Conundrums for the Long Week-End

by Robert Kuhn McGregor

  Dorothy L. Sayers had been hard put to bring Peter to this pass. Ever since she had failed to marry him off at the close of Strong Poison, she had struggled to humanize her main character. Sayers summarized the process in the essay “Gaudy Night,” written in 1937:

  The thing seemed difficult, but not impossible. When I came to examine the patient, he showed the embryonic buds of a character of sorts. Even at the beginning he had not been the complete silly ass: he had only played the silly ass, which was not the same thing. He had had shell-shock and a vaguely embittered love affair; he had a mother and a friend and a sketchy sort of brother and sister; he had literary and musical tastes, and a few well-defined opinions and feelings; and a little tidying-up of dates and places would put his worldly affairs in order. The prognosis seemed fairly favorable; so I laid him out firmly on the operating-table and chipped away at his internal mechanism through three longish books. At the end of the process he was five years older than he was in Strong Poison, and twelve years older than he was when he started. If, during the period, he had altered and mellowed a little, I felt I could reasonably point out that most human beings are mellowed by age. One of the first results of the operation was an indignant letter from a female reader of Gaudy Night asking, What had happened to Peter? he had lost all his elfin charm. I replied that any man who retained elfin charm at the age of forty-five should be put in a lethal chamber. Indeed, Peter escaped that lethal chamber by inches.19

  For the most part, Sayers’s operation on Peter Wimsey’s character resulted in a considerable enhancement of his abilities. By 1935 Peter had acquired both a soul and a host of new physical and mental strengths; he had become virtually impregnable, the ultimate male animal. It is no surprise that Harriet Vane should suffer from feelings of inferiority.

  For Harriet, the uncompromising tradition that is Oxford stands as a refuge from the heady demands of Peter Wimsey’s world, “the swift, rattling, chattering, excitable and devilishly upsetting world of strain and uproar” (231). For years, Harriet has understood Peter to be exclusively the man of London, with all the habits and outlook of the numbingly modern town. To choose Peter, she assumes, is to leave behind the beckoning peace of Oxford. However, in Gaudy Night, Peter suddenly chooses to expose his own aversions to the modern. Exhausted and frightened by his diplomatic missions abroad, he must explain to Harriet both the fears and the bitterness wrought by the experience. The politicians are nothing but charlatans, full of “haste and violence and all that ghastly, slippery cleverness” (287). How he wishes he could root himself in Oxford’s traditions, in its sincere and unstinting quest for knowledge and honest truth. He knows it cannot be done.

  Putting off a discussion of the poison pen, Peter next exposes his “one really shameful weakness” when Harriet explains that she had recognized Peter’s nephew because of the family resemblance in their hands. This is Peter’s most private conceit; he is inordinately proud of possessing the Wimsey hands. In fact, he is proud of the entire Wimsey family tradition and concerned that his nephew will sell it all to Hollywood. For all his embrace of the modern, and for all his fast cars, west-end fashions, lavish international lifestyle, for all his relentless, forward-looking escape in criminology, Peter is in part a traditionalist, wedded as much to Denver and to Oxford as to London. In fact, as he eventually confesses, his life is “a balance of opposing forces.” Harriet is stunned. “She had fought him for five years, and found nothing but his strength; now, within half an hour, he had exposed all his weaknesses, one after the other” (289–90).

  The process continues. Twice in five minutes, while peaceably punting on the river, Peter is forced to warn Harriet away from matters too personal. She recognizes his affinity for John Donne and his proclivity “to get drunk on words.” Next, she surmises correctly that he has “a passion for the unattainable,” namely a desire for beauty measured by balance and order. Peter has to keep changing the subject. Just what does he see in Harriet? Ultimately he admits that he loves her for her “devastating talent for keeping to the point and speaking the truth.” “I have been running away from myself for twenty years, and it doesn’t work,” he admits.

  Even in the five years or so that she had known him, Harriet had seen him strip off his protections, layer by layer, till there was uncommonly little left but the naked truth.

