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  Conundrums for the Long Week-End

  Conundrums

  for the

  Long Week-End

  England, Dorothy L. Sayers,

  and Lord Peter Wimsey

  Robert Kuhn McGregor, with Ethan Lewis

  The Kent State University Press

  KENT, OHIO, & LONDON

  © 2000 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 00-036876

  ISBN 0-87338-665-5

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McGregor, Robert Kuhn, 1952–

  Conundrums for the long week-end: England, Dorothy L. Sayers,

  and Lord Peter Wimsey / Robert Kuhn McGregor, with Ethan Lewis.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-87338-665-5 (alk. paper) ∞

  1. Sayers, Dorothy L. (Dorothy Leigh), 1893–1957—Characters—Lord Peter Wimsey.

  2. Detective and mystery stories, English—History and criticism.

  3. Wimsey, Peter, Lord (Fictitious character)

  I. Lewis, Ethan, 1964– II. Title.

  PR6037.A95 Z78 2000

  823’.912–dc21 00-036876

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.

  Contents ______________

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: England, Sayers, and Lord Peter

  1 Lord Peter Begins a Career

  2 Lord Peter Discovers the Possibilities

  3 Lord Peter Acquires a Soul

  4 Lord Peter Displays His Range

  5 Lord Peter Achieves a Balance

  6 Lord Peter and the Long Week-End

  Appendix A: Coordinated Timeline

  Appendix B: On Sayers and the Sonnet

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  WE HAVE ARGUED MUCH OVER THE MAIN TITLE OF THIS BOOK, while reaching common ground on the subtitle very easily. This is a book about England, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Lord Peter Wimsey. The ordering of the three subjects is arbitrary; the choices are not. We have endeavored to treat each theme equally: England in its history, Sayers in her artistry, and Lord Peter in his development as a fictional character. We are most interested in exploring the mutual influences of these themes—how each affected and shaped the others. Our claim to originality is in this treatment; certainly any number of authors have treated these topics separately and well. We seek to weave them together, to make a whole and coherent story of Sayers’s development of Wimsey as a reflection of English history. In doing so, we have carefully contemplated Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional work in all its nuances. We have also relied heavily on the foundations laid by generations of excellent scholars.

  If we have employed an interpretive model, it is that of Modris Ecksteins, presented in his thoughtful and provocative Rights of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Ecksteins argues that the first years of the twentieth century saw the outbreak of cultural warfare in Europe. On the one side stood England: traditional, conservative, the image of restrictive morality and good sportsmanship. On the opposite bank stood Germany (and the United States): antihistorical, experimental, technologically oriented, modern. The Great War saw the clash of these cultural identities. Britain and her allies emerged victorious, but at the cost of their own cultural disintegration. Postwar England embraced Germany’s modern world. Peter Wimsey’s career, we argue, traces the painful process of that modernization.

  Many historians, professional and amateur, have addressed the story of England between the world wars. We have taken our tone—and some of our history—from The Long Week-End, the work of Robert Graves and Alan Hodge. Both were Oxford scholars, neither a historian in the professional sense. Written on the very eve of World War II, their book provides a contemporary look backward over the previous twenty years, concentrating on the social aspects of Britain’s modernization.

  Historical information on the period derives from a list of academics far too long to enter here, though we must recognize the critically important work of two scholars. Jay Winter has authored several excellent books on the Great War and its aftermath in Britain; our understanding of the war’s impact would prove sadly inadequate without his work. In viewing Sayers’s work in this historical context, the concept was pioneered by Terrance L. Lewis in his Dorothy L. Sayers’ Wimsey and Interwar British Society. Lewis studies Sayers’s fiction in the analytical framework of ethnicity, class, and gender so familiar to modern historians.

