Conundrums for the Long Week-End

by Robert Kuhn McGregor

  All in all, this was a pretty good summary of Dorothy L. Sayers’s opinion of John Cournos. If Cournos lives in the culture today, it is because of this portrait, spread through so much of Strong Poison, and for no other reason. His own books are long dead.43

  If Sayers created Harriet Vane as a match for Peter Wimsey, then she had to alter Wimsey to meet his match on equal terms. At the same time, he had to remain consistent, generally speaking, with the Wimsey of the four previous novels. What emerges is a character pushed to the edge by circumstances of his own choosing. In falling so completely for this nearly doomed woman, he reveals the essential fragility of his own being. For eleven years since the war, Peter has been looking resolutely forward, riding the crest of his own supreme self-confidence in the abilities necessary to his chosen field. Now, for the first time, it all really matters. He absolutely must be the investigative genius he envisions himself to be, or the woman he loves will be lost to the gallows. The thought is terrifying and enervating. Peter flounders at the task, trying one desperate gambit after another, grasping futilely at straws. It is more because of good luck—and the faithful help of those resourceful others—that the real murderer is flushed. At no time is Peter the master of this situation. Confronted with Harriet Vane, even his usual sangfroid falters; he comes very close to saying the wrong thing on more than one occasion. Like anyone facing love in desperate circumstances, Peter is changing:

  Whether his present enterprise failed or succeeded, things would never be the same again. It was not that his heart would be broken by a disastrous love—he had outlived the luxurious agonies of youthful blood, and in this very freedom from illusion he recognized the loss of something. From now on, every hour of light-heartedness would be, not a prerogative, but an achievement—one more axe or case-bottle or fowling piece, rescued, Crusoe-fashion, from a sinking ship. (89)

  Lightheartedness might become more difficult to achieve, but Peter’s ability to jabber on remorselessly and inanely does not desert him. Several times in this novel, Sayers allows Peter to rise to heights of blither that have to be fully read to be believed. An especially notable point arrives when Peter demands to know Charles Parker’s intentions regarding his sister Mary, a throwback to Victorian conventions made necessary not by Mary’s expectations but rather Parker’s. Peter and Charles are on opposite sides in this particular case, a situation that both find a little awkward, but this does not stop Wimsey from urging Parker to join the family:

  “For the last five years or so,” said Wimsey, “you have been looking like a demented sheep at my sister, and starting like a rabbit whenever her name is mentioned. What do you mean by it? It is not ornamental. It is not exhilarating. You unnerve the poor girl. You give me a poor idea of your guts, if you will pardon the expression. A man doesn’t like to see a man go all wobbly about his sister—at least, not with such a prolonged wobble. It’s unsightly. It’s irritating. Why not slap the manly thorax and say ‘Peter, my dear old mangel-wurzel, I have decided to dig myself into the old family trench and be a brother to you?’ What’s stopping you? . . . Cough up the difficulty, old thing, and we will have it removed in a plain van. Now then!” (166)

  Encouraged by the sincere message beneath this blither, Parker dissolves his Victorian reluctance to intrude himself into the aristocracy; he and Mary both are aggravatingly grateful to Lord Peter. Wimsey finds it difficult to remain lighthearted in the presence of the “imbecile happiness” (169) of the now-devoted couple. His own chosen still faces the executioner.

  During this same Christmas season, Peter discovers that he is to stand up with Freddy Arbuthnot, who, after seven years, is finally going to marry the late Sir Reuben Levy’s daughter, Rachel, in a synagogue. Sayers thus succeeds in tying up all the significant loose ends of past romance in the series within the space of forty pages. Undoubtedly she wished to remove all potential distraction from the critical romance of future stories, that of Peter and Harriet. Possibly, too, she merely wished to provide some happiness to at least some of her characters, given what was happening to Peter—and to herself.

  Blindly searching about for some handle on the death of Philip Boyes, Wimsey is forced once again to call upon the assistance of Marjorie Phelps, his guide to London’s Bohemia. Peter rightly feels embarrassed asking Marjorie to help him rescue his one and only, but with only a month to investigate, scruples of any kind have to go to the wall. He and Marjorie sally forth into the Bloomsbury district, keeping the taxi waiting just in case. What follows is one of the most marvelous burlesques in popular literature. Sayers had previously intimated much about Bohemia. This time she provided the reader a genuine taste.

