the sea and one wonders why she didn’t as she could have afforded one with John if she wanted to; especially after the success of the 1970s. Shruff End probably needs some major updating and renovation in any event; I certainly don’t remember it having central heating!

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About Miles Leeson: As well as being the lead editor of the Iris Murdoch Review, Miles also published Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist in 2010, the edited collection Incest in Contemporary Literature in 2018, the festschrift Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration this year and is currently writing Iris Murdoch: Feminist. 

About Anna Iltnere: Anna is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia and the author of our ‘Unreal estate’ series of essays on literary houses by the sea. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Unreal estate No.01: Shruff End

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

By Anna Iltnere:

In the first of a new series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to Shruff End from Iris Murdoch’s novel The Sea, The Sea. Each essay will be about a different house, illustrated by the artist Katrina Gelze. Next week, we will also publish a companion interview to this essay with Miles Leeson, director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester. 

“What madman built it?”
– Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea, 1978

“My imagination lives near the sea and under the sea,” Iris Murdoch said in 1978. She had never lived by the sea herself, but water played a big role in her books and her life.

A passionate swimmer and with characters who are thrown into water by her pen, Iris Murdoch was fascinated by the sea. Shruff End is one of the seaside houses of her mind, enlivened in her book The Sea, The Sea. 

“Water had a quickening effect on Iris Murdoch’s imagination,” writes Olivia Laing in her book To the River, “for her novels brim over with rivers and pools and chilly grey seas.”

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1919, as the only child of a singer and a civil servant. When Iris was a few weeks old the family moved to London. She would go on to study philosophy and wrote 26 novels, before being diagnosed with Alzheimers disease in 1997. Iris Murdoch died in 1999 aged 79, her brilliant mind relentlessly erased by dementia during the last two years of her life.

Iris Murdoch’s book The Sea, The Sea was published in 1978 when she was 59, was her nineteenth novel and the one which brought her the Booker Prize. The story is about a retired middle-aged actor, playwright and director Charles Arrowby, who leaves glittering London and moves to a house by the sea to write his memoirs. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core.  

“Strange novel”, writes Philip Hoare in RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. “Faintly ridiculous” admits Olivia Laing, but this tragi-comic drama sinks in, and you become soaked in its story just as Shruff End remains forever dampened by the mysterious sea.

The House

Shruff End is a fictional house on an unidentified English coast. Charles Arrowby buys it in a fever of haste, selling his big apartment in Barnes, London, by the Thames. The sea-house takes most of his savings, but Arrowby imagines living simple, hermit days here, far away from his previous life on the London stage. But this dream that has come true soon turns into a strange nightmare, and Shruff End has its own role in the gripping story.

Shruff End is perched upon a small promontory, not exactly a peninsula, and stands on the very rocks themselves. “What madman built it?” Arrowby wonders. The facade, looking out onto the road, is “not in itself remarkable”, but in its lonely situation is strangely incongruous. The house would scarcely attract notice in a Birmingham suburb but all alone upon that wild coast it certainly looks odd. “Exposed and isolated,” writes Arrowby about his first impression. He falls in love with it.

The house is a brick, ‘double-fronted’ villa, with bay windows on the ground floor and two peaks to the roof. From the upper seaward windows the view is almost entirely of water, unless one peers down to glimpse the rocks below. From the lower windows the sea is invisible and one sees only the coastal rocks that surround the house, elephantine in size and shape. “How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life,” Charles Arrowby writes of the view. 

The pale buff-coloured blinds, which hang in almost every room, are “in excellent condition”, with glossy wooden toggles on strings, silk tassels, and lace fringe at the bottom. When these blinds are drawn down, Shruff End, as seen from the road, has a weird air of complacent mystery.

The bricks are dark red. The back of the house has been horribly “pebble-dashed” against the weather. “Little do they realise how ardently I look forward to those storms, when the wild waves will beat at my very door!” Charles Arrowby is rather exalted in the first pages of his memoirs: “What a paradise, I shall never tire of this sea and this sky.”

Mr Arrowby lives entirely on the seaward side of the house, upstairs in his bedroom and what he calls his drawing room, and downstairs is the kitchen and a small den next to it known as “the little red room”, where there is a fireplace. On the other side of the house are the the book room, where he has put the crates of his still unpacked books, and the dining room, where he stores his wine. 

The chief peculiarity of the house, and one for which Charles Arrowby can find no rational explanation, is an inner room found on both floors.They are rooms with no external window, but lit by internal window giving onto the seaward rooms. These two “funny” inner rooms on two floors are extremely dark. Throughout the book they seem to be a rib-cage containing the soul of the house. 

The house is “mysteriously damp”, its floor is “curiously damp”. The large – and damp – larder is full of woodlice. “Is it conceivable that the sea could be rising up through a hidden channel under the house?” Charles Arrowby prises up some linoleum in the hall, and replaces it with a shudder. There is a salty smell, he observes. At the end of the book he tries to get rid of the house, and admits that no one seems to want to buy the place, “perhaps because of the dampness, perhaps for other reasons”.

The sea becomes a canvas for Mr Arrowby’s own inner demons. “It is after tea and I am sitting at the drawing-room window watching the rain falling steadily into the sea. There is a terrible grim simplicity about this grey scene. Apart from an iron-dark line at the horizon the sea and the sky are much the same colour, a muted faintly radiant grey, and expectant as if waiting for something to happen. As it might be flashes of lightning or monsters rising from the waves.” 

One morning he does see a monster rising from the waves, while the sea also mysteriously and repeatedly unties the rope that he ties to the shore to help himself get out of the water after his daily swims. It provides one of the most quoted lines from the book: “Time, like the sea, unties all knots.”

The house starts to play tricks on his mind. Is the house haunted? He asks about a poltergeist in a nearby bar. “Any house might be haunted,” someone answers. At first it is a vase that falls down and is smashed to pieces. Then – a mirror. And then there’s a face he sees in the window at night. Or was it moon?

Shruff End seems to have not only its own ghost, but also its own climate, independent from the weather outside. It feels cold even on warm days. One day Arrowby comes in from the brilliant light outside and the air in the house seems grey and thick. The house is gloomy, and there are strange sounds too, or perhaps it is just the bead curtain clicking in the draught from the open door...

“The house was still acting up, but I felt by now that I was getting to know its oddities and I was more friendly towards it,” writes Arrowby. “It was not exactly a sinister or menacing effect, but as if the house were a sensitized plate which intermittently registered things which had happened in the past – or, it now occurred to me for the first time, were going to happen in the future. A premonition?”

When Mr Arrowby puts Shruff End up for sale and runs back to London, he moves to “a peculiar miserable derelict” new flat. If he ever wanted to live as a hermit, retired from the world, then this – he concludes – would be a far better habitat. “It is oddly enough easier to write here, amid all this cramped chaos, than in the open spaces at Shruff End.” 

In the end, he hadn’t been able to concentrate in a house by the sea. 

“Throughout the book water runs like a spell or a curse. The sea of the title is not just a background or vista, it is a character,” writes Daisy Johnson in the introduction of a special edition of The Sea, The Sea. It was published by Vintage Books in the summer of 2019 to celebrate the 100th birthday of Iris Murdoch. 

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About the author: Anna Iltnere is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Katrina Gelze’s website