Conundrums for the Long Week-End Read online

  Dorothy L. Sayers saw also that the postwar era challenged the very identification of things English. Sayers (and her character, Wimsey) were born late in the Victorian era, products of a complacent society confident of its own superiority. This was the nation of shopkeepers that had brought Napoleon to his knees, launched the industrial revolution, and forced half the world’s population to accept British authority. By the turn of the century, this quiet confidence was a bit misplaced, but the average British citizen was ill equipped to see that.

  A new cultural premise built of scientific discipline, technological reliance, the dismissal of history, and a determined view to the future flourished in continental Europe and America, challenging the staid traditionalism and sportsmanship projected by the English. “Modernism” had de-veloped initially in Germany, the United States, and in Russia and France among important elements of their populations. This essentially cultural reformation influenced national political behaviors but had little effect on diplomatic and military relationships among nations. The modernist United States could ally with traditionalist Britain to overcome modernist Germany. This military defeat did nothing to arrest the spread of the modernist cultural values embraced by the German people. The war, in fact, accelerated the modernization of Britain. Before the war, the influence of the new was scarcely felt in Britain; after the war, it was everywhere.13

  This cultural onslaught, characterized by the embrace of technology, the strange new directions taken by the arts, and the compromise (if not outright rejection) of many traditional institutions, threatened the survival of old England. Always a quilt of many classes and communities, England’s different groups responded to this newness in different ways. For the Bloomsbury set that Sayers so wickedly satirized in Strong Poison, the coming of the modern age meant the freedom to do away with the diatonic scale and scoff at “the prurience of prudery.”14 For the less happy residents of the tiny village of Leahampton, portrayed in Unnatural Death, the future meant clinging to the traditional atmosphere of gossip and church doings in the face of fast cars, indiscrete professionals, and a murderous young woman.

  At the heart of each Wimsey novel is a vivid and exacting depiction of one or more such communities, from the pathetically pointless aristocrats whom Wimsey joins for lunch in Whose Body? to the cloister of women scholars holding forth in Gaudy Night. Sayers provides the reader entry into each microcosm, sympathetically displaying the degrees of common cohesiveness and the impact of the modern. How do these communities function? What threatens their survival? To seek the answer to such questions is to approach understanding a Sayers novel.

  Technology makes itself felt in every story. Racing cars and motorcycles, airplanes across the Atlantic (in 1923!), constantly ringing telephones, persistently clicking cameras—this is a society increasingly reliant on the wonders of modern technology. More important, and more subtle, is Sayers’s treatment of the science permeating the minds of thinking people. Wimsey is quite cognizant of scientific advance, numbering among his friends researchers in several fields. To some extent, he relies on science in his detection work. Yet Wimsey is suspicious of overweening scientific influence, perhaps reflecting the mind of his creator. Although Sayers remained abreast of research theories and incorporated the latest science into several of her stories, she never represented science as an unalloyed good. Too often its practitioners—especially medical practitioners—proved amoral and prone to evil.

  Probably this attitude reflected Dorothy L. Sayers’s own religious upbringing. Her father was an Anglican cleric who made himself responsible for Sayers’s early education. (He began to teach her Latin at age seven.) Religion is not as dominant as some of the themes in the Wimsey novels, but it is a recurring and troubling issue for the main character. Old-fashioned piety is perhaps too simple a sentiment for a man who has suffered the worst of the trenches, yet Peter is enough of a Victorian to feel its pull. The country churches especially—Duke’s Denver, Fenchurch St. Paul—are bastions of the old world so endangered by modern culture. Yet they are steeped in the traditions that frame English culture, a culture that Wimsey comes to value more fully in the 1930s as totalitarianism looms. The modern has washed over the English world, but the traditional persists.15

  The war, the challenge to the Victorian tradition, the changing roles for women, the shifting perceptions of class, the function of communities, the rising influence of technology and science, the steadfastness of traditional culture—these are all themes central to this book. How did Sayers deal with these issues? How did her treatment change over time? How well does her interpretation reflect the realities of her time period? To answer these questions is to gauge the process of modernization as Dorothy L. Sayers understood it.

