THE WESTERN WORLD HAD BECOME A DESPERATE AND FRENETIC place in which to live by the middle of the 1930s. If Dorothy L. Sayers lacked true happiness, she had at least achieved a measure of personal security; European society as a whole could boast neither. The new dawn that had beckoned peace and promise after November 1918 proved illusory, even self-delusional. The world had seemed malleable then, a vast potential awaiting the devoted commitment of the newly wise and the newly free. Fifteen years later, society was wobbling, careening toward a spectacular and appalling wreck. Potential had turned to poverty, freedom exchanged for fascism. Everywhere, the long weekend showed signs of ending in a very great sorrow. Expending her creative energies in Cloud-Cuckoo Land, Sayers could still see and feel the hopes of her own youth rapidly slipping away. She chose to write about it, spilling England’s hopes and afflictions onto the printed page just as she achieved the zenith of her powers as a novelist. Could anyone find something resembling love in a universe slowly driving itself mad?
All during the early 1930s, Sayers had tracked the slow unwinding of modern European society in the interstices of her novels. Have His Carcase is especially peppered with references to England’s decline, both economic and political. Agricultural conditions were terrible, as no less an expert than Henry Weldon could testify:
“Nothing in farming these days,” grumbled Mr. Weldon. “Look at all this Russian wheat they’re dumpin’ in. As if things weren’t bad already, with wages what they are, and taxes, and rates and tithe and insurance. I’ve got fifty acres of wheat. By the time it’s harvested I daresay it’ll have cost me £9 an acre. And what shall I get for it? Lucky if I get five. How this damned Government expects the farmer to carry on, I don’t know.” (154)
Henry Weldon may have been a repulsive and brutal killer, but he was not lying about agricultural conditions. Three years later, Sayers would put much the same words into the mouth of Catherine Freemantle Bendick, farmer’s wife and benighted former classmate of Harriet Vane. It was a sad story and altogether too common. In The Nine Tailors, William Thoday, anguished victim of the Fenchurch St. Paul tragedy, was already a victim of the agricultural depression when the story began. Once an independent farmer, Thoday had lost his land when the “bad times” came; he was forced to accept work as a tenant for Hilary Thorpe’s father. Thoday’s brother James was in much the same shape. An officer on a freighter, he was experiencing “an anxious time for men in his line of business, freights being very scarce and hard to come by.” It was “all this depression,” sure enough (121).
Indeed, the remainder of English society was faring little better. At the inquest into the death of Paul Alexis, Sayers has one of the jurors speak out against the numbers of foreigners who have entered the country since the war. Echoing the real sentiments of many, he demanded that the government do more to keep the riffraff out. An “Empire Free-Trader and member of the Public Health Committee,” the juror vehemently argued that with “two million British-born workers unemployed,” it was a scandal to allow Russians or any other outsiders to compete for jobs, naturalization papers or no.1
Two million represented roughly 16 to 20 percent unemployment, a figure that persisted throughout much of the 1930s. Unemployment peaked at about three million (22.5 percent) in 1932, then fell off all too slowly despite steady growth in industrial production. Leaders in Parliament despairingly came to see persistent 15 percent unemployment as a fact of life.2
The sad story of William Bright and the razor in Have His Carcase was believable to Lord Peter and the police for precisely this reason. The tale was a familiar one. Bright supposedly had owned a prosperous haircutting establishment in Manchester before the slump; now he wandered from town to town, desperate for any sort of job and drinking to ease the shame. Posing as Bright, Alfred Morecambe laid it on thick:
“I don’t like making this confession. It’s very humiliating for a man who once had a flourishing business of his own. I hope you won’t think, gentlemen, that I have been accustomed to this kind of thing.”
“Of course not,” said Wimsey. “Bad things may happen to anybody. Nobody thinks anything of that nowadays.” (180)
What finally makes Wimsey and the official police suspicious of Mr. Bright is the fact that he was not on the dole.
In Murder Must Advertise, assumptions born of the same prolonged economic crisis actually assist Lord Peter. Passing himself off as an educated man willing to work for four pounds a week, he forgets to dress accordingly, showing up in silk socks and a Saville Row suit. The typists attribute this suspicious circumstance to the cruel effects of the slump; obviously Mr. Death Bredon was a wealthy man who had lost all his money. He would be one more among thousands.
The international depression did not kill the movement for women’s rights, though it may have blunted its hopes somewhat. It is difficult to make demands for equal treatment and equal employment, however just, in the face of two million able-bodied unemployed. The villain Henry Weldon spoke for a great many Britishers when he disparaged women’s rights as a form of mania. To him and to thousands more, the idea of equality was nonsense. But then, his exposure to women was rather limited. His mother was a sad case, possessing neither brains nor interests. She wandered from one watering hole to the next, vaguely searching for some kind of thrill to occupy her stay on this earth. “I’ve so often thought that if I could have painted pictures or ridden a motorcycle or something, I should have got more out of life” (67), she lamented. The only other women Henry would know were laboring women, such as his housekeeper, with whom he had little contact, or those he targeted for conquest. Certainly he was not interested in their brains.
Fashion designers fell to believing that the work place was not a woman’s place in the early thirties. Whether this was by choice or because societal conditions left them no choice did not matter. Harriet Vane encountered the “return to womanliness” on the dance floor in Wilvercombe, where “long skirts and costumes of the seventies were in evidence—and even ostrich feathers and fans. Even the coyness had its imitators.” Harriet was not fooled, nor were very many of the women present:
If this was the “return to womanliness” hailed by the fashion correspondents, it was to quite a different kind of womanliness—set on a basis of economic independence. Were men really stupid enough to believe that the good old days of submissive womanhood could be brought back by milliners’ fashions? “Hardly,” thought Harriet, “when they know perfectly well that one has only to remove the train and the bustle, get into a short skirt and walk off, with a job to do and money in one’s pocket.” (143–44)
Harriet was perhaps unable to grasp that the situation she described did not match the lot of a great many women in the Britain of the thirties.
For all that hardships obstinately refused to lessen as time crawled slowly from 1929 to 1935, matters could have been worse. They were in fact far worse in nations not far away. Dorothy L. Sayers kept a weather eye on developments in Russia, Italy, and especially Germany. She did not like what she saw.
Russia’s experiment in totalitarianism had of course begun during the Great War. The revolution of February 1917 toppled the czar; the Bolshevik Revolution of the following October ruthlessly established the single-party authority of the communists. Widespread civil war, massive confusion, and abject starvation ensued, lasting at least until 1921. The death of Lenin wrought still more disarray at the top; the infighting continued until Josef Stalin emerged as dictator two years later. The Russian economy slowly recovered and modernized under the Stalinist five-year plans, while nominal rights for working men and women improved. The benefits were illusory in the midst of terror; the collectivization of farms was a calculated cruelty, while the highly publicized political purges left little doubt as to the character of the dictator. In the west, darker rumors circulated, though Russian secrecy masked the depth of Stalin’s brutality.3
Italy had been under the one-party rule of Benito Mussolini and the fascists since 1922. On the surface, dictatorship seemed to have something to recommend it, if the example of Italy meant anything. In the midst of worldwide economic chaos, the country seemed to run more or less efficiently. The boggling thought that Mussolini had made the trains run on time became a watchword throughout Europe. That he exercised management and efficiency using the bayonet as persuasion seemed not to matter. And if Italian women were second class citizens, regarded as little more than baby machines, the fascists were not to blame for that. Italian women had been regarded as such for a very long time.4
Germany’s convulsive leap into totalitarianism in 1933 came as more of a shock. The Lausanne Conference of the previous year had brought an end to Germany’s payment of war reparations, but the economic damage was done. Prostrated by the Great Depression, German unemployment reached at least 6.2 million in August 1933. This was merely the official figure and did not include the many who had given up searching for work or those occupying wholly inadequate part-time jobs. The economic disaster naturally produced a political crisis; a majority in the Reichstag advocated one-party rule. Unfortunately, this majority comprised extreme leftists—the communist party—and extreme rightists—the Nazis. Seeking desperately to break the deadlock, Paul von Hindenberg, war hero and president of the Reich since 1925, handed the powers of chancellorship to the leader of the Nazi party, Adolph Hitler.
Hitler’s rise to power was entirely constitutional, but it brought an end to the Weimar Republic in all but name. The German people went to the polls in February 1933 for the third time in nine months. This time the Nazis won 45 percent of the seats in the Reichstag. Minor alliances made them the majority party, the first step toward one-party rule. In March, the Nazis adopted a law turning practical legislative power over to the cabinet—fully manned by members of the Nazi party. The Communists, the Nationalists, and the Social Democrats were quickly outlawed. The civil service was purged of all but Nazi loyalists. Dictatorship had come to Germany.5
The government moved quickly to consolidate its position. Careful not to trespass on the mostly ceremonial powers of the aged Hindenburg, who still commanded the loyalty and respect of the military, Hitler nonetheless began a radical transformation of German society. To address the economic problems that brought him to power, Hitler quickly outlawed the trade unions and enforced strict managerial control over industry and labor. Fearing the communist alternative, the major industries supported him, as did the average working man. Germany’s labor force became a regimented machine, marching to orders issued from the hierarchy. Youth was organized in much the same way. At least there seemed some promise of working again.
