ROMEO.
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
JULIET.
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in pray’r.
ROM.
O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do, They pray—grant thou lest faith turn to despair.
JUL.
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
ROM.
Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.
(Romeo and Juliet, I.v.101–5)
Harriet and Peter fashion an Italian, or Petrarchan, sonnet. This form, broken into octave and sestet, affords the more mature couple room to meander mentally. Like Romeo, Peter takes the lead part by answering Harriet. As Juliet does, however, so Harriet owns the implicit extra “line” determining rejection or acceptance.
Wimsey’s gloss beneath the piece—“A very conceited, metaphysical conclusion!”—points to a device by which ostensible disparities are joined through revelation of their likeness. The effect on the reader may be paraphrased thus: “What?! How could—O yes, of course, I see now.” Lodged in lines 9–12, Peter’s conceit (Renaissance parlance for ingenious idea) operates just so. A lover’s sleep seems not, at first, “tension” fraught; yet on reflection, restive repose limns perfectly the intellectually stimulating, even playfully volatile, interaction of a sophisticated pair.
The image turns the entire sonnet into a conceit, as Harriet and Peter match harmoniously, though her octave and his sestet seem initially opposed. Lord Sestet has in fact discerned Miss Octave’s true temperament. For as we have alluded in the text, though she lauds “the heart of rest,” Harriet expends considerable creative energy on rendering that turmoil she protests to leave behind. “Wings furled” denotes a bird not flying—but at rest? Her rhythm, too, is agitated by trochees, the stress/light accent pattern that reverses the more soothing iambic unit (“Hére thĕn”, “Fóldig”, “Hére i clóse pĕrfúme”); and by spondees, units of consecutive stresses, which elongate intensity (“Hére nó tíde rúns”; “wíde zóne”; “stíll cén[tĕr]”).
Of course, the sestet does nothing to conceal its agitation, Peter having purposely turned the “peaceful, humming-top [in]to a whip-top . . . sleeping, as it were, on compulsion.” Hence, the “drugged, drowsy,” monosyllabic final half-line that Harriet laments is a matter of necessity: a finely crafted means of curbing the momentum of a “staggering” (Sir Philip Sidneyan) three-line fall: “For, if thou spare to smite, / Staggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead, / And, dying so, sleep our sweet sleep no more.”2 The characters’ success coincides with that of their author, for all three have performed a speech-act. Peter (and Sayers) intimate his need for a precarious stability; Harriet (and Sayers) display her corresponding disposition.
We turn now to significant epigraphs. What follows we acknowledge as highly speculative but, like criminal detection, literary criticism oughtn’t to overlook the circumstantial.
Prefacing chapter four with Shakespeare’s eighty-ninth sonnet neatly foreshadows, with a difference, Harriet and Peter’s sonnet:
Thou canst not, Love, disgrace me half so ill,
To set a form upon desired change,
As I’ll myself disgrace, knowing thy will:
I will acquaintance strangle and look strange,
Be absent from thy walks, and in my tongue
Thy sweet beloved name no more shall dwell,
Lest I, too much profane, should do it wrong,
And haply of our old acquaintance tell.
By quoting eight lines, Sayers suggestively leaves us a sestet to research. Her inclusion of the middle quatrains should not dissuade us from connecting the first four lines with the last two. (We’re dealing, remember, with an inventor of codes, as in the Have His Carcase puzzler solved by a schema somewhat similar to the fill-in-the-blank method here endorsed.) The epigraph’s relevance (which justifies citation in the first place) goes without saying. Yet the six-line answer rings more relevantly still:
Say that thou dids’t forsake me for some fault,
And I will comment upon that offense.
Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt,
Against thy reasons making no defense. . . .
For thee, against myself I’ll vow debate,
For I must ne’er love him whom thou dost hate.
(Sonnet 89, ll. 1–4, 13–14)
Peter is ever “commenting on his own offenses”—and this blither more closely endears him to Harriet and compensates in some respect for the failings that prompt the chatter. The strategy, moreover, is disarming. How chastise one for lameness once the accused party has halted? “For thee, against myself I’ll vow,” indeed.
Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness,
Some say thy grace is youth and gentle sport;
Both grace and faults are loved of more and less;
Thou makes faults graces that to thee resort.
The epigraph to chapter ten (209), culled from Shakespeare’s ninety-sixth sonnet (ll. 1–4), comments blithely on Saint-George, ransomed over and again by dear Uncle Peter. The final couplet may well articulate (and by its absence from the epigraph, enact) what oft his Lordship thought, though ne’er so well expressed:3 “But do not so, I love thee in such sort, / As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.” (And these lines, incidentally, stand out in Shakespeare’s canon because they conclude two sonnets, 96 and 36: “Let me confess that we too must be twain, . . .”). Deduction: As incorrigible as the Viscount is his uncle’s generosity.