  The first stop is at the Kropotkys’—“pro-Boyes, Bolshevik and musical” (81)—where Peter wishes to interview Boyes’s best (only?) friend, Ryland Vaughan. The atmosphere is beyond reckoning. The heat stifles, kippers simmer in an open pan, a piano and violin duo perform a clashing tone piece on “the Piccadilly Tube Station,” and the uncountable crowd converses through the murk in shouts by necessity. Entering into the spirit of the thing, Peter finds himself condemning the diatonic scale and the octave as sentimental conventions of the bourgeoisie. Marjorie drags him off to meet Vaughan, who is seated morosely on the floor “eating caviare out of a jar with a pickle fork” (84). With little urging, Vaughan plunges into bitter reminiscence about Boyes. He has no doubt that Harriet Vane poisoned his friend. In saying so, he reveals something very significant about Bohemia: “Oh, she did it all right. Sheer, beastly spite and jealousy, that’s all there was to it. Just because she couldn’t write anything but tripe herself. Harriet Vane’s got the bug all these damned women have got—fancy they can do things. They hate a man and they hate his work. You’d think it would have been enough for her to help and look after a genius like Phil, wouldn’t you?” (84–85) This monologue has shades of George Fentiman. Yes, even in the Bloomsbury District, men could find it difficult to accept that women had brains, ability, or the wherewithal to do far more than serve some man, genius or not.

  The fact was, for all its playing at Bolshevism and its discussion of freedom from traditional structures, the vanguard of art and literature in London during the period was itself mostly molded by convention. The freedom to experiment with both form and content, to push the culture in new and (seemingly) outrageous directions, was there. Surely it was happening elsewhere, even before the war. Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, a step into uncharted artistic territory, had been performed in London by the Ballet Russes, to a mixed response, in the spring of 1913. In Spain, Picasso was dissolving the conventions of sketchboard and canvas. James Joyce (an Irishman, of course), had published Dubliners in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, and Ulysses in 1922. William Butler Yeats (another Irishman) began his career employing the conventional poetic forms but shifted to a dramatic modernism not long before the Great War. T. S. Eliot (an American, God forbid) published the modernist poetical masterpiece, The Waste Land, in 1922. And Virginia Woolf (a Briton, but not one who had served in the trenches) added a feminist perspective to the modernist approach in novels such as Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To The Lighthouse (1927). What these artists shared was an intimate sense of limited audience—the mass culture would never understand them; they were doomed to misunderstanding and alienation.44

  The influence of this modernist outpouring on Britain was surprisingly minimal. As much as anything, this was due to the power of association—the modernist critique was too intimately identified with a Prussian kultur that emphasized a love of technology, a breaking free from the limitations defined by the historical past, and an embrace of mythic images. To the conservative Briton, this conjured up visions of sacrilegious Hunnish fantasy and sexual deviance. When D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow was published in 1915, the book was banned under the Defense of the Realm Act for just those reasons. Germany—and Germanness, even more so—was the great enemy. Though the war itself would lead to severe doubts regarding traditiona
l British cultural values, the sheer price of victory made most Britishers—even the avant garde—reluctant to embrace kultur too openly. The result was a most tepid embrace of modernism among the cultural adventurers practicing in Britain.45

  This is best illustrated by the careers of the “war poets”: Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Herbert Read, Robert Graves. These men shared much of the modernist vision: the attack on form, the breaking of convention, the rejection of tradition. All had been practiced adepts of the familiar forms of English poetry before the war. The experience of the war itself smashed this out of them, left them groping for forms and expression that could in some way convey the madness they experienced. Take, for example, the third stanza of Wilfred Owen’s “Insensibility”:

  Happy are those who lose imagination:

  They have enough to carry with ammunition,

  Their Spirit drags no pack.

  Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache.

  Having seen all things red,

  Their eyes are rid

  Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.