Working women, and women generally, were not so fortunate. Nazi ideology dictated that women belonged in the home raising children. To achieve this end, women were forced out of the work place. Political and legal rights were stripped away, leaving women little defense in a country where traditionally many more had worked outside the home than in any other nation in Europe. The Nazis widely publicized the rejoicing women expressed over this turn of fortune. What choice did the women have?6
Hitler envisioned a fundamental reshaping of Germany, not simply in its economic and social institutions, but in the essence of its culture. Nazi philosophy was rooted in fantasy, built on a credo of Aryan racial superiority and Teutonic mythology, neither of which had ever existed save in Hitler’s own mind. He fed this fantasy to a people flattened by defeat and disaster; too many willingly bought in. He forced the Christian churches into line, planning eventually to displace their function with a Germanic religion emphasizing obedience and racial purity and paying homage to Germanic gods. The persecution of Jews and other “non-Germanic” peoples began immediately. By 1935 the Nuremburg laws excluded all Jews from rights of citizenship.7
Hindenburg died in August 1934, removing the last impediment to a complete Nazi takeover. The military, initially cool to Hitler, now pledged their unqualified allegiance. Despite pressures to the contrary, Hitler had done little to alter the composition of the armed forces to this point. Military leaders could not foresee the rise of the SS (Schutzstaffel), with its unparalleled array of heinous police powers. Hitler now had all the necessary tools to mold a fully totalitarian state.
England was not entirely immune to the seductive promises of dictatorship. Faced with endemic high unemployment, politicians on the left and the right agitated for stronger one-party rule. Given the strength of Britain’s Labour party, the communists appeared to have some advantage, but this proved illusory. Labour stood firm against communist ideology; any member pushing a communist line was unceremoniously booted out. The radical left boasted a membership of sixteen thousand by 1938, but this group exerted little direct political influence. Mainly they confined themselves to antifascist activities, pointing out the dangers to a largely misapprehending public. Radical publishers, including Victor Gollancz, formed the Left Book Club in 1936 to better inform the nation on leftist issues. Membership reached sixty thousand readers.8
Massive unemployment inspired the right as well. As Germany lurched toward Naziism in 1932, Sir Oswald Mosely left Ramsey MacDonald’s cabinet to form the British Union of Fascists. His ideas for ameliorating the effects of the Depression were rather mild, but his intended means of achieving them were not. Like fascists everywhere, Mosely felt that a multiparty system produced only weakness, confusion, and compromise. Constitutionally, but by force if necessary, he would impose single-party hegemony. Over the next four years, perhaps one hundred thousand Britishers would call themselves fascists at one time or another. Most were of the chronically unemployed classes from traditionally poverty-ridden pockets of major cities. Only six thousand ever actually paid dues to belong to the British Union of Fascists, though the organization claimed one hundred eighty local branches. They held a large rally at London’s Olympia Hall in June 1934; demonstrators were savagely attacked and beaten, repelling many. The Union was definitely on the wane by the end of 1936.9
Was this, then, what modernism had come to? Did the rejection of tradition, the destruction of conventional social and political order, the denial of history’s influence pave the road for the coming dictator? Bereft of stabilizing influences and shorn of their traditional managers, too many European states found themselves turning to the savior, the all-knowing superman who would think for everyone. Freedom from convention in the end perhaps meant no freedom at all. In creating the new, the efficient, the modern state, everything not expressly forbidden became mandatory.
Radical sympathizers from the left and the right populate the later Wimsey novels. Bolshevism was in fact a favorite theme of Dorothy L. Sayers almost from the beginning. Peter’s sister almost married the communist organizer George Goyles. The Soviet Club turns up in several novels and short stories; the mysterious but rickety Mr. Perkins of Have His Carcase was a member. The suggestion seems to be that all this Soviet business should not be taken too seriously. Mrs. Weldon is convinced that Bolsheviks have done in poor Paul Alexis, but the police are certain that none of the handful of communist agents in England could have been involved.
Sayers takes the fascist threat more seriously. At Pym’s Advertising, company photographer Mr. Prout is highly dissatisfied with working conditions. No one is willing to listen when he argues that “What we want in this country is a Mussolini to organize trade conditions.” Several weeks later, Prout “created a sensation by coming to the office in a black shirt.”10
Sayers is sensitive to the anti-Semitic and misogynist tendencies latent in English society, recognizing in these trends the mind-set of the extreme right. In Murder Must Advertise, the hysterical woman who witnesses Doctor Herbert Garfield shoving another member of the drug gang beneath a train believes him to be “a prominent member of a gang whose object is to murder all persons of British birth and establish the supremacy of the Jews in England” (265). And, though women occupy important positions at Pym’s, they are not treated on exactly the same footing as men. When Brotherhood’s, an important client, sends representatives to visit the agency, there are no special directives for the men, but the women must not smoke or expose too much neck and shoulders. None of the men at Pym’s are prepared to admit the possibility of women’s equality. Even Peter is far more mysogynist than usual, agreeing that women cannot use catapults and generally disparaging their reliability: “‘You cannot trust these young women. No fixity of purpose. Except, of course, when you particularly want them to be yielding.’ He grinned with a wry mouth” (114).
If such sentiments are suggested by the merest hints in Murder Must Advertise, they become essential grist for the plot of Gaudy Night. The shadow of totalitarianist threat broods through the entire novel, while antifeminist feelings and questions regarding the proper role of women in society are integral to the entire plot, both in its mystery and in its novel of manners threads.
Sayers began work on Gaudy Night immediately after completing The Nine Tailors. Having essentially kept the problem of Peter’s love for Harriet Vane at arm’s length for more than two years, she now at last determined to move matters to their foregone conclusion. Even before completing the novel, she had begun collaborating on a play framing the first few days of the happy couple’s marriage—the title: Busman’s Honeymoon. Still, actually splicing the pair together proved a challenge. She confessed the problem to the co-author of the play, former Oxford schoolmate Muriel St. Clare Byrne: “I think I have got over most of the technical snags in Gaudy Night now, but the writing is being horribly difficult. Peter and Harriet are the world’s most awkward pair of lovers—both so touchy and afraid to commit themselves to anything but hints and allusions!”11
Perhaps the writing would have been less of a trial had Sayers confined herself to writing a straightforward romance. This would not have been worthy of the Wimsey series, however, nor would such a vapid exer-cise have satisfied Dorothy L. Sayers. Gaudy Night was to be a romance, a drawing-room comedy, a detective story of the combined puzzle-thriller variety, a paean to Sayers’s beloved Oxford University, and a story exam ining a serious question while pointing a serious moral. In a letter to Victor Gollancz, Sayers later confessed of Gaudy Night:
[This is] the only book I’ve written embodying any kind of a “moral” and I do feel rather passionately about this business of the integrity of the mind—but I realize that to make a “detective story” the vehicle for that sort of thing is (as Miss de Vine says of the Peter-Harriet marriage) reckless to the point of insanity. But there it is—it’s the book I wanted to write and I’ve written it—and it is now my privilege to leave you with the baby! Whether you advertise it as a love-story, or as educational propaganda, or as a lunatic freak, I leave to you.12
Yes, writing this one had been most difficult.
In no small part, Sayers was driven to writing such a story because the things she so passionately believed in were in mortal danger. The tramp of mindless marching feet could be heard in too many European nations; the pall of anti-intellectual, antithinking totalitarianism loomed ominously large in democratic England. The few and tentative gains accomplished by women stood endangered; the essential human right to choose one’s own path could be denied. To be sure of tomorrow’s bread, was it necessary that the mass of humanity surrender every freedom they possessed? Was dictatorship desirable, in any form? Dorothy L. Sayers did not think so.
As a counterpoint to the totalitarian potentials of the modern state, Sayers presented the essence of one form of British tradition: Oxford University. Steeped in a heritage of higher learning compassing several centuries, Oxford stood for the uncompromising search for absolute and knowable truth. Each of its colleges, each of its avenues of learning, extended the traditions of the past: true knowledge is the result of honest inquiry constructed on the foundations of past discovery. There can be no break with the past, only a relentless sifting of all that has gone before.
Returning to Oxford for the Gaudy after several years away, Harriet Vane finds herself exhilarated and exalted by the academic atmosphere: “She saw it as a Holy War, and that whole wildly heterogeneous, that even slightly absurd collection of chattering women fused into a corporate unity with one another and with every man and woman to whom integrity of mind meant more than material gain—defenders in the central keep of Man-soul, their personal differences forgotten in face of a common foe” (29).
Gaudy Night is set largely in the university town of Oxford, more specifically within the confines of Shrewsbury College for women, an institution that Sayers has invented and located on Balliol College’s “spacious and sacred cricket ground.” Although she models much of Shrewsbury life on her own experiences at nearby Somerville, Sayers is careful both to update the quality of the educational experience and to disassociate it from her alma mater. Like Somerville—mentioned enough times in the text to emphasize its separate existence—Shrewsbury’s faculty consists entirely of women, roughly twenty dons referred to collectively as the Senior Common Room. They are, of course, resident in the college, assuming responsibility for the education of some one hundred fifty students. Unlike the students of Sayers’s generation, the Shrewsbury women of the thirties demonstrate little cooperative enthusiasm and are generally unwilling to participate in any sort of class pageantry. They are more anxious to exercise independence than to promote camaraderie. These students are, in fact, the products of such freedom for women as has been achieved in England by 1935. On the surface, it seems to their elders that they are unappreciative.13
For all their ungracious disrespect, their unwillingness to participate in community projects, and their cavalier attitude towards the necessity of the academic gown, the students—the “slack little beasts”—are fiercely loyal to the academic traditions resting at the heart of Oxford. They may be selfish in most ways, but in the face of persecution and adversity they will not betray the college. They are the next generation of warriors in the “Holy War” that Harriet Vane has glimpsed at the Gaudy. “If it ever occurs to people to value the honor of the mind equally with the honor of the body,” Peter Wimsey later intones, “we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort—and very different from the kind that is being made at the moment” (352)—being made at that moment, in fact, in Germany, in Italy, in Russia, in far-off Japan, and knocking on the door in safe old England.
