Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  Beatrice White kept the secret until her death. Sayers thanked her, tacitly, by giving her maiden name (Beatrice Wilson) to a minor but admirable character in her 1935 novel Gaudy Night, a young girl who insists that she’s going to become a mechanic, despite her mother’s insistence that she’ll never get a husband (‘I don’t want one … I’d rather have a motor-cycle’). Just as Bryher had stepped in to help H. D. when pregnant and alone, Beatrice’s practical kindness fortified Sayers immeasurably after being let down by Bill’s departure, which was no less swift than Cecil Gray’s. (White had moved on to another woman before his child was born, which didn’t bother Sayers unduly: ‘I never meant him to be more than what he wanted to be – an episode,’ she insisted.) Beatrice’s behaviour towards her husband’s mistress was certainly unconventional – but not self-consciously so, unlike H. D.’s tortured acceptance of Flo Fallas or Arabella Yorke. Her generosity to Sayers was not born out of any desire to live outside society’s moral structures, but rather to remain within them: probably thinking of her young daughter, Valerie, and the stigma that attached to the child of divorced parents (and aware that Bill was unlikely to support Valerie financially after a separation), Beatrice did what she could to make the best of the terrible situation in which she found herself – perhaps with a glimmer of sympathy for a woman who, like her, had been deceived by the smooth talk of a charming man. Sayers later wrote that ‘of all motives for crime, respectability – the least emphasised in fiction – is one of the most powerful in fact, and is the root cause of a long series of irregularities, ranging from murder itself to the queerest and most eccentric misdemeanours’. Respectability drove Beatrice to her actions, distressing as they must have been for her to take; respectability was also at the forefront of Sayers’s own private anguish as she made her excuses to Benson’s and to her parents and began to ponder her child’s future, and her own.

  Her friends only discovered that Sayers had a son after her sudden death in 1957 – though she did, just once, impulsively confide in a stranger on a train, a woman recently divorced with a ten-year-old child who had opened up to Sayers about her own troubles. Since Sayers told so few people about her pregnancy, there’s little evidence from which to reconstruct her thoughts at this chaotic time: whether she ever considered an abortion (illegal, but not difficult to procure if one had the means), or why she was so sure that her loving parents, who had always stood by her, should not know about their grandson (‘it would grieve them quite unnecessarily,’ she insisted, without further explanation). Her religious upbringing may well account for either or both of these decisions, but the subterfuge of a hidden pregnancy must have taken an enormous toll on Sayers’s mental and physical health. And still the question remained of where and how the child would live.

  Two days before she gave birth, Sayers wrote to her cousin Ivy Shrimpton in Oxford, who made a living fostering children, telling her of ‘an infant I’m very anxious you should have the charge of … At present everything depends on the girl’s not losing her job.’ Ivy accepted the commission, and on 27 January, Sayers wrote again: ‘Everything I told you about the boy is absolutely true – only I didn’t tell you he was my own!’ We don’t know whether Ivy’s response was admonitory or reassuring, but she seems to have accepted her cousin’s insistences that the child’s identity should remain hidden from their family, and took in John Anthony at one month old. Sayers brought him to Oxford in a Moses basket, returning to London that same evening, whereupon she found she had locked her keys inside the house and had to sit alone in a cinema for hours waiting for the charlady to arrive with a spare set. On 1 February, mere days after stopping breastfeeding, she returned to work, having been off for exactly eight weeks. She wrote regularly and anxiously to Ivy seeking details of her son’s eating and crying, and forwarded her £3 a month plus extra for doctors’ bills, though was reluctant to visit too often. She told her cousin she wanted the child brought up with ‘affection rather than pomp’; ‘I hope he doesn’t intend to be musical or artistic,’ she warned Ivy, probably thinking of Cournos. ‘I’m so bored with writers and people like that.’

