Time to Be in Earnest

by P. D. James

  Unless the novel, particularly the so-called literary novel, can reach the hearts and minds of ordinary people, reading will increasingly become a minority interest. Novelists, too, surely have a duty to be intelligible if they are to address themselves to a wider audience than the educated middle class and the literary establishment. It would be futile, and indeed silly, to suggest that novelists today can recover the hierarchical and moral certainties of Victorian England. Some writers would argue that we can no longer comfortably write in the tradition of social realism because we no longer know what we mean by reality. I suppose the extremes of literary experimentation are some novelists’ way of explaining the arbitrariness and chaos of human existence, an attempt to express the inexpressible. Thomas Hardy wrote that the secret of fiction lies in the adjustment of things uneven to things eternal and universal. But what adjustment can a writer make if, in a world governed for him by chance and chaos, he is no longer able to believe in things eternal and universal?

  Publication day for A Certain Justice is fast approaching. Faber sent a car to take me to the BBC, where I did an on-line interview from Manchester about the novel, to be used in the afternoon’s Kaleidoscope. Then to Camden Passage to meet Frances Fyfield and collect a dress for Monday’s launch together with a suit and a skirt and jacket. These should see me through most of the publicity.

  In the evening Gavyn Arthur gave a dinner at the Carlton Club. I sat between two lawyers, both interesting, and one involved with mental health cases, and we had a long talk about psychopathy. I was glad that he thought my character Garry Ashe a believable portrait of a psychopath. He asked me whether I thought that Ashe would in the end feel any affection or love for Octavia or would begin to respond to her love for him, and I said I was sure not. He agreed. A psychopath who could feel love would not be a psychopath. Some, however, have felt strong affection for a dog. It occurs to me that I can’t remember ever reading about a murderer who gave houseroom to, or was fond of, a cat. The company at dinner was varied, the talk stimulating and interesting, and I met people I should be glad to meet again—which doesn’t always happen at the age of seventy-seven. The pity is that life is so busy that I know that I won’t.

  October

  THURSDAY, 2ND OCTOBER

  A journalist from Australia arrived in the afternoon for an interview in connection with the publication of A Certain Justice. This is the beginning of the pre-publicity for my Australian tour next year.

  In the evening to St. Anne’s Church in Soho for the launch of Volume 2 of The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, edited by Dr. Barbara Reynolds, for which I have provided a preface. I can detect the influence of Dorothy L. Sayers in my own work together with that of three other writers: Jane Austen, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. I suppose few writers of Sayers’s generation have been more controversial. To her admirers she is the novelist who did more than any other of her age to lift the detective story from its status as an inferior puzzle to a respected craft with claims to be taken seriously as popular literature. Her detractors deplore what they see as the snobbery and élitism (she must be the only crime writer to include in her book a letter written in French which she does not deign to translate), focusing their dislike on her aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. She wrote her detective novels initially to make money and entertain, and neither is an ignoble aim. And the books do continue to entertain, not least as period popular literature giving us a lively picture of life in the 1920s and 1930s, that period which E. M. Forster described as “a long weekend between two wars.” The fact that, over forty years after her death, she can still provoke controversy and stimulate argument is a measure of the resilience of her talent and the vitality of her detective.

  It is only in recent years, and thanks to her friend Barbara Reynolds, that we have come to respect her as a remarkable letter-writer. This correspondence covers the years 1937–43, the years of the Second World War, of air raids, the threat of invasion, difficult and congested travel, the blackout and inadequate or nonexistent domestic help. Nevertheless, they were years of high creativity. She wrote plays, two religious dramas including the notorious radio drama The Man Born to Be King (the first time an actor had impersonated Christ on the radio), and two theological works as well as articles and hundreds of letters, most in her own hand. The expense of time and effort must have been considerable, deflecting energy from her creative work. But perhaps for Dorothy L. Sayers, as for others, letter-writing was a form of creativity. For someone like myself who has an almost pathological dislike of initiating or replying to correspondence, and does it badly, this is difficult to understand.

  And prolific letter-writers, if they achieve fame or notoriety, leave treacherous hostages to fortune. A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence. And we adapt our style to our correspondent. Philip Larkin does not write in the same terms to Kingsley Amis as he does to Charles Monteith, his editor at Faber, or to Barbara Pym. Jane Austen could write with perfect confidence and candour only to Cassandra and the shafts of asperity, cynicism, even of malice, could not have been openly expressed in any other way. In that society, dependent on family and neighbours for entertainment and a social life, discretion and more than a little hypocrisy were necessary if life were to go smoothly, let alone agreeably. Jane Austen may write, “I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow me,” but she would not have wrinkled her nose when they met. “Her sweetness of temper never failed,” wrote her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh. On the contrary, it failed frequently, and if it hadn’t we would not have had the six great novels.

  As a result of editing Dorothy L. Sayers’s letters, Barbara Reynolds was able to solve three of the mysteries which have always surrounded her: Who exactly was the William White who was the father of her illegitimate son John Anthony? Why was it not possible for them to marry? Why did she choose Southbourne in Hampshire as the place of birth when, as far as we know, she had no contact with that town?