  Turning to the study of Dorothy L. Sayers, we again confront a very long list of most able scholars. Janet Hitchman perhaps paved the way with her most controversial Such a Strange Lady. James Brabazon became the first to construct a biography employing essentially all of Sayers’s private letters and papers. In our work, we have relied most heavily on the exhaustive research of Barbara Reynolds, whose biography, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul, provides the basic life chronicle we follow. Reynolds also edited the two volumes of Sayers’s published correspondence, an unparalleled mine of information.

  A bewildering array of writers have contributed their thoughts and perspectives on Sayers and her work. Two indispensable collections are As Her Whimsey Took Her, edited by Margaret P. Hanay, and Dorothy L. Sayers: The Centenary Celebration, edited by Alzina Stone Dale. Dale’s research was also the main source of information on Sayers’s uncompleted manuscript, “Thrones, Dominations,” before its completion and publication by Jill Paton Walsh in 1998.

  Our guides through the maze of Sayers material, primary and secondary, published and unpublished, were three in number. Robert B. Harmon and Margaret A. Burger’s An Annotated Guide to the Works of Dorothy L. Sayers provides an instructive listing of Sayers’s published work organized by type. C. B. Gilbert’s Bibliography of the Works of Dorothy L. Sayers was especially valuable as a handbook to Sayers’s unpublished writings. Ruth Tanis Youngberg’s Dorothy L. Sayers: A Reference Guide provides an exhaustive listing of secondary perspectives on Sayers, though it is unfortunately becoming rather dated.

  Our essential sources for analysis, the Lord Peter stories, are all fortunately still in print. For the sake of consistency, we have employed the large format HarperPerennial series issued in 1993 (with the exception of The Nine Tailors, still published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Seeking to expand our analysis beyond this readily available material, we have made extensive use of the unpublished Lord Peter material included in the Marion Wade Collection, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. Alicia Pearson, assistant archivist at the Marion E. Wade Center, provided invaluable assistance.

  Our fervent desire to gratefully acknowledge our more personal debts is tempered by the fear that we may inadvertently leave someone out. We do thank everyone who has offered wisdom and encouragement, to say nothing of patience, to this project. Our editors, Julia J. Morton and Erin L. Holman, have been steadfast in their support from the outset, which has meant a great deal to us. We also owe a great debt to Professor Marty S. Knepper of Morningside College, Sioux City, Iowa, reader appointed by the Press, who said just the right things at just the right times while offering several most-constructive suggestions. Rest assured that our aversion to conjunctions is not her fault.

  Closer to home, several people materially assisted in the formative stages of this work. The students in our team-taught Liberal Studies Colloquium, offered in Spring 1997, set us on the track. As the thing took shape on paper, our long-suf
fering readers, Deborah Kuhn McGregor and Judy Everson, saw us through the early incarnations. We bounced ideas off virtually the entirety of the history and English faculties at the University of Illinois–Springfield (and some others as well), including Cecilia Cornell, Larry Shiner, Bill Siles, Steve Egger, Jackie Jackson, Karen Moranski, Razak Dahmane, and Norman Hinton. John Holtz, Linda Kopecky, and Denise Greene shepherded our odd requests through the library. We burdened the history graduate assistant, Carol Watson Lubrant, with our most abstruse research challenges (When do peaches ripen in England?). The dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, William Bloemer, and his assistant Cherrill Kimbro, saw us through the bureaucratic mazes, while Julie Atwell made certain we met our academic obligations.

  Our families exhibited remarkable forbearance with the peculiarities of the scholar’s existence. Deborah McGregor, Molly Meyersohn, Leaf, Blue, Janna, and Bran McGregor; Corrine Frisch and Nora Frisch; Michael Lewis, Eleanor M. Lewis, Sylvia Lewis, Dora Midman, June McGregor—we bow to one and all.

  Two stubborn and opinionated scholars trying to write a single book—this has proved an intriguing experience. Allow us to provide a bit of the flavor of our interaction:

  RKM: “I need five or ten pages on the modernist writers, as soon as possible!”

  EL: “No problem. Will next Tuesday be soon enough?”

  RKM: “Next Tuesday? I need it this afternoon.”