In Gaudy Night, Sayers addresses the question of totalitarianism most obviously in her drawing of the Shrewsbury College porter, Padgett. He is a good man—resourceful, honest, and reliable—a vast improvement over the previous porter. Despite these admirable qualities, Padgett is deeply flawed: he does not think, save in conventions. Carrying out the oddest assignments with his customary acumen, Padgett nonetheless harbors a belief that a women’s college is a poor excuse for an institution, that women have no business dabbling in education. His solution to his dilemma is simple, as he reveals in private conversation with a decorating foreman:
“Young ladies,” Padgett was heard to say, “will ’ave their larks, same as young gentlemen.”
“When I was a lad,” replied the foreman, “young ladies was young ladies. And young gentlemen was young gentlemen. If you get my meaning.”
“Wot this country wants,” said Padgett, “is a ’Itler.”
“That’s right,” said the foreman. “Keep the girls at ’ome.” (120)
Padgett, as it happens, had fought under Major Peter Wimsey in the Great War. Almost twenty years later, he cherished the memories and happily shared them with Harriet Vane. It seems that Padgett and another enlisted man had gotten into a fistfight, arguing whether Wimsey was manly enough to be an officer. Peter had responded by putting both men on extra detail cleaning the encampment. Apparently, “This affair of a mop and a bucket seemed to have made Padgett Peter’s slave for life.” Harriet could only conclude that “Men were very odd,” but the underlying message was more ominous. Too many responsible men like Padgett were only too happy to follow. They did not want to think for themselves (361).
The fascist threat weighs heavily throughout all of Gaudy Night. For most of the novel, Peter is abroad performing diplomatic service for the foreign office. Much of his time he spends in Italy, trading cheerful banter while picking the minds of his rivals. Eventually he moves on to Poland before returning home, harrowed by the dangers he has witnessed. War was clearly in the air; it was only a matter of time: “The old bus wobbles one way, and you think, ‘That’s done it!’ and then it wobbles the other way and you think, ‘All serene’; and then, one day, it wobbles over too far and you’re in the soup and can’t remember how you got there” (287).
Harriet Vane, in the meantime, encounters the fascist question all too often, both inside the cloistered walls of Oxford and in the familiar world of writers’ London. Harriet had witnessed at first hand the conditions in Hitlerite Berlin during a European tour undertaken in 1933; she is regularly invited to share her knowledge. Among the first dons she interviews at Shrewsbury is Miss Barton, author of a small volume entitled The Position of Women in the Modern State. Sayers tells the reader little of the volume’s content, but it is easy to infer that Miss Barton has taken it upon herself to defend the rights of women against fascist attacks, especially those in Germany. She is eager to hear Harriet’s impressions about the Nazi regime, though she mostly disagrees with them.
Escaping the strange confines of Oxford, Harriet vacations in London between terms, catching up on gossip among the literary set. As a group, they are as narrow and conceited as ever, believing that the recent triumph of a novel entitled Mock Turtle should be construed solely as an affront to their collective genius. They can see nothing more than a corrupt bargain between publishers and agents or between publishers and advertisers. No one can take seriously the importance of Mock Turtle’s antifascist tone. Harriet hastens back to Oxford.
In a sense, Gaudy Night was Dorothy L. Sayers’s own version of Miss Barton’s The Position of Women in the Modern State. Though Sayers vehemently denied any advocacy of feminist views, the moral to which she points in the novel is raised because of the danger posed to women by the rise of totalitarian sentiments. As she describes it, the question she wishes to address is “integrity of the mind”—the necessity of comprehending one’s own gifts (whatever they may be) and pursuing a path that will give those gifts the greatest latitude to flower. Every person—man or woman—is different. No one should be slotted into an occupation, a position, or a marriage because of his or her sex, class, or racial background. Everyone has a job to do, and they need to be free, first to discover what that job is and thereafter to do it in peace. It must be up to the individual to decide, not society or the state. This is Dorothy L. Sayers’s answer, both to the fascists and to the traditional English who would shove women back onto the Victorian pedestal.14
Sayers sketches out the essence of her argument in a long conversation between Harriet Vane and Miss de Vine, the new research fellow in residence at Shrewsbury College. Harriet has taken residence in Shrewsbury to investigate and, she hopes, expose a “poison pen” who has persecuted the college for several months with offensive notes, dirty words written on walls, and malicious pranks. Miss de Vine, a historian specializing in the intricacies of Tudor finance, is a formidable scholar whose “sole allegiance was to the fact,” possessing “a mind as hard and immovable as granite” (19). She is a great fan of Harriet Vane’s detective stories and is especially pleased to make Harriet’s acquaintance. She befriends Harriet in an intensely honest way, expressing a view of life’s responsibilities that Harriet finds enlightening and a little frightening:
“I’m quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is.”
“I made a big mistake once,” said Harriet, “As I expect you know. I don’t think that arose out of lack of interest. It seemed at the time the most important thing in the world.”
“And yet you made the mistake. Were you really giving all your mind to it, do you think? Your mind? Were you really being as cautious and exacting about it as you would be about writing a passage of fine prose?” (179–80)
After some reflection, Harriet must confess that she had not been as attentive to developing her relationship with Philip Boyes as she was to writing her books. Writing was her job, the one thing to which she devoted undivided attention, the one thing she would never lie about.
The theme of doing one’s job ramifies throughout the novel. Peter Wimsey avoids getting shot by a plug-ugly because his mind was “momentarily” on his job. Mrs. Bendick, the Shrewsbury graduate become farmer’s wife who so shocked Harriet at the Gaudy, maintains that marriage is “really the most important job,” though she admits to reservations. Harriet cannot help but feel “that she had seen a Derby winner making shift with a coal cart” (69, 48–49).
Harriet herself is forced to passionately defend her actions in terms of doing one’s proper job. At their first meeting, Miss Barton presses Harriet to explain why she continues to write detective novels after her own near brush with the gallows. Harriet points out that economics played a part in her decision to continue, but adds, more fundamentally: “I know what you’re thinking—that anybody with proper sensitive feeling would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don’t see why proper feeling should prevent me from doing my proper job” (31).
She goes on to defend Lord Peter’s choice to pursue criminals, whether “as a duty or as an intellectual exercise” (33). It is the legal responsibility of every citizen to enforce the law, and Peter had proven time and again his surpassing ability in detection. Despite whatever reason he gave, and despite his standing as an amateur, catching crooks was Peter Wimsey’s job.
To Sayers’s mind, there were two difficulties in this business of doing one’s job: figuring out what it might be, and then doing it in the face of determined opposition. The world is full of stubborn and conventional people. Most will never trouble to find their own proper job but will instead meekly accept whatever society allots. Italy and Germany were suddenly full of people like that; England had far more than its share.
Early in her stay at Shrewsbury, Harriet Vane rescues Miss Cattermole, an unhappy third-year student who has broken most of the rules in the book without getting much fun out of it. Taxed for the reason, Catter-mole confesses that she had never wanted to come up to Oxford at all. She hated it and was there only because her parents wanted her to take advantage of the new opportunities for women. Cattermole wanted to be a cook. Probably she would be a good one, if instinct meant anything. Not every woman was cut out to be an advanced woman: becoming a cook was Cattermole’s proper job.
If Miss Cattermole wished to defy the new conventions of her parents to pursue a traditional woman’s role, there were many women at Shrewsbury moving in the opposite direction. The struggle to gain acceptance and respect for women’s education was within the living memory of every don in the college; the first legitimate degrees for Oxford women graduates were not conferred until 1920. By choosing academe over marriage and family, every one of these women dons defied woman’s traditional role. Persecution by the college “poltergeist” inspired an ongoing debate among the dons regarding the wisdom and ethics of their decisions. The college secretary, Mrs. Goodwin, became the focal point for several heated discussions. Had the college given her the position simply because she was a widow with a small child in prep school? Was it right that she be excused from her work every time the child had an illness? Were the bursar and the dean indulging her to assuage their own guilt for not having children of their own? Touchy stuff, certainly. As tempers frayed in the face of failure to identify the poltergeist, such arguments grew more heated.
Another angle on the question of proper jobs and women’s roles comes when Harriet Vane, enjoying a spring walk in the park, encounters Annie Wilson, one of the college scouts, strolling with her two daughters. Annie is conventional in the extreme, fervently determined that her girls will become good wives and mothers. Naturally, she is much distressed when her older daughter announces different designs on life:
“I want to ride a motor-cycle when I’m bigger,” said Beatrice, shaking her curls assertively.
“Oh no, darling. What things they say, don’t they, madam?”
“Yes, I do,” said Beatrice. “I’m going to have a motor-cycle and keep a garage.”