  And terror’s first constriction over,

  Their hearts remain small-drawn.

  Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle

  Now long since ironed,

  Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.46

  This is a fractured poetry: the uneven metre, approximate rhyme scheme, and clanging imagery, the elusive to nonexistent structure; these are not according to Lord Tennyson’s tastes. Yet it was the war that created the need for such a harsh poetic landscape, as men educated in the conventions found them lacking for the situation. Driven by horror and artistry, they invented. The red smeared the vision, tortured the verse.

  The war poets wrote for a very exclusive club, however. Peter Wimsey was a member, as were Mervyn Bunter and the Fentiman brothers. These were the men who had served in the trenches and knew firsthand the emotive images the poets tried so hard to capture on paper. Like the modernists, the war poets wrote essentially for one another and others like them; there was no hope or expectation of communicating with the mass audience of nonveterans, especially women. They were, both in their art and their experience of the war, alienated men.47

  Little of this new war poetry found publication during the war itself, but several of the poets produced (or, in the case of those who died in the war, had produced) collections during the 1920s. Their appeal was minimal. To the educated, the work was too much at variance with accepted convention; to the mass, it attempted to communicate an experience most had not shared or would just as soon forget. At best, they prepared the path for Yeats and Eliot, true modernists intruding from outside the culture. At worst, not one of them was accepted as a true British poet, then or since. These were the sons of Britain with the greatest affinity for the modernist stance. Britain simply tolerated them.48

  And so even the freewheeling discussions of “free love, D. H. Lawrence, the prurience of prudery and the immoral significance of long skirts”49—the Bloomsbury set so familiar to Dorothy L. Sayers, Marjorie Phelps and Harriet Vane—could produce little of lasting value. Within Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf struggled determinedly for the common cause of women, but there were too many copies of Philip Boyes and Ryland Vaughan and John Cournos in this bunch. Shockingly conventional in their unconventionality, these were men barren of real inspiration or real genius. It was better to write standard detective fiction, write it well, and take pride in this constrained creation.

  Every reactionary inspires an action, and the Bloomsbury world of Harriet Vane proved the rule. Anxious to obtain a more or less complete understanding of this particular world, Peter allows Marjorie Phelps to lead him to Joey Trimble’s, the stronghold of Harriet’s supporters. This is exactly the same show—chaotic heat producing little light—save that Harriet’s most fervent friends are not present; Sylvia Marriott has sprained her ankle. They find her at home with Eiluned Price, the antithesis of Ryland Vaughan. “Eiluned’s anti-man,” Sylvia explains, “but a very reliable person” (91).

  Eiluned Price, whose artistic talents are suggested but not revealed, is indeed fed up with male types, especially the ones to be found in Bloomsbury. She is willing to abide Peter only because he is going about the positive good of clearing Harriet. Still, she tests him, demanding to know if he needs “masculine refreshment,” refusing to allow him the gentlemanly act of carrying the tea kettle. Peter adjusts, adopting “an attitude of passive decoration,” and manages to draw Price’s perspective on the Vane-Boyes relationship:

  “There never was much money, except what Harriet made. The ridiculous public didn’t appreciate Phil Boyes. He couldn’t forgive her that, you know.”

  “Didn’t it come in useful?”

  “Of course, but he resented it all the same. She ought to have been ministering to his work, not making money for them both with her own independent trash. But that’s men all over. . . . Women geniuses don’t get coddled, . . . so they learn not to expect it.” (92–93)

  Harriet Vane’s bitterness ran deeper than even the crushing disappointment of her failed love affair. A woman of talent, she understood all too well that her own genius was largely unappreciated among her peers. This was the quality she shared most with her creator: her determination to follow her own muse in the face of opposition and ridicule. Unlike Eiluned Price, Harriet had not allowed her bitterness to become complete. She would not stoop to hate the men of her own set. She did draw strength from the few women who defied the classic sexual bigotry of Bloomsbury males, just as Sayers drew strength from her female friends. Even Bohemia still wore Victorian blinders; women of talent needed to support one another as much as they could.