  William White was not the rough, ill-educated motor mechanic he has sometimes been made out to be, but he does appear to have been something of an irresponsible cad. Dorothy and he became lovers on the rebound from her disastrous and unconsummated affair with John Courtos, and in the spring of 1923 she found that she was pregnant. Barbara Reynolds suggests that it may have been only then that she discovered that White was already married and had, in fact, a daughter. He asked his wife to come to London to celebrate the anniversary of their wedding—they seem to have lived apart for much of the time while remaining on good terms—and he then confided in her about Dorothy’s pregnancy and asked her to help. This, with surprising generosity, she agreed to do. Mrs. White invited Dorothy to come to Southbourne for the last stages of her pregnancy, took a room for her at a guest house and arranged for her brother, who was a doctor, to attend the birth, which took place in a nursing home. It was not revealed to him that he had been engaged to deliver his brother-in-law’s child and Mrs. White pledged to keep the baby’s existence a secret, and did so until after Dorothy’s death in December 1957. It was only then that she wrote to her daughter, revealing to her that she had a half-brother. In 1991 that daughter, now Mrs. Napier, decided to write to Anthony. But the letter, which was sent care of the publishers, Victor Gollancz, was returned unopened. John Anthony had then been dead for seven years.

  This must have been a traumatic and utterly miserable part of Dorothy’s life. She was both egotistical and proud, and now found herself in the humiliating position of any woman who had loved unwisely and been careless or unlucky enough to become pregnant. But I doubt whether, in Sayers’s case, it was love; Courtos had cured her of that debilitating waste of spirit.

  To have to rely on her lover’s wi
fe must have been particularly galling. No wonder, in the novels, Sayers’s alter ego Harriet Vane makes a number of caustic comments about the humiliating burden of gratitude. It is difficult to know whether Dorothy really got to like Mrs. White—in many ways a companion in fortune since they had both been victims of the same feckless, irresponsible man—or whether she accepted her kindness always with a deep if unacknowledged resentment. There is a surprisingly ungracious reference to her benefactress in a letter to Ivy Shrimpton when she had returned to London after leaving Anthony in Ivy’s care. “I was a bit weary yesterday, because I came home to find that the fool I’d let my flat to had locked up the keys inside the flat.” Mrs. White had in fact been living there to send on letters to Dorothy and to post her letters from London, notably to her parents. Both of them died without ever knowing that they had a grandson. Mrs. White’s daughter Valerie was with her mother in London and Barbara Reynolds records that she remembered the flat clearly, in particular a cat called Agag, whose name, Dorothy told her, means “he who treads lightly,” and that there was a large supply of children’s books in the flat. If Dorothy provided those it shows a sympathetic understanding of a child’s needs.

  Some mysteries remain, principally why Dorothy waited until she was returning to work to leave her son in the care of her cousin Ivy Shrimpton. Had she been pressed to have him adopted—then the easiest way out—and later relented? If so, one would like to think that the relationship gave her greater pleasure in her later life than in fact proved the case. She received neither disinterested affection nor support from any of the men important to her, including her husband and her son. Small wonder that in Lord Peter Wimsey she created a fantasy figure with whom she could safely fall in love. She moved on from him in later life but she never repudiated him. Unlike the other men in her life, he never let her down.

  SATURDAY, 4TH OCTOBER

  Today was the blessing of grandson Tom and Mary’s marriage, the civil ceremony of which took place last month in a restaurant in Cambridge. I went to Southwold in great hopes that the day would be everything the young people and the family, in particular Clare, needed; for her it was the blessing rather than the civil ceremony which was important.

  All went perfectly and there was great happiness. My eldest grandchild Katie had interrupted her solo sponsored walk round the British Isles and had taken a train to be with us. Katie had set out on 2nd April 1997 on a six-month hike over 2,500 miles round Britain in aid of the Calvert Trust Exmoor and the Chernobyl Children’s Project. She will just rest for the night and then go back and continue the walk. The weather today was perfect, the sky blue with a few drifting clouds, the light marvellous as it always is in East Anglia, and Blythburgh church, like a great ship moored in the marshes, took one’s breath away. Mary and Tom had gone to a great deal of trouble. Mary looked beautiful in a simple sheath dress in bright orange which was good with her skin and large dark eyes. She carried a small posy of marigolds and green foliage and had made similar posies to decorate the ends of the pews.

  On my father’s knee, aged two and a half, with my mother and sister Monica

  Babes in the Wood at Ludlow. My brother as a babe and my sister and me as gnomes. I think this was a pantomime in aid of Ludford church.

  My mother with her Sunday school dancers. Wearing improvised costumes, we pranced uncertainly across the stage in highly inauthentic country dances with Mother at the piano.

  As Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. Cambridge High School for Girls, 1934

  With my mother, Monica and Edward. Cambridge, 1931. This was probably taken to be sent to relations and friends at Christmas. I don’t know why my father wasn’t included.