  That, then, was what he wanted her for. For some reason, obscure to herself and probably also to him, she had the power to force him outside his defenses. Perhaps, seeing her struggling in a trap of circumstance, he had walked out deliberately to her assistance. Or perhaps the sight of her struggles had warned him what might happen to him, if he remained in a trap of his own making. (309, 371–72)

  Harriet had too long assumed that he saw nothing of her at all, but rather some phantasm of his own imagination, a creature molded by his own inductive triumph: a prize for his magnanimity. By exposing his weaknesses, Peter has allowed her to glimpse her own strengths.

  Peter Wimsey is a dashed clever fellow, but he must take care to avoid his most common failing: trying to be too clever. At all costs, he has to learn to accept Harriet as she is and not attempt to force the situation. Any exchange of inner emotions must come naturally. One of the few openings Harriet provides is to include her own half-completed sonnet among the papers recording the work of the poison pen. (“A schoolgirl trick” [370], she berates herself.) Encountering Harriet’s octave, Peter cannot resist adding the necessary sestet to complete the sonnet.

  Imbibing that sense of surety only an Oxford spring can provide, Harriet’s octave, on the surface, is a celebration of a world at peace: “To that still centre where the spinning world / Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.” Accidentally discovering this octave some weeks afterward, Peter discerns in the eight lines Harriet’s true temperament. For all its acclamation of “the heart of rest,” much of the octave registers the turmoil she seeks to leave behind, both in its images and its rhythm. Peter responds with a sestet revealing Harriet’s underlying agitation, turning her “peaceful humming top” into a “whip-top” that accepts the necessity of rest only in the sense that tension is at rest in the core of music:

  Lay on thy whips, O love, that we upright,

  Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed

  May sleep, as tension at the verberant core

  Of music sleeps . . . (395)

  “A very conceited, metaphysical conclusion,” Peter writes for Harriet to read. Just as Harriet has demonstrated an uncanny ability to step into Peter’s mind, Peter has suggested that he too can perceive her true inward thoughts, at times better than she can herself. This communication through the sonnet inspires Harriet to reflect on Peter’s steadfast decency in all his dealings with her; though he possesses the ability, he has avoided trespassing on her personal ground. The truth is that Peter has sacrificed a good deal of himself to build an honest foundation between them. Realizing this, Harriet can only admit that her own conduct over the years has been less than lovely. Sayers closes this reverie with the observation that it “goes to prove that even minor poetry may have its practical uses” (370–73).

  There remained two scores to settle, two stumbling blocks that Peter must remove—by not acting. For Harriet, the chief impediment to falling in love with Peter is that infernal debt of gratitude; she owes him her life. Peter must find some way to restore that life to her. Peter’s own burden is a deeply felt regret, guilt for his actions in the first days after meeting Harriet. He must also find some way to atone for that.

  Strangely, the poltergeist provides him the necessary opportunity. For much of the case, Peter is nowhere in evidence. Hearing that Harriet has embarked on a dangerous investigation, he neither flies to her side nor offers protection or even counsel. He merely wishes her well, observing that “If you have put anything in hand, disagreeableness and danger will not turn you back, and God forbid they should” (222). Peter has learned that Harriet must run her life as she sees fit, no matter the circum
stances.20

  Even when she does send for him, bowing to his superior investigative experience, he is careful both to acknowledge her skill and to give her room to pursue the case in her own fashion. Fully comprehending that the poltergeist is preparing to do violence, he will not offer his protection, hold her hand, or take her away. Instead, he teaches her self defense and buys her a collar to protect her “arum lily” neck from throttling fingers. In the meanwhile, he challenges her to write the true detective novel that she is capable of creating. Harriet finds him “about as protective as a can-opener” (386, 311).

  That is the point. He cannot win her love by being protective. To give Harriet her life back, he must stand by and watch as she runs the risks she chooses. When she does end up nearly murdered, he can only thank God it was no worse. Stitched and bandaged, she is her own woman at last, free to marry Peter on equal terms or banish him forever. He has signified for good and all that he will not interfere with her private ground.