  What kind of match is that of Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey? In Strong Poison, it is very difficult to tell. The thing they most visibly share is the shadow of the hangman’s noose, an arresting reminder both of Harriet’s ill luck and Peter’s peculiar talent. For as long as Harriet remains in that harsh and ominous shadow, she cannot really be herself: “‘I used to piffle rather well myself,’ said Harriet, with tears in her eyes, ‘but it’s got knocked out of me. You know—I was really meant to be a cheerful person—all this gloom and suspicion isn’t the real me. But I’ve lost my nerve somehow.’” (123–24). In this situation, Peter cannot be his true self either. He regards it as an obligation to lift the spirits of the prisoner, but this forces him to be cheerful and light. What could Harriet learn of him from that? His own real mood was a mix of melancholy and anxiety verging on terror, but he must carefully mask this in Harriet’s presence. There can be no real chance of love between the two until the shadow of the noose is lifted.

  Unfortunately, even that will not smooth the path. Had Charles Parker found the evidence to save Harriet Vane, Peter’s suit might have stood some more immediate chance. As it was, it is none other than Peter who saves Harriet’s life. Dorothy L. Sayers, a novelist first, mystery writer second, and romantic a distant third, recognized the difficulty:

  I could not marry Peter off to the young woman he had (in the conventional Perseus manner) rescued from death and infamy, because I could find no form of words in which she could accept him without loss of self-respect. I had landed my chief two puppets in a situation where, according to all the conventional rules of detective fiction, they should have had nothing to do but fall into one another’s arms; but they would not do it, and that for a very good reason. When I looked at the situation I saw that it was in every respect false and degrading; and the puppets had somehow got just so much flesh and blood in them that I could not force them to accept it without shocking myself.50

  There was no choice. Peter and Harriet would have to build an honest relationship from scratch after the prison ordeal ended. Sayers understood and accepted this challenge, eventually writing three additional Wimsey-Vane novels to provide sufficient room for love to bloom properly. But first, Peter had to grow a bit on his own. Sayers gave him the rest of 1930 to accomplis
h that, setting two additional novels in the months following his initial rejection by Harriet Vane.51

  On the face of the evidence, Dorothy L. Sayers seems to have been less than anxious to tackle the job. The Five Red Herrings, the sixth in the series of Lord Peter novels, finds a relentlessly cheerful Wimsey on his yearly pilgrimage to Scotland for fishing and golf. There is no mention of Harriet Vane, almost no sign of the restless and conflicted soul that Sayers was fashioning for her detective. She finished the novel in just a few months following completion of Strong Poison. Gollancz published the novel in January 1931.

  Only once in the story does Peter give voice to the issues facing the inner man. One of the six artists suspected of murdering Sandy Campbell is Hugh Farren, a hot-tempered Scotsman married to a cool, pretty, and astonishingly thick-headed woman named Gilda. Farren has unfortunately run off at just the wrong moment; his actions may be construed as those of a man guilty of murder. In his determination to find Hugh Farren, Peter questions Hugh’s wife relentlessly, driving her to give the game away by insulting her sense of self-respect. The interrogation turns on their differing ideas of proper behavior in marriage.

  Gilda Farren claims to be the perfect wife: “‘I have been faithful to him,’ said Mrs. Farren, with rising temper. ‘I have worked to keep the house beautiful and—and to make it a place of refreshment and inspiration. I have done all I could to further his ambitions. I have borne my share of the household expenses—’ Here she seemed suddenly to become aware of a tinge of bathos and went on hurriedly, ‘You may think all this is nothing, but it means sacrifice and hard work.’”52 All well and fine, but the difficulty is that Mrs. Farren is unable to see the world through her husband’s eyes. Though she had been faithful, she had opened the refreshing and inspiring doors of her home to Sandy Campbell, not comprehending why this drove Hugh Farren wild with jealousy. To Gilda, this was no more than a hurtful display of mistrust on her husband’s part; it is indecent “to believe vile things of other people” (177). Wimsey understands that the jealousy is something profoundly different: a soul-revealing demonstration of how much Farren loves her. Wrapped up in her own narrowly defined virtue, Mrs. Farren is too obtuse to see it that way.