Conundrums for the Long Week-End

by Robert Kuhn McGregor

  Miss Climpson is a definite victim of the prevalent Victorian attitudes toward women. Possessing a genuinely fine native intelligence, she could have been a professional woman of surpassing ability. Her “poor father” did not believe in education for women, not even the rudiments of law or business practice. His daughter was therefore condemned to a pointless existence as chaperone, travelling companion, and common boarder. Her one reliable companion has been her own good conscience, honed through years of steadfast religious devotion. She and Lord Peter share equally in the good fortune that they have found each other.

  At the time of Unnatural Death, Miss Climpson has been working for Wimsey some six months. Generally she investigates newspaper advertisements, searching for attempted frauds or worse. But Peter recognizes the depth of her talents and plants her in the middle of complex investigations, such as the Agatha Dawson murder, when the situation warrants. In her own convoluted, enthusiastic way (a product of her “roaming Catholic” devotion [226]), she sees directly into the heart of Mary Whittaker and goes about gathering the evidence to prove murder. It is Miss Climpson, acting from instinctive revulsion, who first confronts Whittaker. Lord Peter could not have solved the case without Miss Climpson, though it is conceivable that she could have worked it out without Lord Peter.

  Perhaps in the spirit of these rebellious women, Dorothy L. Sayers became noticeably less disposed to tolerate the easy prejudices of her age as her career in popular writing developed. Echoing the nascent anti-Semitism of the society portrayed in her first novel, she had impeccably captured the Francophobia gripping Britain in her second, incorporating commonplace anti-French platitudes into several conversations in Clouds of Witness. In doing so, she summed up the feelings of the British public quite well; mistrust of the French extended back at least nine hundred years and was not about to be overcome by any recent alliance, however successful. In fact, postwar Britons tended to blame the French as much or more than the Germans for the appalling death tolls of the war. Robert Graves summed up the popular outlook when he stated that no one wished the Germans any harm in the twenties, but all were prepared to fight the French. Still, in the same book, Sayers did soften her unthinking stereotype of the Jews, mentioning only that Mrs. Grimethorpe’s unusual beauty was not of English origin; it must be a “touch of Jew.”42

  Easy stereotypes give way more completely in Unnatural Death. In portraying Agatha Dawson as a brave and gracious old woman, Sayers openly attacks the unthinking prejudice that lumped all dark-skinned people—Africans, Argentines, Esquimaux, Hindus—into one mass of un-British, inferior humanity. The Dawson family housekeeper is scandalized and quits when Agatha invites a man of “pleasant, slightly aquiline features and brown-olive skin of the Polynesian”(155) into the home. Miss Dawson’s position is that the man, whatever his color, is a blood relation and a Christian minister and deserves to be treated as such—a sentiment with which Sayers plainly agrees. The Reverend Hallelujah Dawson, a man of “humble and inoffensive” appearance, turns out to be the most decent and pious soul in the novel.

  Sayers also chose in this novel to address—however obliquely—the issue of homosexuality. Although none of the characters in Unnatural Death mention the word or any of its euphemisms, two lesbian relationships form the core of the story. On the one hand, it is Vera Findlater’s “pash” for Mary Whittaker that alarms Miss Climpson, suggesting that Mary’s homosexuality is integral to her “unnatural” makeup. Yet Sayers treats the long-lived same-sex relationship between Clara Whittaker and Agatha Dawson with compassion and respect, implying that theirs was a thoroughly understandable and honorable love. There seems some ambivalence in Sayers’s underlying message, as if she cannot make up her own mind on the subject. Certainly Sayers encountered homosexual relationships in her own life. Among the Bohemian set, same-sex affairs more generally came into the open during the 1920s. By 1930, Sayers had apparently accepted them as a positive; Harriet Vane’s closest friends and supporters in Strong Poison are a lesbian couple.

  Apparently by conscious choice, Sayers has softened her opinions—and those of her characters—in considering issues of race and sexual relations. While such displays of tolerance are not an entirely consistent feature of the stories to follow, the common prejudice that Sayers so fully incorporated into the first two books does largely disappear.