“Nonsense,” said her mother, a little sharply. “You mustn’t talk so. That’s a boy’s job.”
“But lots of girls do boys’ jobs nowadays,” said Harriet.
“But they ought not, madam. It isn’t fair. The boys have hard enough work to get jobs of their own. Please don’t put things into her head, madam. You’ll never get a husband, Beatrice, if you mess about in a garage getting all ugly and dirty.”
“I don’t want one,” said Beatrice, firmly. “I’d rather have a motor-cycle.”
Annie looked annoyed, but laughed when Harriet laughed.
“She’ll find out some day, won’t she, madam?”
“Very likely she will,” said Harriet. If the woman took the view that any husband was better than none at all, it was useless to argue. (231)
Annie’s view went way beyond that. Not only was a woman’s—any woman’s—sole job to get and serve a husband but also to stand by him, no matter what. In Annie Wilson’s understanding, the world belonged exclusively to men. The man’s part in the arrangement was to put the family welfare ahead of all other considerations. Lying, stealing, cheating—these matters of personal integrity within the public sphere came a distant second as far as she was concerned. Regrettably, her own husband had shared in this belief and had paid. Exposed as a scholarly liar by a woman, the man had turned to drink and eventually shot himself. This confutation of all she believed was too much for Annie Wilson. Her mind had snapped. She was the campus poltergeist.15
Annie’s husband was an academic named Arthur Robinson. A promising scholar, he nonetheless failed the most important of intellectual tests: personal integrity. In an obscure archive, Robinson had found a letter that undermined a thesis he had long developed. Rather than owning up to the error and reworking his thesis, he stole the letter to prevent exposure. Unfortunately for him, he ran up against another scholar, one who regarded academic integrity as the measure of all worthwhile. Miss de Vine had no choice but to expose him; the result was disgrace and eventual suicide.
Here is the nexus of the moral problem that Sayers has posed. Arthur Robinson, Miss de Vine, and Annie Wilson have each defined their own jobs according to vastly different sets of values. Robinson stands for what Sayers refers to as the “doctrine of snatch” (180); he will go after what he thinks he wants, paying no heed to consequences or decency. Annie becomes the conventional woman, imprisoning herself and her children in bonds of assumption about women’s proper role. Miss de Vine represents the potential of the fulfilled human being; despite her sex, her age, and her health, she is secure in serving the higher morality of collective academe. Miss de Vine is saddened by the consequences of exposing Robinson but knows she had no alternative. She is an honorable human being. Arthur Robinson, on the other hand, was narrow and dishonest; he is dead by his own hand. Annie Wilson, the woman who defined her job and herself in standing by her man, has become a psychopath.
The strength that allows Miss de Vine to carry on her own life in the face of such a tragic affair derives both from the essential rightness of her position and the community of like-minded people surrounding her. She possesses a will of iron; her one allegiance is to the fact, in any circumstance. After hearing what has become of Robinson and Annie, she feels remorse, not because she had done wrong in exposing him, but because she took no steps to see to his welfare afterward. By Sayers’s yardstick, morality was clearly on her side, as every one of the Shrewsbury dons understood. That unanimity of commitment to learning, to doing one’s job properly, saved them all.
Annie Wilson’s long campaign of cruel psychological warfare was intended to undermine the dons’ belief in themselves and their calling. To Annie, they were all hypocrites, pretending to a man’s place in the world, taking bread from children’s mouths. Though they lived through an agony of mutual suspense that spawned bitter personal antagonism, every don remained true to her faith that her proper place was in academe. This was a bond of strength that Annie could not crack. When Lord Peter came as inquisitor to question them, they “tended to avoid one another’s eyes; yet they gathered together as though for protection against a common menace” (331). When Peter at last exposes Annie as the poison pen, he pays homage to this sense of community:
The one thing which frustrated the whole attack from first to last was the remarkable solidarity and public spirit displayed by your college as a body. I think that was the last obstacle that X expected to encounter in a community of women. Nothing but the very great loyalty of the Senior Common Room to the college and the respect of the students for the Senior Common Room stood between you and a most unpleasant publicity. . . . This particular kind of loyalty forms at once the psychological excuse for the attack and the only possible defense against it. (441)
Nothing, no matter how unpleasant, would sway these women from doing what they understood themselves meant to do.
It is Lord Peter Wimsey who solves this case in less than two weeks, after Harriet Vane had struggled with it for months. Peter is the first to point out that he could not have solved it without Harriet’s groundwork. She had methodically collected all the documentary evidence; she had maintained a careful chronology of the poison pen’s activities. Examining this material, Peter immediately perceives a pattern worth tracing. After conversing with the dons, he quickly runs down the story of Arthur Robinson and his embittered widow. Why did Peter succeed, after Harriet had come so far only to falter in the process of putting two and two together?
The plain fact is that Harriet Vane was experiencing a great deal of trouble determining her proper job. She was a writer first and foremost, a head rather than a heart. Reaching (snatching?) after this self-defined essence of self, she has returned to Oxford, not merely to catch the Shrewsbury poltergeist but to devote herself to endeavors of the intellect. Peter recognizes immediately that she is leaning toward “a spot of celibacy.” But she is uncertain. The reason she wants “to get clear of people and feelings and go back to the intellectual side is that that is the only side of life I haven’t betrayed and made a mess of” (302–3). The problem is, that kind of life may betray her. Does sheltered residence in college lead to abnormality, to the asylum? Before the investigation is done, Harriet is prepared to believe that any of the dons is capable of being the poison pen. Fear clouds her judgment.
Harriet’s writing, normally her refuge from a too-often beastly world, provides no solace this time. Her latest effort, an elaborate puzzle entitled Twixt Wind and Water, has bogged down, the characters too symmetrical. As Peter points out, the best solution is to give the characters greater depth, to turn them into real human beings. It will be her first attempt to capture human realities in a detective story, and she is sure it will “hurt like hell” (311).
She is willing to endure this pain, to write the novel she knows she is capable of writing, because she is beginning to grow again. The two-headed misery inflicted by Philip Boyes and the criminal court has at last begun to fade. Harriet can begin to examine herself without reference to that horrid time, to ask whether she is genuinely all head or if she has a heart as well. Can a person possessed of both satisfy the needs of both without betraying one or the other? Can Harriet Vane define a job for herself that allows her to remain true to her intellectual muse without denying her emotions? Does Harriet dare to fall in love?
With so much on her mind, Harriet may be forgiven for not identifying the college poltergeist. In any case, she is a writer, not a detective. It is not her proper job. Peter Wimsey is the true investigator. For Peter, the case is rather simple and straightforward, though not without its uncomfortable moments. The personal will intrude—and at the most troublesome junctures.
Dorothy L. Sayers had more than the usual misgivings about Gaudy Night. She thought it a “peculiar book,” not really a detective story at all “but a novel with a mild detective interest of an almost entirely psychological kind.”16 She was much relieved when Victor Gollancz telegrammed in September 1935 to assure her that he liked the work. He brought it out immediately and was rewarded with huge sales. Though her books had attracted a steadily growing market for years, Gaudy Night was Sayers’s first bestseller. Very few of the thousands of readers probably cared much about Dorothy L. Sayers’s thoughts on moral integrity and doing one’s job. The attraction was in finding out how Peter and Harriet, “the world’s most awkward pair of lovers,”17 could ever find happiness.
By this time, Sayers had strung the thing out over five years. If nothing else, Peter’s patience and Harriet’s sheer endurance were matchless. After introducing this most difficult love match in Strong Poison (and essentially writing herself into a corner), Sayers approached the problem with great caution. Of her next four novels, only one actually wrestled with Peter and Harriet’s difficulties. Have His Carcase provided a suggestion of hope for the couple’s future, but not much more.
As far as romance is concerned, Have His Carcase begins inauspiciously. Harriet pointedly refrains from informing Peter Wimsey of her difficulties; Peter gets the word from a newspaper reporter. Harriet is not altogether pleased when Peter shows up to assist in the investigation. His persistent marriage proposals are more or less a joke, but they are an uncomfortable annoyance. Harriet does not want romance. She wants to be left alone to enjoy her freedom, to write, to heal.
Yet she is maddeningly inconsistent, a reflection of her own confusion. Announcing that she must buy a new frock to carry on investigations at the Resplendent Hotel, Peter suggests she buy a wine-colored one, or claret, more specifically. She does so. Peter cannot help but think “that when a woman takes a man’s advice about the purchase of clothes, it is a sign that she is not indifferent to his opinion.” They dance together, not without some awkwardness, but ultimately “in silence and harmony” (161, 158).
Peter knows that the ground is treacherous. For a year and a half he had struggled to build up a “delicate structure of confidence” between them (174). The Wilvercombe tragedy dashes it all to pieces. Harriet knows all too well that she is a notorious woman, that the police cannot help but suspect her of murdering Paul Alexis. She can only perceive Peter’s presence, ostensibly an innocent expression of his interest in crime as a hobby, as another example of his damnable knight-errantry—Lord Peter to the rescue. She does not want his help; she does not want to be grateful.
