Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  But Sayers’s main enthusiasm was for stories where chilling misdeeds were followed not by rescues or exorcisms but by logical, immediate investigation. Before she left for France, Sayers had attempted to enrol some university friends into a detectivewriting syndicate, and was disappointed that Eric Whelpton – whom she had earmarked as a collaborator – scorned her passion for the genre, considering it beneath their intellectual interests. He later remembered that on her bedside table at Verneuil were ‘the works of Eugène Sue, the memoirs of various French police officers, and masses of what we used to call penny dreadfuls’; doubtless she also kept close volumes by Edgar Allan Poe, whom she credited with writing the first modern detective story; books by her heroes Wilkie Collins and Sheridan Le Fanu; and the works of G. K. Chesterton, which she later told his wife were ‘more a part of my mental make-up than those of any writer you could name’. At Somerville, she and Muriel Jaeger had pored over the saga of Sexton Blake, a Baker Street-dwelling detective created by Harry Blyth in 1893 (‘the Holmes tradition … crossed with the Buffalo Bill adventure type’). After Blyth’s death, others took over his characters (Blake’s assistant Tinker, bloodhound Pedro and rotund housekeeper Mrs Bardell), and Sexton Blake’s exploits continued to appear in a dedicated magazine, in silent films, on the radio and stage, and even on a set of playing cards, as his character evolved from Victorian gentleman to full-blown action hero.

  Sayers adored Blake, and considered the series ‘the nearest modern approach to a national folk-lore’. Unlike Whelpton, she had no pretensions to exclusively highbrow tastes, and saw no reason to differentiate her reading according to a preconceived hierarchy of quality; she devoured both medieval poetry and lurid crime paperbacks with the same imaginative verve and critical rigour. A decade later, Sayers could report that detective fiction ‘is no longer read [only] in back kitchens’ but rather ‘in Downing Street, and in Bloomsbury studios, in bishops’ palaces, and in the libraries of eminent scientists’: for now, however, she was delighted to challenge anyone who sneered at her reading matter, pulling them up robustly for their snobbery. In an unpublished essay, written while she was living in Mecklenburgh Square, Sayers addresses a ‘Miss Dryasdust, MA’ – perhaps a version of Whelpton – who ‘disapproves of my fondness for detective stories of the more popular kind’. While her interlocutor begrudgingly accepts Sherlock Holmes ‘as we put up with the Albert Memorial’, she dismisses works by less famous practitioners as ‘vulgar’ and written ‘by office-boys for office-boys’. This ‘undemocratic contempt’, writes Sayers with customary animation, masks the fact that this literature holds in the contemporary imagination the position once occupied by the myths and legends of Arthur and Robin Hood, or the heroic epics of Scandinavia and ancient Greece: the detective, she argued, ‘is really the last of the great heroes who have stood up for civilisation against disorder and invasion. Roland fought the Saracens; Beowulf fought the dragon; Sexton Blake fights crime.’ In March 1920, she had asked Muriel to dispatch to Verneuil ‘all the Sexton Blakes you can lay hands on … in discreet packages of about two at a time so that they go as letters and don’t get stopped in the Customs’. Her letters to Muriel from France abound with lively debate on the comparative merits of different Blake writers, and elaborate theories tracing Blake’s origins to solar mythology, the mystery cults of Osiris, and biblical legend of sacrifice and resurrection (‘Sexton Blake = Christus’).

  At Verneuil, recovering from an attack of mumps, Sayers had begun her own attempt at a Sexton Blake story. She never completed ‘The Adventure of the Piccadilly Flat’, which survives only as five chapters and a synopsis. But this effort marks something more than a crucial moment in her development from reader of detective stories to writer of them. The work is particularly notable for the fact that the body (of a French politician) is found, mysteriously, in the bachelor flat of one Lord Peter Wimsey, a character whose charismatic potential was so strong that she would spend the next year writing him into his own novel. For the unfinished story, Sayers had planned a rollicking fantasia involving mutually distrusting British and French agents, an aeroplane pursuit and a dramatic unmasking at Westminster Cathedral, as Blake and Wimsey work together to reclaim a stolen code book. The criminal’s disguise is uncovered, in an ingenious twist, when the men notice a figure in women’s clothes speaking angrily to French officials at a train station, forgetfully referring to ‘her’ self using a masculine adjective. Already Sayers’s story departed from the traditional Blake formula, which prioritised action over deduction, speed over sagacity, and hair-raising journeys to outlandish locations over subtle analysis of the evidence: this is an outline for a sophisticated plot bolstered by characteristically highbrow detail.