  EL: “This afternoon? That’s not possible. How about tomorrow afternoon?”

  RKM: “Well, to be honest, I kind of needed it yesterday.”

  We are glad that we have brought this to successful conclusion and that we are still friends. We may even teach that class together again sometime.

  Introduction:

  England, Sayers, and Lord Peter

  HE BEGAN EXISTENCE IN THE YEAR 1920, THE INCIDENTAL product of a lively imagination at play. Before bowing from the stage forever some twenty-two years later,1 he acquired enough flesh and blood to defy the will of his creator. Lord Peter Wimsey—brooding amateur detective, aristocratic man of fashion, talented musician and intellectual, wealthy collector of first editions—had become a recognizable man to legions of readers throughout the western world. His enduring presence is a tribute to the care and genius of Dorothy L. Sayers, the woman who dreamed him up during a long, tumultuous sojourn in Normandy.

  Sayers was a striking example of the “new woman” of the early twentieth century, educated at Oxford University and determined to make her own way in the world. Her presence in France in 1920 suggests the nature of her escape from the bonds of Victorian gender roles: she was unescorted, working as assistant to a young scholar whom she wished to love. Sayers, all of twenty-six years old, could only dimly recognize her own participation in the great social upheaval beginning to shape the twentieth century. She was a woman looking toward freedom.

  In this second year after the Great War, the traditions of the prewar world were rapidly falling to pieces. Through the twenties and into the thirties, the comfortable, conservative English world of Victoria, and of Sherlock Holmes, would continue to crumble, to be brushed aside in the embrace of the modern. Women stepped up the pace of their long march toward equality with men; aristocratic privilege diminished as democracy grew; the pace of life quickened amidst a perplexing array of communication and transportation potentials; the world grew more exciting and more dangerous. F. Scott Fitzgerald called it the Jazz Age, “the most expensive orgy in history.”2 Robert Graves would remember the era as “the long week-end” between world wars.3

  Dorothy L. Sayers established herself in these years. She reveled in the limitless possibilities, and sometimes she fell victim to their hidden pitfalls. Her story in some ways encapsulates the social transformation taking place in her time. More important is the story she told of those times, an ongoing saga of crime and detection that so capably captured the energy of postwar Britain. To read the eleven completed novels and twenty short stories that Sayers devoted to the exploits of Lord Peter Wimsey is to return to the “long week-end,” when so much was possible and so much was shocking.

  The ongoing appeal of this crime literature lies in its characterizations. The mysteries themselves are not terribly difficult to solve—“who done it” is generally obvious, although perceiving how it was done can be something of a chore. Like any true literary artist (and unlike too many mystery writers who rely almost exclusively on plot), Sayers lavished attention on her characters, transforming them from the one-dimensional cutouts inhabiting most popular fiction into representations of real people. Sayers’s novels proved far more artistically successful than her short stories for just this reason. She needed the room the novel format offered in order to develop her characters. The short stories, necessarily emphasizing plot, seem one dimensional, suffering in comparison. To comprehend the depth of Sayers’s creative ability, attention must focus largely on the novels.

  Lord Peter Wimsey was Dorothy L. Sayers’s single greatest project. In the two decades she devoted to his adventures, Wimsey grew enormously, reflecting the developing subtleties of his creator’s enhanced understanding of her world. In the end, Wimsey was a most reflective man.4

  He had a great deal to reflect upon. Sayers had placed Wimsey in the aristocracy—from this perspective, he could comprehend the changing British culture. Born in 1890, with one foot in the Victorian era and the other in the postwar world, Peter emerged as a balance of opposites. He became Sayers’s literary embodiment of a culture trying hard to accommodate the newly modern.

  The salient fact of Peter Wimsey’s created life was his service in the Great War. A frontline officer, Wimsey was nearly killed at Vimy Ridge, and he later penetrated behind enemy lines as an intelligence operative. These experiences proved the watershed of his life; like millions of other Britons, he was of the class that saw and would never forget. In the early twenties, this made him a member of a social system containing only one other class: those who had not seen. The miasma of the war permeated the twenties, creating new forces and ideas, smothering the old. The Great War was the benchmark beginning the modern age.