  Her letters to Ivy at this time remained upbeat and pragmatic, but the conflicts they masked must have been extraordinarily painful. Everything had been arranged meticulously – Sayers’s experience cracking and composing detective plots had given her excellent grounding to cover her tracks – but the distraction of logistical planning could not displace emotion for ever. This was far from the situation she had imagined for her first child, and for herself, when she had planned out a future with Cournos. But she knew that being a single mother to an illegitimate child – possibly cut off by her ashamed parents, with little state support and extra difficulty earning her own living – would render impossible the life she had wanted so deeply and finally saw the chance of having: one of independence, professional success and intellectual freedom, which she had moved to Mecklenburgh Square in the hope of finding. Her situation is strikingly similar to that in which H. D. found herself after leaving the square; but without a Bryher to provide emotional and financial support the idea of disregarding the safety of a nuclear family structure seemed, to Sayers, not an act of bravery but a pathway too fraught and shameful to countenance. She still wanted nothing more than to write, and couldn’t imagine a way of combining the focus required of her work with the self-sacrifice expected of a mother. At this point, it seemed inconceivable that she could have both domestic and professional happiness. With her freedom in the balance, Sayers made her choice.

  *

  Apart from the Whites, Ivy and the man she later married, only one other person knew about the existence of John Anthony in Sayers’s lifetime: John Cournos. Soon after arriving in New York, Cournos had – despite his alleged opposition to marriage and fatherhood – become engaged to a woman named Helen Kestner, who had been married twice before, had two children and wrote romances and detective novels under a variety of pseudonyms. On New Year’s Day 1924 – just as Dorothy was preparing to give birth – they married at the Strand Palace Hotel in London. That August, Sayers wrote to him in faux-nonchalant tones that do little to disguise her pain. The correspondence reveals a vulnerability strikingly absent from the capable persona she constructed for her parents:

  Dear John,

  I’ve heard you’re married – I hope you are very very happy, with someone you can really love.

  I went over the rocks. As you know, I was going there rapidly, but I preferred it shouldn’t be with you, but with somebody I didn’t really care twopence for. I couldn’t have stood a catastrophe with you. It was a worse catastrophe than I intended, because I went and had a young son (thank God, it wasn’t a daughter!) and the man’s affection couldn’t stand that strain and he chucked me and went off with someone else! So I don’t quite know what I’m going to do with the infant, but he’s a very nice one!

  Both of us did what we swore we’d never do, you see – I hope your experiment turned out better than mine. You needn’t bother about answering this unless you like, but somehow I’ve always felt I should like you to know. I hope you’re ever so happy —

  Dorothy

  When Cournos replied, mournfully admonishing her for apparent double standards in having sex with White and not him, she was quick to bolster her sense of integrity: ‘The one thing worse than bearing the child of a man you hate,’ she informed him, ‘would be being condemned to be childless by the man you loved.’ He suggested meeting, but Sayers shot him down: ‘Last time we met, you told me with brutal frankness that you had no use for my conversation. Do you think my misfortunes will have added new lustre to my wit? Or am I to provide you with material for a new chapter of John Gombarov’s philosophy? If I saw you, I should probably only cry – and I’ve been crying for about 3 years now and am heartily weary of the exercise.’ She boasted to him of her efficiency in dealing with the situation, and preventing anyone at Benson’s from suspecting the reason for her absence: ‘You can put that in a boo
k if you like; no one will believe it.’

  He took her at her word. In subsequent years, just as he had with H. D., Cournos turned his relationship with Sayers into bitter fiction – his cruelty aggravated by the fact that he left her identity open to recognition by anyone familiar with their circumstances, thus compromising the secrecy of her arrangements for John Anthony. In 1927, he published a short story entitled ‘The Generous Gesture’ in the anthology Americana Esoterica, which provided the basis for a similar episode in an immensely long, rambling novel published in 1932, The Devil is an English Gentleman. In details, both closely correspond with the portrait of the relationship discernible from Sayers’s letters: each involves a bohemian man, who denounces marriage and believes in new ideas, frustrated by a woman who insists on a promise of commitment before she will consent to sex. In the novel, the unfortunate woman (a lively Cambridge graduate with unattractive ankles, who ‘insisted on talking, on being heard, and indulged in an excess of badinage’) tearfully gives in, whereupon the man storms out, furious that she perceives sex as a sacrifice, not as the ‘generous gesture’ given freely and unstintingly which would, on his terms, have affirmed her love – but on hers would have only confirmed his power over her.