  Over the next months, Sayers experimented with her character, testing him out in dashed-off fragments of stories and sketches for plays. Lord Peter Wimsey soon acquired a monocle and a rarebook collection, and a cheerful ability to unravel apparently preposterous solutions without doffing his slippers. Later in life, though he never finished any of Sayers’s books, Eric Whelpton would encourage the rumour that the affable aristocrat was based on him, with characteristics borrowed from other members of L’École des Roches staff. During Sayers’s tenure at the school, Whelpton was asked to appoint a new teacher, and rejected the application of ‘a shy Irishman named James Joyce’ in favour of an unqualified Old Etonian named Charles Crichton, ‘a very handsome man of forty-five who quite frankly said that women were his hobby’. Sayers had little patience for tales of Crichton’s Casanova exploits, and scorned Whelpton’s willingness to listen to him boast about his club, his gentleman servant, his country house and his flat in Mayfair’s Jermyn Street – yet she retained some of these details when constructing Lord Peter Wimsey’s London life. But Lord Peter is not primarily a biographical creation. Rather, his character – his ready wit, acute emotional intelligence and elegant accoutrements – is testament to Sayers’s imagination and immersion in the canon of detective fiction.

  In January 1921, in the first-floor room at Mecklenburgh Square, gazing out of her window on to the tennis players in the square’s garden below, Sayers began to draft a novel in earnest. Lord Peter Wimsey, on his way out to a rare-book auction, receives a call from his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, informing him of ‘such a quaint thing’: the architect repairing the church roof has arrived home to find an unrecognised body in his bathtub, naked, closely shaven and with a pair of pince-nez perched mockingly on his nose. Sensing an invaluable opportunity to indulge ‘his hobby of criminal investigation’, Lord Peter delightedly hotfoots to Battersea. It’s soon discovered that a financier named Sir Reuben Levy has disappeared, after dining with friends at the Ritz, on the very day he had arranged to complete a deal worth millions – but Wimsey realises that the connections between Levy and the body in the bathtub are not what they might logically seem.

  The novel – which she called Whose Body? – brims with exuberance: although the murder is one of Sayers’s most grisly, Wimsey’s enthusiasm for his task is irresistible, his attitude to murder playful and intuitive. While his overly pedantic rival Inspector Sugg officiously arrests all the wrong people, Wimsey inveigles the owner of the flat into showing him the corpse, and manages to make a full inspection – ‘with the air of the late Joseph Chamberlain approving a rare orchid’ – while distracting his host with punning patter about soot and servants. He’s smart enough to notice everything Sugg doesn’t – that the corpse smells of Parma violet, its hair is recently cut and its fingernails neatly trimmed, but that the hands are calloused, teeth decayed, toenails filthy and the torso is pocked with flea bites. (In the original manuscript, he also noticed that the body was uncircumcised and therefore could not be the Jewish businessman – but Sayers’s publisher insisted this reference be removed.) ‘Uncommon good incident for a detective story’ is Wimsey’s objective analysis. ‘We’re up against a criminal – the criminal – the real artist and blighter with imagination – real, arti
stic, finished stuff.’

  Advertising material for Whose Body?