  With my first-born, Clare, in 1942

  OPPOSITE TOP: With Connor, on leave from the RAMC, and Jane at Chigwell Row, Essex

  OPPOSITE BOTTOM: With Connor at Clare’s wedding, 27th April 1963

  Clare and Jane in the garden at White Hall, Chigwell Row, 1945

  Publicity photo for Cover Her Face, with the dust jacket by Charles Mozley, 1962

  (Publicity photograph courtesy Elliott and Fry)

  In New York, 1980, for the American publication of Innocent Blood, which reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list

  (Photograph by Susan Gray)

  The first Anglia television series, Death of an Expert Witness, in 1983. With John Rosenberg (producer), Herbie Wise (director) and Roy Marsden as Adam Dalgliesh

  (Photograph courtesy Anglia TV)

  The ceremony was to have been in a small upper room over the porch, but Mary was afraid that I would find the narrow twisting stairway too claustrophobic to climb. So the blessing was held before the altar with the family sitting opposite each other in the choir stalls. Tom and Mary had devised the ceremony with the help of Father Barry, the parish priest, and it was a mixture of Christian liturgy with a reading by Clare from an Eastern mystic, and translated Gaelic blessings and prayers because Tom and Mary had first met in Ireland. Father Barry seemed to take the innovations in his stride and the service was simple and very moving.

  Afterwards we piled out into the sunshine where a patient group of people were waiting for the church to be reopened. They joined in the general laughter and happiness and Clare asked one of them to take a photograph of the group. “I thought you’d never ask me,” he said. “I’ve been waiting here for ages.” Let’s hope it comes out.

  Afterwards, back at the Southwold house, there was a cake provided by Clare with the Union Jack and Australian flag, and champagne from Peter of a quality seldom met with at weddings large or small. Katie looked bonny and happy. Her journey seems to be a spiritual odyssey as well as a great feat of endurance. Granddaughter Eleanor wasn’t well, but had insisted on coming. I think she is finding her teaching job exceptionally arduous. The children, apart from the ill-discipline one expects these days, have had no home training either in manners or social skills, and their attention span is so short that learning is almost impossible. But Nell said that she was trying hard to establish good relationships with the parents of some of the most difficult children. They might come up to the school to confront her belligerently, but once they understood she was genuinely trying to help their child, they became cooperative and grateful. But it really is an extraordinarily tough job. I’m not surprised that we have a shortage of good teachers. I’m sometimes amazed that we have any.

  I’m glad that the day was so successful. It will be a wonderful memory for all of us, and particularly for Clare. Tom is an only son and it will be hard for her to say goodbye to him when he leaves for Australia.

  SUNDAY, 5TH OCTOBER

  I went to 11 o’clock Mass at All Saints, Margaret Street. One of the post-Communion hymns was “Jesu, Good Above All Other,” a hymn frequently sung at assembly at Cambridge High School. It is odd how hymns can trigger off memories of the past more strongly than visual scenes or smells. At all the schools I attended we had morning assembly consisting of prayers including the Lord’s Prayer, a reading from scripture and a hymn. My memory of the British School in Ludlow is that we had no hymn books but sang the same hymns over and over again. Could this really be so? During prayers the older children, those nearing eleven, by some childish unwritten prescription were privileged merely to bow their heads and loosely link their fingers. We, the smaller ones, had to raise our arms, palms pressed.

  I can’t have been at the National School long before we moved to Cambridge, and I began half-way through the first term of the new school year at the High School. Here too every morning began with assembly. We would file into the hall by form while one of the more musical girls would thump out a march on the piano. The Headmistress, Miss Dovey, commonly called The Dove, would stand there in her gown, the other mistresses ranged against the walls, also gowned. I remember on my first day how impressed I was by this first sight of academic dress, the visible symbol that I was, indeed, a High School pupil.

  I was born and bred in the distinctive odour of Angli
canism, which childhood memory identifies as the smell of old prayer books, flowers, brass, stone and polished wood, the whole overlaid by the occasional sweet pungency of incense. I early grew accustomed to its services. Because Father, a middle-grade civil servant, was relatively poor, my parents employed no resident servant to help look after us children, even in those days when wages were low. This meant that, until we moved to Cambridge, when my father gave up going to church, the whole family attended Sunday Evensong together.

  I must have been about five years old when we moved from Oxford to Ludlow and I can remember long autumnal Sunday evenings (my memory is always of going to church in the fading light and coming out into darkness): my brother fast asleep against my mother, my sister dozing, and myself reading the Book of Common Prayer to relieve the boredom of sermons which were not only long but invariably well above my understanding. I was fascinated by the prayer book—less by the liturgy than by the accompanying text. I can remember at a very early age being impressed by the rubric in the Communion Service that when in times of plague no one could be found to take Communion with the sick then the priest only might do so, and I would sit there in the darkened church with a vivid imagining of crosses on doors, wailing voices and the heroic figure of the cloaked priest moving silently and swiftly through the deserted streets, bearing the sacred vessels.