Though it is not much help, Peter does not want her to be grateful either. As long as any debt of gratitude stands between them, true love is impossible:
Do you think it’s pleasant for any man who feels about a woman as I do you, to have to fight his way along under this detestable burden of gratitude? Damn it, do you think I don’t know perfectly well that I’d have a better chance if I was deaf, blind, maimed, starving, drunken or dissolute, so that you could have the fun of being magnanimous? Why do you suppose I treat my own sincerest feelings like something out of a comic opera, if it isn’t to save myself the bitter humiliation of seeing you try not to be utterly nauseated by them? Can’t you understand that this damned dirty trick of fate has robbed me of the common man’s right to be serious about his own passions? Is that a position for any man to be proud of? (175)
The only thing Peter and Harriet can do is try to fight it out as equals. Peter will not give up, and Harriet is just intrigued enough to keep herself from sending him firmly away. If only they had met as most couples do, without all this extra baggage.
Have His Carcase ends on a note of qualified hope, as Harriet agrees to accompany Peter back to town to escape the horrors of Wilvercombe. There is no promise beyond that, no resolution of their difficulties. Sayers essentially avoided the problem in her next two Wimsey novels, making only an oblique and veiled reference to Harriet in Murder Must Advertise. Gaudy Night, therefore, opens essentially at the point where Have His Carcase leaves off. Peter and Harriet remain attracted to one another but have found no way past their mutual difficulties.
As Sayers began work on Gaudy Night, her own experiment in romantic love was on exceedingly shaky ground. Her marriage to Mac Fleming had been rocky almost from the beginning, due in large part to his health problems. Things seemed to grow worse with each passing year. In a letter written to her cousin in August 1934, Sayers gave some hint of the situation:
The fact is that Mac is getting so queer and unreliable that it is not safe to trust him to do anything at all, and if he is told that he has forgotten anything, he goes into such a frightful fit of rage that one gets really alarmed. The doctors say that he is getting definitely queer—but there doesn’t seem to be much that one can do about it. . . . It also makes the financial position very awkward, as he can’t earn any money, and what with his illness and the difficulty of managing his odd fits of temper and so on, it isn’t easy for me to get any work done regularly and properly.18
At best, life on the home front was a domestic truce. Mac Fleming had become a sick and embittered man, unable to provide his wife the support and respect she needed and deserved. The entirety of Gaudy Night was written under this cloud. Desperately unhappy in her own marriage, she chose to explore the ingredients of true romantic happiness in her novel. Peter and Harriet both possessed some understanding of those ingredients after five years. The question was whether she could bring them to a relationship with each other.
As three full years had passed between the awkward dance of Have His Carcase and the beginning of Gaudy Night, Sayers sets the stage by reviewing Peter’s long-suffering progress in wooing Harriet. After the Wilvercombe fiasco, Peter began again the long process of constructing some foundation of mutual confidence and equality. Harriet kept her distance, spending much of her time writing bestsellers and traveling abroad. She tells herself that Wimsey will surely give up if she remains firm, but he is dug in for a long siege. He promises not to make a nuisance of himself but continues to propose at decently spaced intervals:
“ . . . as a birthday treat, and on Guy Fawkes Day and on the Anniversary of the King’s Accession. But consider it, if you will, as a pure formality. You need not pay the smallest attention to it.”
“Peter, it’s foolish to go on like this.”
“And, of course, on the Feast of All Fools.” (63)
The difficulty is that Harriet cannot quite bring herself to put an end to this foolishness. The wounds inflicted by Philip Boyes and the criminal court are slow to heal; she is not capable of honest love. And she is especially incapable of loving Peter Wimsey; the much-cursed debt of gratitude lies between them like a concrete wall. Still, there is just enough there to attract her unwilling attention. Harriet is drawn to Peter, even as she rejects him. She senses that, beneath his blither, he is attempting to atone for something, and she is willing to allow him the opportunity.
So the story of Gaudy Night begins. Essentially, the novel is a Harriet Vane story. Her presence in the story is continuous; action is interpreted almost exclusively through her eyes. Peter makes scattered appearances in the early sections of the story, mostly through letters, but does not appear on the scene until the last third of the book. Sayers affords Harriet ample opportunity to explore the conflicts in her own mind. Just what is her proper job? Is she sick of the Bloomsbury crowd? Does she really desire the cloistered life of the Shrewsbury academic? How does she feel about Peter Wimsey, in her heart of hearts? Although Sayers never allows Harriet to reach any resolution to these issues as the novel progresses, she does provide the reader lavish opportunity to watch Harriet gnaw at them. For Harriet Vane, this is a process of growth or, perhaps more exactly, the shedding of a shell that has become too confining.
Peter Wimsey can only stand by, watch her grow, and hope for the best. He too is in the process of reforming himself, a more deliberate and focused campaign to make up for past errors. It is one thing for him to see that Harriet is the one and only, quite another to make himself worthy of her.
Dorothy L. Sayers had been hard put to bring Peter to this pass. Ever since she had failed to marry him off at the close of Strong Poison, she had struggled to humanize her main character. Sayers summarized the process in the essay “Gaudy Night,” written in 1937:
The thing seemed difficult, but not impossible. When I came to examine the patient, he showed the embryonic buds of a character of sorts. Even at the beginning he had not been the complete silly ass: he had only played the silly ass, which was not the same thing. He had had shell-shock and a vaguely embittered love affair; he had a mother and a friend and a sketchy sort of brother and sister; he had literary and musical tastes, and a few well-defined opinions and feelings; and a little tidying-up of dates and places would put his worldly affairs in order. The prognosis seemed fairly favorable; so I laid him out firmly on the operating-table and chipped away at his internal mechanism through three longish books. At the end of the process he was five years older than he was in Strong Poison, and twelve years older than he was when he started. If, during the period, he had altered and mellowed a little, I felt I could reasonably point out that most human beings are mellowed by age. One of the first results of the operation was an indignant letter from a female reader of Gaudy Night asking, What had happened to Peter? he had lost all his elfin charm. I replied that any man who retained elfin charm at the age of forty-five should be put in a lethal chamber. Indeed, Peter escaped that lethal chamber by inches.19
For the most part, Sayers’s operation on Peter Wimsey’s character resulted in a considerable enhancement of his abilities. By 1935 Peter had acquired both a soul and a host of new physical and mental strengths; he had become virtually impregnable, the ultimate male animal. It is no surprise that Harriet Vane should suffer from feelings of inferiority.
For Harriet, the uncompromising tradition that is Oxford stands as a refuge from the heady demands of Peter Wimsey’s world, “the swift, rattling, chattering, excitable and devilishly upsetting world of strain and uproar” (231). For years, Harriet has understood Peter to be exclusively the man of London, with all the habits and outlook of the numbingly modern town. To choose Peter, she assumes, is to leave behind the beckoning peace of Oxford. However, in Gaudy Night, Peter suddenly chooses to expose his own aversions to the modern. Exhausted and frightened by his diplomatic missions abroad, he must explain to Harriet both the fears and the bitterness wrought by the experience. The politicians are nothing but charlatans, full of “haste and violence and all that ghastly, slippery cleverness” (287). How he wishes he could root himself in Oxford’s traditions, in its sincere and unstinting quest for knowledge and honest truth. He knows it cannot be done.
Putting off a discussion of the poison pen, Peter next exposes his “one really shameful weakness” when Harriet explains that she had recognized Peter’s nephew because of the family resemblance in their hands. This is Peter’s most private conceit; he is inordinately proud of possessing the Wimsey hands. In fact, he is proud of the entire Wimsey family tradition and concerned that his nephew will sell it all to Hollywood. For all his embrace of the modern, and for all his fast cars, west-end fashions, lavish international lifestyle, for all his relentless, forward-looking escape in criminology, Peter is in part a traditionalist, wedded as much to Denver and to Oxford as to London. In fact, as he eventually confesses, his life is “a balance of opposing forces.” Harriet is stunned. “She had fought him for five years, and found nothing but his strength; now, within half an hour, he had exposed all his weaknesses, one after the other” (289–90).
The process continues. Twice in five minutes, while peaceably punting on the river, Peter is forced to warn Harriet away from matters too personal. She recognizes his affinity for John Donne and his proclivity “to get drunk on words.” Next, she surmises correctly that he has “a passion for the unattainable,” namely a desire for beauty measured by balance and order. Peter has to keep changing the subject. Just what does he see in Harriet? Ultimately he admits that he loves her for her “devastating talent for keeping to the point and speaking the truth.” “I have been running away from myself for twenty years, and it doesn’t work,” he admits.
Even in the five years or so that she had known him, Harriet had seen him strip off his protections, layer by layer, till there was uncommonly little left but the naked truth.
That, then, was what he wanted her for. For some reason, obscure to herself and probably also to him, she had the power to force him outside his defenses. Perhaps, seeing her struggling in a trap of circumstance, he had walked out deliberately to her assistance. Or perhaps the sight of her struggles had warned him what might happen to him, if he remained in a trap of his own making. (309, 371–72)
Harriet had too long assumed that he saw nothing of her at all, but rather some phantasm of his own imagination, a creature molded by his own inductive triumph: a prize for his magnanimity. By exposing his weaknesses, Peter has allowed her to glimpse her own strengths.
Peter Wimsey is a dashed clever fellow, but he must take care to avoid his most common failing: trying to be too clever. At all costs, he has to learn to accept Harriet as she is and not attempt to force the situation. Any exchange of inner emotions must come naturally. One of the few openings Harriet provides is to include her own half-completed sonnet among the papers recording the work of the poison pen. (“A schoolgirl trick” [370], she berates herself.) Encountering Harriet’s octave, Peter cannot resist adding the necessary sestet to complete the sonnet.