  When Sayers reread Whose Body? in 1937, she considered it ‘conventional to the last degree, and no more like a novel than I to Hercules. This is not really surprising, because one cannot write a novel unless one has something to say about life, and I had nothing to say about it, because I knew nothing.’ But as well as presenting a remarkably assured hero, Whose Body? already displays Sayers’s determination to explore and expand the possibilities of the genre she knew and loved. Golden Age detective fiction, which promised order restored satisfactorily from chaos, justice delivered by a detective of apparent omniscience and transgression punished, is often seen as a symptom of the post-war British yearning for escapism, exemplified by the popularity in the 1920s of football pools, crossword puzzles and light entertainment (such as the musical comedy Chu Chin Chow, which premiered in London in August 1916 and ran for five years straight). ‘It may be,’ Sayers later wrote, perhaps thinking of her own motivations for immersing herself in both the reading and the writing of detective stories, ‘that in them [one] finds a sort of catharsis or purging of [one’s] fears and self-questionings.’

  But Sayers’s work is exceptional because, for her, such questions were never so easily resolved. Even in this first outing, Lord Peter displays a complexity of character and a relationship with the consequences of his work that was unusual in fictional detectives. ‘I took it up when the bottom of things was rather knocked out for me, because it was so damned exciting,’ says Wimsey (a war veteran) of his detection habit, during a frank conversation with his policeman friend Charles Parker. ‘If it was all on paper I’d enjoy every bit of it. I love the beginning of a job – when one doesn’t know any of the people and it’s just exciting and amusing. But if it comes to really running down a live person and getting him hanged … there don’t seem as if there was any excuse for me buttin’ in.’ When Wimsey realises who the murderer must be – a person so unexpected that at first he feels ‘as if I’d libelled the Archbishop of Canterbury’ – he finds himself shaking, plunged into memories of the war: his teeth chatter, he hears the crackle of gunfire and is convinced he’s in the trenches under attack. In her very first novel, Dorothy L. Sayers laid the groundwork for a new sort of moral detective; in Mecklenburgh Square, she fed all her current influences into the creation not only of a fresh plot but also of a long-lasting character whose depths and delights would provide her with enough material for several further novels.

  *

  ‘You don’t know what it means to be stuck for money,’ the culprit in Murder Must Advertise (1933) tells Wimsey. But his creator certainly did. When Sayers looked back on her year in Mecklenburgh Square, her retrospective pleasure at the eventual success of Whose Body? was tinged with the memory of her fluctuating moods as she wondered whether writing would ever be a profitable path. Her letters to her parents – always remarkably open about her everyday routines and her feelings about work, but less so about her darker emotional states – give some indication of her frustrations, though she shielded them from the full extent of her worry. ‘Things have been very up-and-down and tiresome and pleasant, and I’ve never known from one minute to another whether I was in high spirits or the depth of gloom,’ she told them. ‘One reason why I am so keen about Lord Peter is that writing him keeps my mind thoroughly occupied, and prevents me from wanting too badly the kind of life I do want, and see no chance of getting.’ Later, she recalled the despondency that dampened her excitement at her new-found independence, her determination to write plagued by a painful awareness that the longer she spent on her novel, the greater the desolation she set herself up for – emotionally and financially – if nothing came of it. Much like H. D., it was only with hindsight that Sayers would acknowledge quite how much resilience she had employed throughout this crucial year. In Mecklenburgh Square, she imagined her way to a life of splendid elegance, distracting herself from occasional fits of melancholy by granting her character all the riches she wished her writing might earn for her. ‘Lord Peter’s large income (the source of which by the way I have never investigated) … I deliberately gave him,’ she wrote years later. ‘After all it cost me nothing and at that time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it. I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes. It relieves the mind and does no harm to anybody.’