  A new London publisher, Ernest Benn, brought out Unnatural Death in September 1927, less than two years after Sayers began plotting the story. This was a vast improvement over the four years of agony poured into Clouds of Witness. Satisfied in marriage, she was now able to devote more energy to creative work. The writing itself also became more rewarding. Recognition and sales grew, enabling her to negotiate a relatively lucrative contract with another British publisher, Victor Gollancz. Before proceeding to the work for Gollancz, however, she was obligated to produce one last volume for Ernest Benn. She pushed “the ‘Bellona Club’ story ahead for him”; The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club appeared just ten months after Unnatural Death.43

  This fourth Peter Wimsey novel is a very brave piece of work and a direct product of Dorothy L. Sayers’s marriage to Mac Fleming. Eight years before, she had chosen to portray Lord Peter as a shell-shocked war veteran. Now she was married to such a man and privy to his moods, his memories, and his pain. She chose to face this ticklish subject head on, to write a novel about the impact of the Great War on human life.

  The war is an omnipresent fact of life in her two previous novels, a presence mentioned but never dwelled upon. In Clouds of Witness, the maidservant Ellen, doing the laundry at Riddlesdale, vividly recalls her sorrow over poor Bert, her “young man what was killed in the war.” In London, a ragged news vendor remembers Peter Wimsey as the major he helped to pull out of a shell hole at Vimy Ridge. Most of all, it is the war that creates the desperate set of circumstances leading to Dennis Cathcart’s suicide. Heavily invested in properties and securities throughout Europe, he saw his Russian and German credits disappear in 1914, while his proceeds from the French vineyards were suspended for years together. Unable to shore up the situation while serving at the front, he turns to cardsharping, a “rotter’s game.” His mistress deserts him anyway, and in despair he pulls the trigger—one more victim of the Great War (73, 247, 265).

  In Unnatural Death, the action takes place in 1927, nine years after the war’s end. Here the characters look determinedly forward, expressing much concern over flappers and the ways of the modern world. Yet the war has cast its shadow over this story as well, exacting its grim toll on the Dawson family of the Hampshires. John Dawson, Agatha’s first cousin and her only close relation, died at the front in 1916. “A cruel business that was . . . and nobody the better for it” (147).

  Despite the repeated presence of the war’s aftereffects, Sayers did not confront the conflagration directly in either story. Wimsey seems cured of the remnants of his shell shock—perhaps the three months in Corsica did him good. His personality is still balanced on the knife edge, especially in Unnatural Death, but the reader is not allowed past the blithering mask to view the scars of those years in the trenches. Like all true veterans, Peter prefers not to speak of the war.

  This reticence still marks his character in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. The story begins, significantly, on November 11, 1927, the ninth anniversary of the armistice. Peter is at the Bellona Club to attend a private dinner to honor the memory of a close friend killed in the war. He has weathered the public ceremonies honoring the veterans and mourning the dead, and he is heartily sick of the whole business. Commiserating with another veteran, he expresses the wish of virtually every man sharing their grisly experience: “All this remembrance-day business gets on your nerves, don’t it? It’s my belief most of us would be only too pleased to chuck these community hysterics if the beastly newspapers didn’t run it for all it’s worth. However, it don’t do to say so” (2).

  Peter has done with the war, and he sincerely wishes the war was
finished with him. But he can only express these sentiments at places such as the Bellona Club, within the hearing of the war-experienced and no one else. Nine years after the fighting has ended, these men form a special and exclusive kind of community, prone to emotions only they can fully understand.

  The Bellona is a refuge for war casualties. There is “Tin-Tummy” Challoner, with his “spare part” from the second battle of the Somme; the secretary, Cuyler, with his one good arm; and the cloakroom attendant with “a Sam Weller face and an artificial leg.” Worst of all are those without visible scars, the men who look and act “normal,” men desperately wounded deep in their emotions. The Fentiman brothers, George and Robert, are prime examples (34).