Imbibing that sense of surety only an Oxford spring can provide, Harriet’s octave, on the surface, is a celebration of a world at peace: “To that still centre where the spinning world / Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.” Accidentally discovering this octave some weeks afterward, Peter discerns in the eight lines Harriet’s true temperament. For all its acclamation of “the heart of rest,” much of the octave registers the turmoil she seeks to leave behind, both in its images and its rhythm. Peter responds with a sestet revealing Harriet’s underlying agitation, turning her “peaceful humming top” into a “whip-top” that accepts the necessity of rest only in the sense that tension is at rest in the core of music:
Lay on thy whips, O love, that we upright,
Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed
May sleep, as tension at the verberant core
Of music sleeps . . . (395)
“A very conceited, metaphysical conclusion,” Peter writes for Harriet to read. Just as Harriet has demonstrated an uncanny ability to step into Peter’s mind, Peter has suggested that he too can perceive her true inward thoughts, at times better than she can herself. This communication through the sonnet inspires Harriet to reflect on Peter’s steadfast decency in all his dealings with her; though he possesses the ability, he has avoided trespassing on her personal ground. The truth is that Peter has sacrificed a good deal of himself to build an honest foundation between them. Realizing this, Harriet can only admit that her own conduct over the years has been less than lovely. Sayers closes this reverie with the observation that it “goes to prove that even minor poetry may have its practical uses” (370–73).
There remained two scores to settle, two stumbling blocks that Peter must remove—by not acting. For Harriet, the chief impediment to falling in love with Peter is that infernal debt of gratitude; she owes him her life. Peter must find some way to restore that life to her. Peter’s own burden is a deeply felt regret, guilt for his actions in the first days after meeting Harriet. He must also find some way to atone for that.
Strangely, the poltergeist provides him the necessary opportunity. For much of the case, Peter is nowhere in evidence. Hearing that Harriet has embarked on a dangerous investigation, he neither flies to her side nor offers protection or even counsel. He merely wishes her well, observing that “If you have put anything in hand, disagreeableness and danger will not turn you back, and God forbid they should” (222). Peter has learned that Harriet must run her life as she sees fit, no matter the circumstances.20
Even when she does send for him, bowing to his superior investigative experience, he is careful both to acknowledge her skill and to give her room to pursue the case in her own fashion. Fully comprehending that the poltergeist is preparing to do violence, he will not offer his protection, hold her hand, or take her away. Instead, he teaches her self defense and buys her a collar to protect her “arum lily” neck from throttling fingers. In the meanwhile, he challenges her to write the true detective novel that she is capable of creating. Harriet finds him “about as protective as a can-opener” (386, 311).
That is the point. He cannot win her love by being protective. To give Harriet her life back, he must stand by and watch as she runs the risks she chooses. When she does end up nearly murdered, he can only thank God it was no worse. Stitched and bandaged, she is her own woman at last, free to marry Peter on equal terms or banish him forever. He has signified for good and all that he will not interfere with her private ground.
Now there remained the matter of apology. Five years before, Peter had begun this strange, intricate dance of the emotions on the wrong foot. Aristocratically accustomed to getting what he wanted, he had pursued Harriet from the day he first set eyes on her—in court, struggling for her life. His own selfishness had inspired him to unforgivable sin; he wished to possess her when she did not possess herself. Now he is deeply ashamed of that behavior: “It has taken me a long time to learn my lesson, Harriet. I have had to pull down, brick by brick, the barriers I had built up by my own selfishness and folly. If, in all these years, I have managed to get back to the point at which I ought to have started, will you tell me so and give me leave to begin again?” (465)
In turn, Harriet offers Peter what she has been most loath to give him: her gratitude, both for saving her life and for giving it back to her. All the scores are settled at last.
Peter then asks, not for her hand in marriage, but for a date. The next evening, after briefly consigning their souls to the magic of Bach, the two stroll by the river. For the first time since coming to Oxford, for the first time seriously in several years, Peter Wimsey asks Harriet Vane to marry him. True to the dream that is Oxford, Harriet signifies in the traditions of assenting, approving academe. Mystery-reading England breathed a collective sigh of relief.
By the time Gaudy Night appeared, Dorothy L. Sayers had enmeshed herself in a comfortable and comforting web of friends, fans, and supporters, all of whom shared an enthusiasm for the Wimsey saga. Among the varied participants, the most steady and dependable were longtime friend Muriel St. Clare Byrne, now a successful playwright, Byrne’s housemate, Marjorie Barber, and a new acquaintance, novelist Helen Simpson. Sayers also received thoughtful encouragement from her Aunt Maud Leigh, who still shared the home in Witham, serving as a buffer between Sayers and Fleming. Aunt Maud had taken special interest in the predicament of Harriet Vane, offering Sayers invaluable perspective and advice.
In informal meetings and correspondence, Dorothy L. Sayers shared her thoughts on future direction for the series, cheerfully debated bones of contention and character, and encouraged collateral creativity. This slowly evolving “Wimsey industry” compensated for some of the comraderie and warmth denied Sayers by her unfortunate marriage. If her husband could little appreciate the magnitude of her accomplishments, her friends made up for him to some degree.21
Perhaps the most important fruit of this informal discussion group was a fleshing out of Peter’s history. As part of her effort to “chip away” at his character, Sayers participated in several correspondences speculating on Peter Wimsey’s past, including his early family life, his education, his first love affairs, and his service in the war. Apart from the material woven into the later Wimsey novels, Sayers saw fit to summarize some of this material in a “biographical note” appended to new editions of the first four Wimsey novels, re-issued by Gollancz in 1935.22
Ostensibly written by Peter’s lecherous old Uncle Paul Austin Delagardie (his mother’s brother), the “note” explains many of the early experiences that shaped Peter’s character and career. The second son of the fifteenth Duke of Denver, Peter was wholly unlike his father, “all nerves and nose,” but at least possessed of a brain. His schoolmates at Eton called him “Flimsy” until he emerged as a natural cricketer and became “the fashion.” Delagardie assumes credit for teaching Peter a proper taste in wine, food, and clothing; he saw also to his sexual education in Paris. Peter then went up to Oxford “with a scholarship to read History at Balliol,” and there became “rather intolerable,” affecting a monocle and the air of an aesthete. Romance intervened, for good and bad. Peter fell heavily for Barbara, “a child of seventeen,” and was saved from marriage only by her parents’ decision that she was too young. He was still waiting when the Great War came. Acquitting himself well as an officer, Peter returned on leave to discover Barbara married to someone else. He returned to the front with the firm intention of getting killed but was instead promoted and decorated for intelligence work. Blown up and buried near Caudry in 1918, he came home with a nervous breakdown. The next two years were touch and go, but with the help of Bunter, Peter pulled himself together. Delagardie recalled the Peter of the immediate postwar period: “I don’t mind saying that I was prepared for almost anything. He had lost all his beautiful frankness, he shut everybody out of his confidence, including his mother and me, adopted an impenetrable frivolity of manner and a dilettante pose, and became, in fact, the complete comedian.” Then came the theft of the Attenbury emeralds. Joining forces with Charles Parker, Peter applied the skills honed in intelligence to track the thief. A hobby was born—a hobby that became the career Sayers tracked through ten novels and sixteen short stories through 1935.23
The “Wimsey industry” acquired a new direction in February 1935, when an authority on heraldry by the name of Wilfrid Scott-Giles wrote to Sayers, inquiring after the Wimsey coat of arms described in her later novels. Utterly mock serious, Scott-Giles speculated that the Wimsey heraldry bore the marks of a great antiquity calling for investigation. Sayers replied in kind, and the two began to spin a history of the Wimsey family stretching back into medieval times. Muriel St. Clare Byrne and Helen Simpson joined in, and a lively game ensued. The group produced a series of pamphlets (“Papers Relating to the Family of Wimsey”) for private distribution, and they even delivered lectures on the subject. Some of this material made its way into the novel Busman’s Honeymoon, while Scott-Giles edited his correspondence with Sayers for eventual publication as The Wimsey Family.24 “Our beautiful game,” as Sayers referred to this exercise, was a good deal of fun, but it was a private entertainment, adding little substance to Peter Wimsey, the character solving the popular mysteries.25
A far more salient product of the Wimsey industry was a story that became both Sayers’s first play and the last completed novel to feature Lord Peter. Even as Sayers struggled to complete Gaudy Night, she gave considerable attention to the development of its sequel, Busman’s Honeymoon—plotting and creating dialogue for Peter and Harriet’s honeymoon in the country even as she labored to bring them into one another’s arms at Oxford. She kept the materials pertinent to each project in separate rooms at her house in Witham.
The seed that became Busman’s Honeymoon germinated at a luncheon party in London early in 1935. To amuse Muriel St. Clare Byrne and Marjorie Barber, Sayers recounted an astonishing encounter with a chimney sweep. The sweep, a chubby little man, wore any number of pullovers which he pulled off one by one as the work got hotter. Sayers capped the anecdote by wishing she could put the fellow in a play. “Why don’t you?” was St. Clare Byrne’s reply. A collaboration was born.26
Each of the co-authors brought special skills to the task. Agreeing to build the play around a murder occurring on Peter and Harriet’s honeymoon placed Sayers firmly on home ground. Thoroughly familiar both with the traits of the main characters and the fundamentals of good mystery writing, Sayers constructed the essence of the play. Muriel St. Clare Byrne, the experienced playwright, shaped the action to the needs of the stage, honing the dialogue, heightening the drama at the close of each act, and sharpening the visual impact of the murder method. It was a most fruitful cooperation, each allowing full expression of the other’s complementary skills.