  The social transformation so obvious in the twenties was neither as abrupt nor profound as people thought. The war had the effect of darkening memories, making the prewar past seem distant and beyond reach. The movement for women’s rights did not suddenly erupt in 1918; its roots extended at least to the 1870s if not as early as the 1790s. The formation of a definable working class interest had been the project of more than a century. The class system still stood for entrenched inequality, though the aristocracy was firmly on the defensive. Men and women continued to enter domestic service, though perhaps more warily.5

  Yet the landscape, the culture, and the world differed palpably following the armistice. The automobile firmly claimed the roadways, bringing greater independence of occupation and movement to the masses. Faster and more efficient trains, ships, and even aircraft heralded a new era in transportation. Women were everywhere in public—voting, working, wearing saner garments, and attending public entertainments. Just how great a revolution in women’s lives occurred is debatable, but the changes were great (and sometimes disturbing) to those living the experience. And laborers, unable to vote before 1870, elected a prime minister in 1924. The world seemed to be turning upside down, even if it was not.6

  This lively, freer, more democratic world is the backdrop for the Wimsey stories. Dorothy L. Sayers was vitally interested in the changes taking place around her. Absorbing the spirit of her times, she interpreted its meaning and provided a running chronicle of the emergent culture. Indeed, to give her novels a greater sense of immediacy, she often added references to current events to her manuscripts just prior to publication, drawing material from almanacs and newspapers found in the reading room at the British Museum.7 Using Wimsey as her agent, Sayers could hold a mirror to her culture and offer a critical commentary. Supportive, penetrating, ironic, sardonic, and occasionally bitter, this commentary becomes an engag
ing window into the maze of that fascinating time. The fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers has become an essential source for the historian and for the literary analyst.8

  This is a book about Dorothy L. Sayers, her creation—Lord Peter Wimsey—and her portrayal of the coming of the modern age. It is not intended as a biography of Sayers but rather a critical examination of her most popular works in an historic context. Despite an almost overwhelming temptation to the contrary, Peter Wimsey will not be treated as an historic figure but rather as the figment of literary imagination that he is.9

  Just as Lord Peter is fictional, the stories in which he participates are grounded in “Cloud-Cuckoo Land,”10 an imaginary world where Peter occupies an elegant flat in Piccadilly Circus, sallying forth to do battle with criminals throughout Britain. Yet Sayers did not create a fantasy world for Wimsey. Peter travels real and familiar English roads and suffers with the rest of Britain through a heady but troubled time. This was a Britain easily recognized by Sayers’s contemporaries.

  Several themes pervade the Wimsey saga, elements of English life that Sayers considered in novel after novel. The ever-present legacy of the Great War is the most obvious of these. In Whose Body?, the first of the novels, the reader learns that Peter is a shell-shocked war veteran and that Bunter, his manservant, served under Wimsey as sergeant in France. In Gaudy Night, published a dozen years later, Wimsey takes time from a complicated investigation to yarn with a former serviceman about life in the trenches. The war appears in some guise in every long story; at times, its memory permeates the story.11

  Another theme, one especially important to Dorothy L. Sayers, concerns women in society. Women play critical roles in virtually all the Wimsey stories. In time, one woman character, Harriet Vane, comes to dominate the action. Sayers was no feminist (as she herself insisted), but she did regard as critical the issue of a woman’s right to do as she would with her own life. The women in the novels run the gamut of English society, from traditional housewives to freewheeling Bohemians to fully independent professionals. Sayers took the time to examine their lives, to penetrate their feelings, and to gauge the public’s reaction to their activities. If Sayers was herself one of the “new women,” she was perceptive enough to recognize that whatever revolution was taking place in English society affected all women and affected women far more than it did men.12