  Now there remained the matter of apology. Five years before, Peter had begun this strange, intricate dance of the emotions on the wrong foot. Aristocratically accustomed to getting what he wanted, he had pursued Harriet from the day he first set eyes on her—in court, struggling for her life. His own selfishness had inspired him to unforgivable sin; he wished to possess her when she did not possess herself. Now he is deeply ashamed of that behavior: “It has taken me a long time to learn my lesson, Harriet. I have had to pull down, brick by brick, the barriers I had built up by my own selfishness and folly. If, in all these years, I have managed to get back to the point at which I ought to have started, will you tell me so and give me leave to begin again?” (465)

  In turn, Harriet offers Peter what she has been most loath to give him: her gratitude, both for saving her life and for giving it back to her. All the scores are settled at last.

  Peter then asks, not for her hand in marriage, but for a date. The next evening, after briefly consigning their souls to the magic of Bach, the two stroll by the river. For the first time since coming to Oxford, for the first time seriously in several years, Peter Wimsey asks Harriet Vane to marry him. True to the dream that is Oxford, Harriet signifies in the traditions of assenting, approving academe. Mystery-reading England breathed a collective sigh of relief.

  By the time Gaudy Night appeared, Dorothy L. Sayers had enmeshed herself in a comfortable and comforting web of friends, fans, and supporters, all of whom shared an enthusiasm for the Wimsey saga. Among the varied participants, the most steady and dependable were longtime friend Muriel St. Clare Byrne, now a successful playwright, Byrne’s housemate, Marjorie Barber, and a new acquaintance, novelist Helen Simpson. Sayers also received thoughtful encouragement from her Aunt Maud Leigh, who still shared the home in Witham, serving as a buffer between Sayers and Fleming. Aunt Maud had taken special interest in the predicament of Harriet Vane, offering Sayers invaluable perspective and advice.

  In informal meetings and correspondence, Dorothy L. Sayers shared her thoughts on future direction for the series, cheerfully debated bones of contention and character, and encouraged collateral creativity. This slowly evolving “Wimsey industry” compensated for some of the comraderie and warmth denied Sayers by her unfortunate marriage. If her husband could little appreciate the magnitude of her accomplishments, her friends made up for him to some degree.21

  Perhaps the most important fruit of this informal discussion group was a fleshing out of Peter’s history. As part of her effort to “chip away” at his character, Sayers participated in several correspondences speculating on Peter Wimsey’s past, including his early family life, his education, his first love affairs, and his service in the war. Apart from the material woven into the later Wimsey novels, Sayers saw fit to summarize some of this material in a “biographical note” appended to new editions of the first four Wimsey novels, re-issued by Gollancz in 1935.22

  Ostensibly written by Peter’s lecherous old Uncle Paul Austin Delagardie (his mother’s brother), the “note” explains many of the early experiences that shaped Peter’s character and career. The second son of the fifteenth Duke of Denver, Peter was wholly unlike his father, “all nerves and nose,” but at least possessed of a brain. His schoolmates at Eton called him “Flimsy” until he emerged as a natural cricketer and became “the fashion.” Delagardie assumes credit for teaching Peter a proper taste in wine, food, and clothing; he saw also to his sexual education in Paris. Peter then went up to Oxford “with a scholarship to read History at Balliol,” and there became “rather intolerable,” affecting a monocle and the air of an aesthete. Romance intervened, for good and bad. Peter fell heavily for Barbara, “a child of seventeen,” and was saved from marriage only by her parents’ decision that she was too young. He was still waiting when the Great War came. Acquitting himself well as an officer, Peter returned on leave to discover Barbara married to someone else. He returned to the front with the firm intention of getting killed but was instead promoted and decorated for intelligence work. Blown up and buried near Caudry in 1918, he came home with a nervous breakdown. The next two years were touch and go, but with the help of Bunter, Peter pulled himself together. Delagardie recalled the Peter of the immediate postwar period: “I don’t mind saying that I was prepared for almost anything. He had lost all his beautiful frankness, he shut everybody out of his confidence, including his mother and me, adopted an impenetrable frivolity of manner and a dilettante pose, and became, in fact, the complete comedian.” Then came the theft of the Attenbury emeralds. Joining forces with Charles Parker, Peter applied the skills honed in intelligence to track the thief. A hobby was born—a hobby that became the career Sayers tracked through ten novels and sixteen short stories through 1935.23