Our whimsy fans us still further—beyond the novel’s bounds, though within (we hope) the yard of telling comparison. The publication of Auden’s sonnet postdates Gaudy Night by one year; even so, the resonance proves difficult to ignore.
“The great man,” Harriet reflects, with more than a little cheek intended toward that personage, “could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all” (53). With similar irreverance, Auden wrote:
Who’s Who
A shilling life will give you all the facts:
How Father beat him, how he ran away,
What were the struggles of his youth, what acts
Made him the greatest figure of his day:
Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,
Though giddy, climbed new mountains, named a sea:
Some of the last researchers even write
Love made him weep his pints like you and me.
With all his honours on, he sighed for one
Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;
Did little jobs about the house with skill
And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still
Or potter round the garden; answered some
Of his long marvelous letters but kept none.4
While consistent with Harriet’s sarcasm, this sestet reads antithetically to that in the Vane-Wimsey sonnet. The opposition is semantic and structural. The woman is portrayed in Auden’s last half-dozen lines; conversely, Peter authors their sestet—and he bears no resemblance to the supposed “great man” who, in “Who’s Who,” is maudlin (“Love made him weep his pints”); and fatuous. (Who—excepting “Who”—runs about naming seas these days? For “figure” one can read “cipher”; “fought, fished, hunted, worked all night” reads like filler in a drugstore “shilling life” biography; and “giddy”ness is prominently featured.) Harriet could never abide such a man, nor could Peter abide being such. He would honor her, rather, by complementing her accomplishment with his own.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Sayers wrote her last Wimsey story, “Talboys,” in 1942. This work remained unpublished in her lifetime. See Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter: A Collection of All the Lord Peter Wimsey Stories, comp. James Sandoe (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 431–53.
2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Jazz
Age (New York: New Directions, 1996), 13.
3. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918–1939 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1963).
4. Among the better examinations of Sayers’s mystery writings are James Bernard Burleson, “A Study of the Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1965); Mary Brian Durkin, Dorothy L. Sayers (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), 27–100; and Dawson Gaillard, Dorothy L. Sayers (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981).
5. For an angry critique of Sayers’s fiction in the context of the postwar era, see Martin Green, “The Detection of a Snob: Martin Green on Lord Peter Wimsey,” The Listener 69 (Mar. 14, 1963): 461, 464. A broader perspective on the same issue, one that discusses Sayers’s work in passing, is Colin Watson, Snobbery with Violence: Crime Stories and Their Audience (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1971).
6. The transition from the traditional to the modern is examined in fascinating and challenging detail in Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1989). The historical framework on which this book rests is supplied largely by Eksteins and by Graves and Hodge, The Long Week-End. In the pages to follow, we sketch the general political history of Britain and Europe during the era, essentially to remind readers of what was going on in the larger world. We make no claim to original or exhaustive research in these areas. Reference notes should be regarded as little more than suggestions for further reading.
7. One discussion of Sayers’s use of real news stories in her works is Sharyn McCrumb, “Where the Bodies are Buried: The Real Murder Cases in the Crime Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers,” in Dorothy L. Sayers: The Centennial Celebration, ed. Alzina Stone Dale (New York: Walker and Company, 1993), 87–98.
8. For a readily accessible celebration of Sayers’s endurance, see Carolyn Heilbrun, “Reappraisals: Sayers, Lord Peter and God,” reprinted in Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter: A Collection of All the Lord Peter Wimsey Stories, comp. James Sandoe (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 431–46.
9. Terrance L. Lewis addresses the problem of treating Lord Peter as a real person in his study, Dorothy L. Sayers’ Wimsey and Interwar British Society (Lewiston, Me.: Edwin Mellon Press, 1994), v. Lewis’s book pioneers the study of Wimsey in historic context. His discussions of Sayers’s perspective on the English class system and the effects of “the Slump” are especially enlightening. (See pp. 15–56.)
10. A term for the imaginary which Sayers employs on several occasions. A good example may be found in the “Author’s Note” in Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (1936; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), vi. For the sake of consistency, all references to Sayers’s fiction will be made to the HarperPerennial edition, unless otherwise noted.
11. For Terrance L. Lewis on the war, see Sayers’ Wimsey, 1–14.
12. Terrance L. Lewis treats “The Changing Status of Women” in Sayers’ Wimsey, 57–74.
13. See Eksteins, Rites of Spring, for an elaboration of this argument.
14. Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison (1930; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 88.
15. Terrance L. Lewis considers “Politics and the Changing World” in Sayers’ Wimsey, 89–96.
16. Graves and Hodge, The Long Week-End, 291.
1. LORD PETER BEGINS A CAREER
1. In compiling the biographical details of Dorothy L. Sayers for this work, we have made lavish use of seven different biographies, each with its strengths and weaknesses. These are, in order of publication: Janet Hitchman, Such a Strange Lady: A Biography of Dorothy L. Sayers (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); Alzina Stone Dale, Maker and Craftsman: The Story of Dorothy L. Sayers (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1978); Ralph E. Hone, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Literary Biography (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979); James Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography (New York: Charles P. Scribner’s Sons, 1981); Catherine Kenney, The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990); David Coomes, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Careless Rage for Life (Batavia, Ill.: Lion Publishing, 1992); Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). It is generally surprising how little space is devoted to the development of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels in any of these. Frankly, we regard Barbara Reynolds’s book as far and away the best of the seven, and we will cite her work generally for biographical information. For details of Sayers’s early life, consult Reynolds, 1–44.
2. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 45–62. For a personal reminiscence of Sayers from a distant but most perceptive acquaintance, see Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933), 106, 482, 508, 510.
3. Ibid., 59–62.
4. An excellent treatment of prewar Europe is Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1865–1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1987). See also Oron J. Hale, The Great Illusion, 1900–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). An excellent short summary of the subject is provided by Joachim Remak, The Origins of World War I, 1871–1914, 2d ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994).
5. The best work regarding Britain and the approach of the war is Zara S. Steiner, Britain and the Origins of the First World War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979).
6. Joachim Remak, Sarajevo: The Story of a Political Murder (New York: Criterion Books, 1959).
7. Historians generally agree that the most comprehensive and balanced treatment of the Great War is B. Liddell Hart, History of the First World War (London: Pan Books, 1970). A less intimidating overview is provided in James L. Stokesbury, A Short History of World War I (New York: William Morrow, 1981). Stokesbury’s discussion of the impact of new weapons technology may be found on pp. 14–18.
8. Two studies by Martin van Creveld examine von Schlieffen’s plan exhaustively: Supplying War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and Command in Wartime (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). See also Stokesbury, World War I, 32–61.
9. Stokesbury, World War I, 36–60.
10. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 72–76. See also Dorothy L. Sayers to Muriel Jaeger, Feb. 6, 1916, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1899 to 1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist, ed. Barbara Reynolds (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 121–22. Two excellent works examine the impact of trench warfare on the common British soldier: Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Penguin Books, 1979); and John Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
11. Stokesbury, World War I, 194–307.
12. The best treatment of the peacemaking is Arno Mayer, The Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (New York: Random House, 1973).
13. A truly perceptive and captivating study of the grieving necessitated by the war is Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
14. Graves, The Long Week-End, 1–39. For an excellent summary of the recent scholarship on sex and gender relationships during and after the war, see Gail Braybon, “Women and the War,” in The First World War in British History, ed. Stephen Constantine, Maurice W. Kirby and Mary B. Rose (London: Edward Arnold, 1995), 141–67.
15. Graves, The Long Week-End, 1–39; Winter, Death’s Men, 235–65; Braybon, “Women and the War.”
16. Winter, Sites of Memory, 1–53.
17. Ibid., 78–116; Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness (1926; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 189.
18. Winter, Sites of Memory, 102–5.
19. Though somewhat dated, the best summary of Britain’s postwar troubles is A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 120–62.
20. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 63–84.
21. Ibid., 85–106.
22. Ibid., 94–95.
23. A thumbnail sketch of the origins and career of Sexton Blake appears in William L
. DeAndrea, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (New York: Prentice Hall, 1994), 29. DeAndrea’s work is an excellent source of obscure information on the history and development of detective fiction.
24. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Untitled,” unpublished MS, MS 138 (thirteen pages) presumably written in 1920. Sayers Collection of the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois (hereafter cited as Sayers Collection, Wade Center). We wish to thank the David Higham Associates on behalf of the Estate of Anthony Fleming for permission to photocopy this manuscript. Barbara Reynolds does an excellent job of describing and analyzing this ragged piece of early Sayers fiction, and she includes this first description of Peter Wimsey, quoted in our subsequent paragraph, in Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 171–73.
25. Sayers, “Untitled.”
26. Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Mousehole: A Detective Fantasia in Three Flats,” unfinished MS, MS 138, Sayers Collection (thirteen pages). See also Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 174.
27. Dorothy L. Sayers, “How I Came to Invent the Character of Lord Peter,” Harcourt Brace News 1 (July 15, 1936): 1–2.
28. Sayers to her mother, Jan. 22, 1921, Letters, 174.
29. Dorothy L. Sayers, Whose Body? (1923; reprint, New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 13, 61.
30. There are, of course, entire libraries of material devoted to Sherlock Holmes. Most, unfortunately, treat him as if he were a real historical figure, seriously compromising the interpretation. A happy exception to this is Rosemary Jann, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995). There is no substitute for the genuine article however: Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (New York: Doubleday, 1930).
31. Gordon Phillips, “The Social Impact,” in First World War in British History, ed. Constantine, Kirby, and Rose, 106–40. Lord Peter explains that Duke’s Denver operates at a loss in Dorothy L. Sayers, Have His Carcase (1932; reprint, New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 154–55. He expresses his fears regarding the future of Duke’s Denver in Sayers, Gaudy Night, 289.
Conundrums for the Long Week-End Page 29