Sayers felt her way slowly, taking three months to rough out the play’s first act. Plotting for the stage was very different from writing a mystery for the printed page; in some ways posing the puzzle proved easier, in others far more difficult. On the stage, the material remains of some murder device are simply a part of the scenery, there for the audience to see should they choose to exercise their detective ability. In the novel, such a device must be described, drawing the reader’s attention to its existence. On the other hand, the scope of the setting in the novel is as wide as the author’s imagination and ability. Action in virtually all of Sayers’s books takes place in an array of geographic locations, each enhancing the impact of the mystery and its resolution in some way. In a play, the action must be confined to a very limited number of settings, readily producible on a very material stage. The action is far more geographically focused.
Originating as a play, Busman’s Honeymoon was shaped by the conventions of the stage. The number of potential suspects was severely limited (four, really), and much of the investigation had to take place in the form of dialogue, there being little latitude for abstruse scientific analyses, elaborate shadowing of suspects, extended research into legal documents, or other such trappings of the detective novel. Moreover, Sayers and St. Clare Byrne chose to describe their play as “A Detective Comedy in Three Acts.” Later, Sayers would subtitle the novel “A Love Story with Detective Interruptions.” The emphasis was to be on the lighthearted happiness of the newly married couple, counterpointed by the clumsy investigation necessitated by the discovery of a murdered corpse in their basement. The origin of the entire business, after all, was the comic antics of a chimney sweep who wore too much clothing.27
The authors worked on Busman’s Honeymoon throughout the summer of 1935, completing the play in September, just as Gollancz published Gaudy Night. Sayers and St. Clare Byrne immediately began the arduous business of securing a producer. After an initial failure, they found success with Anmer Hall, who located the necessary money. Such things take time; rehearsals did not begin until November 1936, and the first London performance came just before Christmas. The play enjoyed a nine months’ run in London.
This rather held matters up, as far as continuation of the Wimsey novels was concerned. After completing the play, Sayers had proceeded directly to work on the novel Busman’s Honeymoon, which was to embody the play in narrative form while incorporating additional materials. Not wishing to spoil the impact of the play by giving away the solution, Sayers stipulated that the play appear on stage in advance of the novel’s release. The theater being what it was, such a course dictated a good deal of waiting. Sayers completed the book in October 1936, but Gollancz did not publish it until the following February.28
In some ways, Busman’s Honeymoon is the oddest of all the Wimsey novels, a beast both satisfying and unfulfilling, neither fish nor fowl. The story’s genesis as a play trapped Sayers; it is of necessity a very talky novel, an endless succession of conversations punctuated very seldom by either thought or action. Until the conclusion, the most active moment in the story comes when Peter and Harriet take a ride in the car. It is also the only Wimsey novel to fully hinge on its predecessor—the book is a sequel to Gaudy Night. The satisfaction the novel provides derives from seeing Peter and Harriet safely married at last.29 Certainly it is a Wimsey novel most oriented to the private side of life. Beyond a bare mention early in the book of King George V’s Silver Jubilee, there is no reference to current events. Peter has given himself over almost completely to the traditional half of his existence, eschewing the modern as he commences life as a married man. Harriet now understands that the air of security she had perceived in Peter almost from the beginning emanates from allegiance to his traditional British heritage. For all his adaptation to the modern world, Peter “belonged to an ordered society.” To her delight, she discovers that she has “married England.” In fact, of the two, Harriet now comes closer to embodying a sense of the modern. A woman without family and possessing a means of income entirely her own, it is her sort who “go all sanitary and civilised, and get married in hotels and do their births and deaths in nursing-homes where they give offence to nobody.”30
The novel begins with a series of vignettes—material purportedly written by persons attending the Wimsey-Vane wedding, including Bunter, Peter’s mother and sister-in-law, and the dean of Shrewsbury College. Obviously inspired by the “Wimsey industry,” these letters and diary entries provide several perspectives on the marriage. As might be expected, the ceremony has its share of maladroit moments, both in planning and performance. Harriet has fallen head-over-heels in love with Peter, worrying only about negative publicity from her notorious past and her ability to perform the duties incumbent on Lady Peter Wimsey without embarrassing all concerned. Peter is naturally solicitous that the thing be done in loving good taste beyond the glare of reporters’ cameras and that Harriet’s entrance into noble society be as smooth as possible. The witnesses report a simple, elegant, but private wedding, followed by a successful escape from the newshounds for the honeymoon. Each account has its share of pithy comments, such as this observation, contained in a letter from the dean to Miss de Vine: “I know heaps of couples who are both as stupid as owls and not happy at all—so it doesn’t really follow, one way or the other, does it?” (12)
Obviously much smarter than owls, Peter and Harriet have determined on a very private honeymoon in Harriet’s childhood hometown of Great Pagford, Hertsfordshire. Both the play and the narrative portion of the novel essentially begin with their arrival at Talboys, a great old Tudor house newly purchased in secret by the Wimseys. Unfortunately, Noakes, the former owner, is not there to meet them, nor is the house prepared for their appearance. All the doors are locked; no key is in evidence. Noakes is in fact dead, lying in the basement with a fractured skull. Thankfully, no one discovers the grisly fact until the following day.
The unscheduled appearance of a murder victim on a honeymoon gives the story two horses to ride, though neither is a terrifically strong one. There is some tension in the romance, as Peter and Harriet must work out their roles as husband and wife and learn how to maintain complementary but separate identities. This is nothing in comparison to the kinds of romantic tensions flowing like kerosene on fire through Gaudy Night. There is a murder mystery, of the locked-room variety, but the victim is a close old man no one much liked. There can be just four suspects; no one of them encourages much sympathy either. The limits of the stage have left Sayers with rather a tepid puzzle in comparison with her ten preceding novels.
Sayers seems more interested in exploring the problems of love in marriage than in posing a detective puzzle. Having at long last brought Peter and Harriet to the altar, she is now free to explore her ideal state of wedded bliss—a stark contrast to the reality of her own marriage to Mac Fleming. The reader is made to understand that this couple will succeed, not only because they love each other deeply, but because they respect one another equally as human beings. They have already overcome their most dangerous obstacle: the problem of gratitude. Harriet freely allows Peter to purchase their new home because she knows “he liked giving people things” (18); she in turn expends the proceeds from three short stories to purchase for him a letter of John Donne concerning “Divine and human love.” Peter could easily have purchased the letter himself—he had wanted to do so, as a gift for Harriet. The value is not in the letter but in the fact that Harriet has bestowed it. They are free of the mutual burden of necessary gratitude; each can now give to the other freely.31
As might be expected, there are awkward moments as they inadvertently test one another. When Harriet discovers information that might incriminate Aggie Twitterton, Noakes’s niece (and a hapless human being if ever there was one), Peter automatically assumes that they will share this with the police. Harriet is appalled; the information has come to her in confidence. But Peter’s hands are the hangman’s hands: catching murderers is his job. Either Harriet must allow him to pursue that job in his usual thorough way, or he must quit. She has the power to make him quit; most women would use it immediately. Harriet will not:
“If we disagree, we’ll fight it out like gentlemen. We won’t stand for matrimonial blackmail. . . . You must do what you think is right. Promise me that. What I think doesn’t matter. I swear it shall never make any difference.”
He took her hand and kissed it gravely.
“Thank you, Harriet. That is love with honour.” (292)
The difficulty for Peter will be to allow someone to share his most private, self-protected moments. In the face of Barbara and the war, Peter had spent long years constructing mask after mask to protect his emotional fragility; he has been the comedian, the pedant, the clotheshorse, the man about town, the hardworking private detective, and even the harlequin. Harriet’s relentless demand for honesty has mostly torn those masks away, but there are still places he keeps hidden, even from her. When Peter comes to understand how the murder was done, he turns more to Bunter than to Harriet. The old habits die hard.
Yet, for the far larger part, this is a story of joy in marriage. Harriet is perfectly thrilled, in every sense, now that all the difficulties and discomfort are behind her. Peter suspects that “If I’d had nothing but a haystack to offer you, you’d have married me years ago.” Harriet agrees:
“I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“Damnation! think what I’ve missed.”
“Me too. At this moment I could have been tramping at your heels with five babies and a black eye, and saying to a sympathetic bobby, ‘You leave ’im be—’e’s my man, ain’t ’e?—E’ve a right to knock me abaht.’”
“You seem,” said her husband, reprovingly, “to regret the black eye more than the five babies.”
“Naturally. You’ll never give me the black eye.” (37)
Peter too gives himself over to a euphoria verging on giddiness. Holding Harriet in his arms and hearing her sigh “seemed to lift the sealing stone and release some well-spring of laughter deep down within him. It came bubbling and leaping up in the most tremendous hurry to reach the sunlight, so that all his blood danced with it and his lungs were stifled with the rush and surge of this extraordinary fountain of delight. He felt himself at once ridiculous and omnipotent. He was exultant. He wanted to shout” (250). They can only agree that this was “almost like being in love,” a faintly ludicrous thought. Peter concludes, mischievously, that “One can’t be married and in love. Not with the same person, I mean. It isn’t done” (272–73). The alert reader can almost hear the lamenting sigh of Dorothy L. Sayers.