  To all appearances, Robert Fentiman has escaped the war without a scratch, physical or psychological. He is of a military family and was quite the hardened soldier at the front, a “regular army type.” His brother remembered him “at that ghastly hole at Carency, where the whole ground was rotten with corpses—ugh!—potting those swollen great rats for a penny a time, and laughing at them. Rats. Alive and putrid with what they’d been feeding on. Oh yes. Robert was thought a damn good soldier” (128).

  For all his physical and mental hardihood, Robert came away from the war a damaged soul. His sense of gentlemanly honor was gone. When his ninety-year-old grandfather dies suddenly, killing his chance to inherit thousands from Lady Dormer, Robert immediately bends to fraud, concealing the death and dishonoring the old man’s body by hiding it in a telephone booth—on Armistice Day! He compounds this unholy fraud by systematically lying to Peter Wimsey about his grandfather’s last night on earth. When Wimsey at last exposes him, Robert explodes with laughter. He has no finer feelings left.

  Brother George is in worse shape. Most of the time he is feeling visibly awful. His insides are “gassed out,” his nerves shot. Perpetually paranoid and complaining, he cannot hold a steady job but must depend on his wife’s income. This only aggravates matters, robbing him of his sense of honor and worth. Too often he is bitterly critical of his wife, a good woman with untold patience and a determination to work hard for both of them. At heart, George knows this, but he is incapable of returning honest respect and love. The war has gassed it out of him.

  To have any hope of at least maintaining a normal appearance, George must avoid stress. He sits quietly nodding as his ancient grandfather (a veteran of the Crimea) lectures him on proper behavior. The grandson controls himself with difficulty; the old man has no idea what George has suffered, what he must now avoid. Tension mounts with old Fentiman’s death and becomes unbearable when it is proved murder. The old shell shock returns; George Fentiman’s nerves run amok. He ends up at the police station confessing to a killing he did not commit, convinced he is possessed by the devil.

  Though he finds their actions deplorable at times, Peter Wimsey fully comprehends what has shaped Robert and George Fentiman. He is of the same community and is perhaps capable of similar behavior. Millions of men honed by the war would understand in just the same way. When the body of old Fentiman is discovered sitting by the fire in the Bellona Club’s sitting room, George dissolves into hysterical laughter. The older members are horrified by this undignified display. “Only the younger men felt no sense of outrage; they knew too much” (7).

  The sense of what is lost is best provided by a close friend of the Wimsey family, the elderly Colonel Marchbanks. Having lost a son in the war, Marchbanks is a sensitive and sympathetic soul, but still his perspective is different:

  Sometimes, Lord Peter, I think that the War has had a bad effect on some of our young men. But then, of course, all are not soldiers by training, and that makes a great difference. I certainly notice a less fine sense of honour in these days than we had when I was a boy. There were not so many excuses made then for people; there were things that were done and things that were not done. Nowadays men—and, I am sorry to say, women too—let themselves go in a way that is to me quite incomprehensible. (335–36)

  Peter has no response to this. An honorable man himself, he shares the Colonel’s sense of dignity. But the war, the Great War, has left its mark on him.

  Although a tale of murder, with all the usual trappings of the modern detective story, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club was something more. By weaving the most painful of sentiments into the text, by drawing fully rounded portraits of human beings still suffering from their wounds, Sayers gave her readers an opportunity to genuinely contemplate a long-forbidden subject. There were essentially no books about the interior view of the war written between 1918 and 1928. Soon after would come Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, followed by Graves’s Good-bye to All That and countless others. Dorothy L. Sayers had ventured down a courageous path.44

  Sayers was not interested merely in the war and its effects on those who participated; she wished to consider its impact on the whole of society. To this end, she returned to two familiar themes: the influence of scientific dogma and the emerging roles of women in the modern world. Her depiction of each is in some way shaped by the presence of the war-wounded characters populating the novel.