  Sayers’s letters to Cournos in 1924 and 1925, when both their lives had changed dramatically, reveal her delicate negotiation of intimacy and individual freedom as she was working it out: she could only be happy within a situation of utter mutual trust, where neither partner had to compromise their desires, their ambitions or their values. In this way only, she insisted, could love be ‘free and careless’: ‘I have become impatient of the beastly restrictions which “free love” imposes,’ she wrote. What to Cournos was a flamboyant riposte to conservative morals, to Sayers meant risking exactly the sort of miserable situation she had found herself in with White. His position as an artist was never at stake in their tussle, while she knew hers was liable to combust in a moment’s carelessness. Sayers’s experiences with Cournos and White had left her painfully aware that women’s independence was precarious in a way men’s was not. But in these two failed relationships, Sayers came to clarify her own priorities. In Sayers’s vision, a free woman does not ‘make her man’s interests her own’, as the protagonist of The Devil is an English Gentleman suggests she should, but pursues her own intellectual freedom within the framework of a supporting and nurturing alliance, with someone whose ‘interests are my interests, his home my home, his time my time’. She would explore this idea, rooted in her Mecklenburgh Square year, over the rest of her career, through polemical essays and religious plays, and in her detective novels, through the new character of Harriet Vane.

  *

  John Cournos was not the only one capable of transmuting fact into fiction, and Sayers – having published three further Wimsey novels and a collection of stories since Whose Body? – turned to the unlikely form of the detective novel when she chose to address their relationship herself. Her fifth novel, Strong Poison (1930), opens in a law court, where a judge ‘so old he seemed to have outlived time and change and death’ haltingly addresses the jury as reporters scribble. The defendant, Harriet Vane, is a detective novelist, ‘a young woman of great ability, brought up on strictly religious principles’ who has, by the age of twenty-nine, ‘made herself independent in a legitimate way, owing nothing to anybody and accepting help from no one’. She is on trial accused of poisoning her former lover, Philip Boyes, a writer of ‘immoral or seditious’ treatises on anarchy, atheism and free love (which were, to his great chagrin, far less commercially successful than Harriet’s novels). Boyes, the judge stiffly explains, was ‘conscientiously opposed to any formal marriage’, but had pressured Harriet to ‘live on terms of intimacy with him’ outside that bond; some time later, neighbours heard Harriet packing her bags and leaving, claiming only that she had been ‘painfully deceived’. The cause of the argument was not, to their surprise, unfaithfulness or cruelty, but the fact that Boyes had, in spite of his alleged principles, offered legal marriage to Harriet. Harriet was furious at Boyes’s hypocrisy in making her compromise for no good reason. ‘I quite thought he was honest when he said he didn’t believe in marriage,’ she tells Lord Peter Wimsey from her prison cell. ‘And then it turned out that it was a test, to see whether my devotion was abject enough. Well, it wasn’t. I didn’t like having matrimony offered as a bad-conduct prize.’

  The courtroom embodies all the tensions between Victorian and modern mores, and it’s clear that the ancient judge considers Harriet ‘a person of unstable moral character’. The charge she faces is serious, since Sayers took no mercy on Cournos’s fictional avatar: after visiting Harriet one evening for a cup of coffee, Philip Boyes collapsed and died ‘in great pain’ following several days of vomiting and diarrhoea. The case is really a trial of Harriet’s lifestyle; the judge’s implication is that an educated and highly successful working woman who rejects conformity in her living arrangements (Harriet lives in ‘a small flat of her own’ in Bloomsbury’s Doughty Street, a milieu assumed to be unregulated by established morals) is likely to be willing to undermine social order to the extent of murdering her ex-lover. ‘Genius must be served, not argued with,’ sniffs an associate of Boyes’s, insisting that Harriet poisoned her lover out of jealousy at his superior intellect. A friend of Harriet’s puts it differently, summing up the attitude a successful woman writer had to contend with: ‘She ought to have been ministering to his work, not making money for them both with her own independent trash.’ Harriet knows her own worth, and refuses to spare Boyes’s ego by diminishing her own achievements. Yet her situation is a stark reminder of the dangers women faced: Harriet’s choices have not resulted in pregnancy, as they did for Sayers, but they have left her vulnerable to a nightmare of public shame and punishment, on the verge of losing her freedom for ever in the most definitive of ways, at the gallows.