  Through 1921, these dreams spurred Sayers on. As long as she kept up the rent on Mecklenburgh Square, she told herself, the literary success she longed for remained a possibility. In the back of her mind always was the sobering prospect of having to devote herself full-time to teaching or, worse, return to the rectory and forgo her independence: ‘I simply must hang on in London if I possibly can,’ she wrote. ‘It’s the only place, and I love it in spite of everything.’ It was not so much the glamour of a literary life that compelled her, or the anticipation of great wealth or fame, but the firm desire to spend her time on work which she truly enjoyed and knew she was good at. She spent Saturdays in the British Museum, reading the Notable British Trials series for reports on the case of George Joseph Smith, hanged in 1915 for the murder of three women whose bodies were found in bathtubs, and William Hare and William Burke, who committed a series of murders and sold the corpses to an unsuspecting anatomy professor for dissection. (Aspects of these cases – both referred to by Wimsey as examples of serial murderers who never would have been uncovered had they not grown overconfident – are evident in the plot of Whose Body?) On weekdays, when not at the school, she sat where H. D. had sat three years earlier, a large notebook open on her desk and a telephone directory to hand, to scour for inspiration when naming minor characters.

  She was cheered in March when another tranche of freelance work came in from the Polish organisation: ‘I’m just going on and not worrying,’ she wrote. ‘I’m a great believer in things “turning up”.’ She advertised her writing services in The Times, and cultivated a passing acquaintance who had hinted she might need some French translations done. In July, Sayers insisted that her money worries had not dampened her social life, which involved ‘lots of parties – theatre and a night-club (!!) last week, teas and things this week, lunch at the Ritz next week’. But soon even London’s charms were exhausted, and she was fed up that her friend Dorothy Rowe hadn’t invited her to visit her in Bournemouth. ‘I can’t get the work I want, nor the money I want, nor (consequently) the clothes I want, nor the holiday I want, nor the man I want!!’

  Writing to her parents on 27 July about coming home for the summer, she mentioned this man for the first time: ‘I’m inviting a friend for the end of September, but ten to one he won’t be able to come.’ Later in the letter she added with apparent nonchalance: ‘He’ll be no trouble if he does come, being used to living under pretty uncomfortable conditions and asking nothing but kind treatment … He is not the young man who entertains me at the Ritz, and will not expect Ritz standards.’ It was John Cournos.

  *

  After Cournos returned from St Petersburg to discover Arabella Yorke’s and Richard Aldington’s treachery, he had left Mecklenburgh Square and thrown himself into work both political and literary. It’s unclear how he was first introduced to Sayers – and whether their meeting was connected to their shared association with 44 Mecklenburgh Square – but it seems likely to have occurred at a Bloomsbury party such as one Sayers describes in her novel Strong Poison, with sausages sizzling on the stove, the samovar boiling over and shouted discussion above avant-garde piano music of ‘free love, D. H. Lawrence, the prurience of prudery, and the immoral significance of long skirts’. In 1921, Courn
os was living in Oxford and working intensely on Babel, the third novel in his trilogy after The Mask and The Wall (heavily autobiographical fictions, admired by Yeats and Ford Madox Ford, about his childhood in Ukraine and American adolescence). This instalment covered his move from Philadelphia to London and his immersion in the world of the Imagists. ‘Just now I am living for this alone,’ he wrote.

  Cournos – who was twelve years older than Sayers – never did visit her parents, despite her entreaties. ‘Perhaps I could get hold of him at Christmas, but he is really devoted to his work and finds it hard to get away,’ she wrote, her disappointment barely disguised by her casual tone. Throughout this year Cournos was writing regularly to John Gould Fletcher – whose friendship, he noted, ‘has consoled me for many betrayals’. Both were distressed at the dissolution of their pre-war circle – Pound was about to leave London for Paris, Eliot’s health was deteriorating, H. D. and Bryher were living in Switzerland, and others, such as Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, had died during the war. Cournos liked to imagine himself and Gould Fletcher as ‘prisoners of life, trying to paint the walls of our prison with beautiful designs’; their letters to each other contain – alongside plenty of mutual reassurance, and anxiety about their own limitations – ever more virulent diatribes against philistine British readers, against their publicists and agents for not sufficiently promoting their books, and against fellow writers (‘these cliques and gangs of misbegotten charlatans who infest London’) whose hostility rendered them ‘literary outcasts’. In all these pages of personal correspondence, Cournos never once mentions Dorothy.