  Scientific theory was news in the latter half of the 1920s. The idea that medical intervention could in some way not only improve health but actually cure society’s ills arrested attention. In the Fentiman mystery, this idea takes the form of research into glandular imbalances. Peter Wimsey is conversant with the subject, possessing “a number of scientific friends who found him a good listener” (220), but the true expert is Doctor Penberthy, Harley Street physician and medical man at the Bellona Club. A war veteran himself, Penberthy is sensitive to the special needs of the combat veterans who make up much of his patient list. He understands not simply their physical ails but their emotional difficulties as well. Still, he is fed up. He would much rather do something more glamorous, more rewarding. Penberthy is an earnest and determined practitioner who closely follows the latest research; his own analysis is “original” and “suggestive.” His dream is to abandon the poor-paying demands of regular practice and establish his own research clinic devoted to the study of glands. His vision of treating both disease and criminal tendency through glandular injections is very attractive—the wealthy high society Rushworth family is “all over glands” (220, 181).

  Penberthy is prepared to do anything, including murder, to get his clinic. Sayers has to some extent repeated here the essential theme of Whose Body? the scientific visionary utterly without a sense of social responsibility. Not only does he kill a ninety-year-old man to prevent him inheriting money which would otherwise go to his fiancée, he then turns brutally on the woman, accusing her of sexual mania to get rid of her and conceal his own crime. This is a man after Julian Freke’s heart.

  Of the first four Peter Wimsey novels, one is resolved by suicide; in the other three, the killers are all medical practitioners. Dorothy L. Sayers’s concern with the dangers of unregulated science was a recurring focus in her work. If nerves and glands were news, the public needed to be wary. (The book apparently had some impact in this respect; Sayers received a letter from a medical man asking for information about gland research after the book was published.) It is possible, too, that Sayers was gently avenging herself on the medical profession for memories past. Their treatments, after all, had made her later adolescence a traumatic experience. What young woman would want to lose her hair?45

  If the solution to The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club mirrors that of Whose Body? the comparison must end there. In this fourth novel, Sayers has evolved a far more complex story line, a “rounded” story in which Peter Wimsey must carefully consider the psychological profiles of several persons, including himself, to arrive at the proper solution. This represents an extension of Peter’s character, as evidenced in his interactions with three young women integral to the plot.

  The long grasp of the war has shaped the lives of Sheila Fentiman, Marjorie Phelps, and Ann Dorland in powerful ways. Each is struggling to make
her way in the world, only to run up against impediments of a kind not so common in the world before 1914. Yet each is unique, and Peter Wimsey must deal with each in a different fashion, talking to them “like ordinary human beings.”46

  Sheila Fentiman is as much a victim of the war as is her husband, George. He had been a caring and supportive husband when first they married, but he had returned from the trenches a mental and physical wreck. This placed the economic, as well as the emotional, burdens of the family squarely on her shoulders. George could not hold a job. Sheila tried running a tea shop, but the slump took care of that. Heavily indebted, she must now work long hours on the outside, only to return to a demanding and guilt-ridden husband. He wants them to be a traditional family: he out earning a paycheck, she keeping the house. She perhaps seems to want the same thing. This is impossible, and he takes it out on her, accusing her of being one of those “advanced women,” prone to “all this jazzing and short skirts and pretending to have careers.” Poor Sheila—her hair is going prematurely gray, she has to take medicine for her heart, and her husband envisions her “flying off to offices and clubs and parties.” Small wonder she wept for the injustice of it all. One quality of the war’s effect is plain: even in the dawn of the age of the “new woman,” not every woman wanted to work outside the home. Some simply had to (81–95).

  Wimsey, alas, can see both sides of this unresolvable conflict. In his own defense, George does admit that it is his “filthy temper,” spurred on by his damaged nerves, that makes him so rude to Sheila. Peter can only understand and forgive, agreeing that “She’s damned fine, old man” (81–95). But his sympathies really lie with Sheila. “It always gives me the pip,” said Wimsey, “to see how rude people are when they’re married. I suppose it’s inevitable. . . . I’ve asked people, you know—my usual inquisitiveness—and they generally just grunt and say that their wives are sensible and take their affection for granted. But I don’t believe women ever get sensible, not even through prolonged association with their husbands” (105). When George Fentiman has an attack and disappears, Wimsey rushes immediately to Sheila’s aid, ignoring the pointed suspicion of neighbors to provide real sympathy and comfort. Sheila loves her war-damaged husband and will stand by him, no matter what. Peter can only give his hand to support such real affection.