  Wimsey, hopelessly in love with the prisoner, has a month to prove her innocence – which he does with panache, thanks to the valiant efforts of a determined cast of spinster spies, from Miss Murchison, who masquerades as an error-prone secretary to insinuate herself into the office of a scurrilous solicitor, to Miss Climpson, who extracts information from a spiritually inclined paid companion via a Ouija board of her own devising. By the end of the novel, Harriet is vindicated and declared free. Although the ignominy of the case threatens to haunt her indefinitely, she receives a full apology from the court, and her books sell like wildfire. Sayers’s revenge on Cournos was complete. But she was not finished with Harriet Vane. Writing about this brave, clever woman, resilient in the face of grave challenges to her independence and integrity, who found solace in her work and the support of a devoted troupe of female friends, had been a cathartic experience. As Sayers reflected on the achievements and regrets of her own life, she began to wonder whether she could help her fictional creation achieve that elusive balance between public success and private happiness.

  Sayers had at first intended to end Strong Poison with Harriet and Peter becoming engaged. Although she was loath to subject Wimsey to the fate of Sherlock Holmes – thrown to certain death at the Reichenbach Falls (though subsequently resuscitated by a sheepish Conan Doyle) – she had grown fed up with her ‘puppet’, who remained essentially static, triumph after triumph, solving mysteries with ever-gallant bravado and mind-boggling flourishes of logic. Wearied of Wimsey’s ‘everlasting breeziness’, she began Strong Poison ‘with the infanticidal intention of doing away with Peter; that is, of marrying him off and getting rid of him’. And so she planned a case in which Wimsey would, ‘in the conventional Perseus manner’, rescue a young woman falsely accused of murder, and crown his achievement with marriage, thus drawing his career to a neat and respectable ‘happily ever after’ conclusion.

  Dorothy L. Sayers at the Detection Club in 1939

  Sayers’s dissatisfaction with her hero was largely due to the feeling – which had pricked her since Whose Body? – that the genre was
preventing her from addressing the moral questions in which she was increasingly interested. In her wide-ranging introduction to the anthology of detective stories that she edited for Gollancz in 1928, Sayers argued that the gradual progression from sensational Victorian thrillers to the logical puzzles of the Edwardian era meant that, for her generation, detective writing was essentially a matter of technical craft, not of style or art. Sayers derided novels of the sort which G. K. Chesterton called ‘a drama of masks and not of faces’, where the excitement is purely on the surface, the murder apparently committed only to provide a corpse, and nothing more serious at stake than the detective’s reputation. Rather, she insisted, detective novels should – like any ‘literary’ fiction – contain atmosphere, character, human truth and a driving force beyond the mechanics of plot. Only then, she suggested, could an author ‘persuade us that violence really hurts’.

  Sayers had found models for the sort of detective novel she wanted to write in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) and E. C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case, a ‘revelation’ to Sayers on its publication in 1913 (and a novel for which Virginia Woolf admitted ‘a passion’). Bentley had set out ‘to write a detective story of a new sort’, and explore what happens when the detective’s logical powers are swayed by human fallibility. Sayers praised Bentley’s characters as ‘breathing and moving with abounding vitality’ and his love story – the detective falls for the main suspect, compromising his investigation most awkwardly – as ‘moving, credible and integral to the plot’. The influence of Trent’s Last Case is easily discernible in Whose Body?, and it shaped Sayers’s direction for her later novels, too, in its ambition and scope, and its willingness to subvert convention with an ending in which the detective’s deductions are revealed to have been entirely wrong. It was Bentley’s example that made Sayers believe Lord Peter could be salvaged. But it was her own circumstances that gave her the idea of not only sparing her hero from death, but also saving his bride from a potentially stultifying marriage.