  The “Wimsey industry” acquired a new direction in February 1935, when an authority on heraldry by the name of Wilfrid Scott-Giles wrote to Sayers, inquiring after the Wimsey coat of arms described in her later novels. Utterly mock serious, Scott-Giles speculated that the Wimsey heraldry bore the marks of a great antiquity calling for investigation. Sayers replied in kind, and the two began to spin a history of the Wimsey family stretching back into medieval times. Muriel St. Clare Byrne and Helen Simpson joined in, and a lively game ensued. The group produced a series of pamphlets (“Papers Relating to the Family of Wimsey”) for private distribution, and they even delivered lectures on the subject. Some of this material made its way into the novel Busman’s Honeymoon, while Scott-Giles edited his correspondence with Sayers for eventual publication as The Wimsey Family.24 “Our beautiful game,” as Sayers referred to this exercise, was a good deal of fun, but it was a private entertainment, adding little substance to Peter Wimsey, the character solving the popular mysteries.25

  A far more salient product of the Wimsey industry was a story that became both Sayers’s first play and the last completed novel to feature Lord Peter. Even as Sayers struggled to complete Gaudy Night, she gave considerable attention to the development of its sequel, Busman’s Honeymoon—plotting and creating dialogue for Peter and Harriet’s honeymoon in the country even as she labored to bring them into one another’s arms at Oxford. She kept the materials pertinent to each project in separate rooms at her house in Witham.

  The seed that became Busman’s Honeymoon germinated at a luncheon party in London early in 1935. To amuse Muriel St. Clare Byrne and Marjorie Barber, Sayers recounted an astonishing encounter with a chimney sweep. The sweep, a chubby little man, wore any number of pullovers which he pulled off one by one as the work got hotter. Sayers capped the anecdote by wishing she could put the fellow in a play. “Why don’t you?” was St. Clare Byrne’s reply. A collaboration was born.26

  Each of the co-authors brought special skills to the task. Agreeing to build the play around a murder occurring on Peter and Harriet’s honeymoon placed Sayers firmly on home ground. Thoroughly familiar both with the traits of the main characters and the fundamentals of good mystery writing, Sayers constructed the essence of the play. Muriel St. C
lare Byrne, the experienced playwright, shaped the action to the needs of the stage, honing the dialogue, heightening the drama at the close of each act, and sharpening the visual impact of the murder method. It was a most fruitful cooperation, each allowing full expression of the other’s complementary skills.

  Sayers felt her way slowly, taking three months to rough out the play’s first act. Plotting for the stage was very different from writing a mystery for the printed page; in some ways posing the puzzle proved easier, in others far more difficult. On the stage, the material remains of some murder device are simply a part of the scenery, there for the audience to see should they choose to exercise their detective ability. In the novel, such a device must be described, drawing the reader’s attention to its existence. On the other hand, the scope of the setting in the novel is as wide as the author’s imagination and ability. Action in virtually all of Sayers’s books takes place in an array of geographic locations, each enhancing the impact of the mystery and its resolution in some way. In a play, the action must be confined to a very limited number of settings, readily producible on a very material stage. The action is far more geographically focused.

  Originating as a play, Busman’s Honeymoon was shaped by the conventions of the stage. The number of potential suspects was severely limited (four, really), and much of the investigation had to take place in the form of dialogue, there being little latitude for abstruse scientific analyses, elaborate shadowing of suspects, extended research into legal documents, or other such trappings of the detective novel. Moreover, Sayers and St. Clare Byrne chose to describe their play as “A Detective Comedy in Three Acts.” Later, Sayers would subtitle the novel “A Love Story with Detective Interruptions.” The emphasis was to be on the lighthearted happiness of the newly married couple, counterpointed by the clumsy investigation necessitated by the discovery of a murdered corpse in their basement. The origin of the entire business, after all, was the comic antics of a chimney sweep who wore too much clothing.27