Sayers once again demonstrated her choice to be cognizant of the modern without being of the modern in her treatment of sex, that most delicate and delectable of subject matters. True to form, she frankly examined “the interesting revelations of the marriage-bed” (there was little left to reveal for any reader familiar with the works of D. H. Lawrence or Henry Miller), without ever mentioning sexuality in any overt fashion. Only the discerning and lascivious old Paul Delagardie can discern the reason for the “unusual constraint between P. and H.” at a dinner party not long before the wedding. Harriet possesses a tiger, not a shabby tiger as Peter feared, but “an entirely new tiger,” ready and waiting to pounce. But when, after several misadventures, Harriet and Peter do land in the marriage bed, it is “the end of the journey and the beginning of all delight.” This bedroom stuff is supposed to be fun, Sayers reminds the reader. Beyond the fact that Peter and Harriet found it so, there was nothing worthy of report (62, 31).
There is a mystery to be solved in the midst of all this, of course, but it is an infernal nuisance. The news of the body brings an avalanche of reporters to Talboys, along with the official police who carry on their initial inquiries in the Wimsey living room. Meanwhile, creditors have come to demand the furniture—old Noakes was in debt up to his ears. The murder scene is slowly dismantled, first by the happy couple (assisted by Bunter) and subsequently by the movers. As any faithful reader of the Sayers mystery series knows, what is being destroyed is evidence of how the murder was done, which is the key to understanding the entire business.
Peter and Harriet talk about the “how” at some length. Comparing memories of the condition of the house upon their arrival, they dwell on possible means of entry, possible times when the murder could have occurred, and possible weapons. Peter is really glad to discuss the case with someone knowing enough to focus on method. All too often, he complains, the official police concentrate largely on motive, a weak indicator at best. Several people may possess a reason for wanting to do someone in (love or money, generally speaking), but that proves nothing. Juries want to look at motive as well, for the same wrong reasons. But if you can trace the method the killer employed, that will point unfailingly to the perpetrator—“When you’ve got How, you’ve got Who.”
Harriet replies in kind: “I seem to have married my only intelligent reader. That’s the way you construct it from the other end, of course. Artistically, it’s absolutely correct” (219).
Once again, Dorothy L. Sayers is speaking through Harriet and Peter, coaching her audience on the proper approach to resolving her locked-room mystery. This time the audience includes, not merely armchair readers, but people seated in a theater, eyes on a stage. Somewhere before their eyes there exists the remains of a murder device capable of fracturing a tall man’s skull. And that potted cactus hanging by the fireplace near the wireless looks so innocent.
Sayers strews a fair number of red herrings across the investigators’ path, but in the end all that matters is the lead-weighted cactus and the memory of a few yards of fishing line. The device is easy enough to reconstruct; once in place it points directly to the murderer: the man who unnecessarily watered the cactus twice in a week’s time.
Frank Crutchley is by far the most repulsive of Sayers’s murderers, a “pushing” young no-account from London who sticks at nothing. He is a hard worker, serving as a garage mechanic and working part-time as Noakes’s gardener. But he works only for the sake of the money and his own ambitions, not for the pride of the job. He is willing to demonstrate the proper respect for Lord and Lady Peter only as long as he thinks there is something to be got out of them—within, he hates the thought of “trucking to a blasted title” (268). He has paid court to poor old Aggie Twitterton solely to get her money (and perhaps her uncle’s) for his own garage. In the meantime he has been seeing another woman on the sly, saucy Polly Mason, too modern for Pagford with her silk stockings and motion-picture ways. She is a bit too modern for her own good, ending up carrying the child of a condemned murderer. Crutchley does not care.
Crutchley, in fact, does not care about anything. When Peter reconstructs his death machine and springs the trap, Crutchley knows the game is up. He has but one regret: that he got caught. He would like to escape the strong arms of the police, kill Peter for catching him: “Let me go, blast you! Let me get at him! So you set a trap for me, did you? Well, I killed him. The old brute cheated me. So did you, Aggie Twitterton, blast you! I been done out o’ my rights. I killed him, I tell you, and all for nothing” (341).
The play ends at this point, with much the same speech from the murderer. As Crutchley is dragged off stage, Peter seeks Harriet’s hand. “This part of the business always gets me down,”32 he warns. They exchange promises, embracing as the curtain falls. Sayers has paid the necessary debt to her craft, acknowledging that, however repulsive the crime, sending a man to the gallows is a sobering thing.
The book winds through an additional three chapters, providing the reader a full look at Peter’s reaction to investigative triumph. Sayers had generally suggested that Peter took it hard when a case came to an end. In Whose Body? he suffered a relapse of shell shock after discovering Levy’s murderer. Unnatural Death left him ready to believe the end of the world had come; exposing The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club as murder led to depression and quarrels with Charles Parker. So it went. In the early chapters of Gaudy Night, Sayers hinted that such adverse reactions were typical:
There had been an evening when he had turned up to keep a previously-made dinner appointment, but had obviously been unfit either to eat or talk. Eventually he had confessed to a splitting headache and a temperature and suffered himself to be personally conducted home. [Harriet] had been sufficiently alarmed not to leave him till he was safely in his own flat and in the capable hands of Bunter. The latter had been reassuring: the trouble was nothing but reaction—of frequent occurrence at the end of a trying case, but soon over. (64)
In this way, Sayers addressed what was to her a most crucial element in the detective story as human drama: the detective must acknowledge the gravity of his deeds and in some way suffer in consequence.
The last three chapters of Busman’s Honeymoon—the “Epithalamion”—explore this theme in crucial detail. In the play, it is enough for Harriet to “feel as if the evil spirit has been cast out of this house, and left it clean for you and me.”33 Despite its sudden shock of a climax, the play was intended to be a light comedy. The book, being the eleventh Wimsey novel, demanded much more. Looking at the situation realistically, the Wimseys have spent the first three days of their honeymoon at a crime scene, with policemen, reporters, and total strangers traipsing through at all hours. Even after they expose the murderer, they are left with the haunting echo of his curses. Moreover, they are standing holding hands in a house with no furniture. This is all going to be a little bit depressing, even if all else is equal.
Sayers was now faced with the consequences of entangling murder and romance. Her newly wedded couple must get marriage off on the right foot, but Peter must acknowledge his responsibility for uncovering Frank Crutchley’s crime. Love and depression can be a volatile mix; the shadows hang heavy over these last three chapters.
Peter does his best to disguise and dispel the usual reaction. He assumes direct responsibility for Crutchley’s predicament and arranges the best legal counsel possible for his defense. For the briefest of moments, the honeymooning Wimseys re-enter the modern world, driving up to London, turning into a movie house to view a “Mickey Mouse and an educational film about the iron and steel industry,”34 before speaking to Sir Impey Biggs at midnight. That done, Peter and Harriet return to the England of long-standing tradition, driving to Denver, where she is truly initiated into the ancient Wimsey family—ghosts and all. Sayers draws again on the “Wimsey industry” in creating these scenes, filling in considerable detail on the Wimsey family history as well as Peter’s personal past. The story of how Bunter came to serve him is for the first time told in full.
Then the return to refurbished Talboys and the trial, the inevitable condemnation. Peter is an emotional wreck. He would like to have Crutchley’s forgiveness; he does all he can to ease the prisoner’s last hours, even arranging care for Polly Mason and her baby, all to no avail. A bitter and unrepentant Crutchley remains sullen to the end; his only wish is to get the drop over with and see them all in hell.
Peter’s anguish is the great final test of his marriage to Harriet. This is a struggle he wants desperately to carry on alone, the last defended place in his own psyche, the part of himself he can share with no one. Harriet can only wait it out. To demand that Peter share this last bit of himself is unthinkable; she can only let him know in subtle but unmistakable ways that she is there if he wants her. He comes at last at four in the morning, shivering, teeth chattering—the exact symptoms exhibited in Whose Body? more than thirteen years before. “It’s my rotten nerves,” he confesses. “I can’t help it. I suppose I’ve never really been right since the War. I hate behaving like this. I tried to stick it out by myself” (378).
This time he turns to Harriet to help him through. She, of course, provides all the rational reasons why he cannot blame himself for the nearing execution, but those reasons do not matter, really, to either of them. Peter must feel what he does; he has a conscience. And now he has a spouse as well; he must share all, even his worst moments. Finally he begins to weep against Harriet’s breast. The wounded detective and the romantic lover at last meld into a single person.
Strange to say, Dorothy L. Sayers did not intend to end the Wimsey series with this moment. That is to say, she had plans for further novels, and she did write additional short stories featuring Peter Wimsey. But the “Epithalamion” reads very much like a conclusion, a summing up of a career. Peter is brought full circle, his family explained, the fierce loyalty between Wimsey and Bunter illuminated, and the last stumbling blocks to true love removed. Peter is still the shell-shocked veteran of Whose Body?: he is also the detective and the lover triumphant. The triumph is strange and painfully human, characterized not by a crow from the rooftops but by an embarrassed fit of bitter tears. There was very little room left for Peter to grow. As matters turned out, Busman’s Honeymoon proved to be the last Peter Wimsey novel.