  This is not enough. Certainly Sayers drew from the world she knew and understood. More important, she drew from herself, from her own experiences. Sayers used her popular novels as a vehicle to analyze, to express, and to shake her head at her own life. Her health, her passions, her frustrations, and her triumphs as a woman and a scholar fueled her imagination. So much that happened to Wimsey and other of her central characters had happened first to her. In her suspicion of medical types, the reader sees the consequence of ill-treated sickness that made Sayers’s hair fall out. In the story of Philip Boyes, the Strong Poison victim, we hear bitter echoes of her love for John Cournos. In the defensive ramblings of Gilda Farren, wife of one of the Five Red Herrings, we see an author attempting to establish the necessary foundations for happy marriage. Sayers did not write in a vacuum. In her coordination of the chronology of the Wimsey stories with that of her own life, we see the crosscurrents of experience and inspiration.

  Finally, there is the fact of Dorothy L. Sayers’s genius as a craftsman with language. Members of the contemporary smart set treasured the Wimsey stories in large part because they were so literate.16 At Oxford, Sayers received an unparalleled education in language and never betrayed its dictums. She loved to play with language and to experiment with idiom, with point of view, and with the problem of revealing a character’s thoughts in contrast to his or her expressed words. Although the conventions of popular crime fiction limited her ability to tinker with modes of writing, she searched continually for ways to better involve the reader in all the levels of her story: the mystery plot, the lives of her characters, their struggles to cope with life’s struggle, and the essentially simple humanness underlying all the machinations inherent to crime and its solution.

  So this is a book about Sayers as a writer and as a human being, what she saw and felt in the years between the world wars, and how she incorporated the experience into the fictional lives of her creation. It is a history of a make-believe person who lived a real life.

  1

  Lord Peter Begins a Career

  LIFE WAS NOT EASY IN 1922. AS AUTUMN DREW TO A DREARY close that November, the British nation clung to a kind of wary optimism, a somber hope of the soul. The Great War was truly over, the troops demobilized. Those who would ever return home had done so. Government efforts to ease the transition to peacetime economy met with some success, though a recent slump threatened troubled times ahead. The political situation remained unclear. Lloyd George had resigned as prime minister, and Bonar Law presided for the moment. The next year would bring still another general election. Abroad, a tolerable postwar climate took shape as Germany and Russia stabilized and the Fascists seized control in Italy. It was not an ideal world by any stretch but one in which Britons could only mend their lives and try to go on.

  For Dorothy L. Sayers, life experience reflected the national mood. She was young, talented, cautiously confident of the future, yet beset with all kinds of immediate disappointments. She had just ended a tempestuous and unconsummated love affair with writer John Cournos, a memory that would haunt her for years to come. Six months before, she had taken a new job at S. H. Benson’s, an advertising firm. Not exactly a soul-satisfying position for a woman with an Oxford University educatio
n, but more palatable than the teaching and publishing posts she had tried before. Popular writing had now become an outlet. One detective novel, completed and typed twelve months before, made the rounds of publishing houses while she worked steadily at a second. There was no pretension to higher literature here, but the writing was great fun and it might someday pay the bills.

  The fictional hero whom Dorothy L. Sayers fervently hoped to present to the public was the product of both the mystery writer’s convention and her own eccentric imagination: Peter Wimsey, an ingenious amateur detective with an unfortunate penchant for blither. More than two years before, Sayers had invented him, a minor character in a Sexton Blake story she never finished. She began to experiment seriously with the detective genre the following year, and by November 1921 she produced the first Wimsey novel, Whose Body? The book finally saw publication in May 1923.

  Sayers set the novel in the bleak London of November, presumably in 1922. Although this was to be the first actual public glimpse of Lord Peter, she presented him as a man with a complicated (if largely unwritten) past. The “Battersea Park Mystery” detailed in Whose Body? is far from being Wimsey’s first case. He has already undertaken enough major investigations to acquire close friends and bitter enemies among the official police. He is also brittle and impenetrably defensive in manner, the consequence of a love affair only barely suggested in the text. One more component is enmeshed in the Wimsey character: his experience as a frontline officer in the Great War. Lord Peter, the reader eventually learns, is a victim of shell shock.

  To arrive at this first incarnation of Wimsey, the blithering young ass of November 1922, we must pursue elements of two separate but related natures: the recent history of England and the history of Dorothy L. Sayers herself. Any fictional character is a product of his creator’s life and beliefs; this is perhaps more true of Peter Wimsey than most. Wimsey is also a product of the world his creator inhabited, a world haunted by memories and bloodstains.

  Sayers was born in Oxford on June 13, 1893. She was an only child, much loved and sheltered by parents who indulged her creative whims from a very young age. Her father was a High Church cleric, headmaster and chaplain at Oxford’s Christ Church Choir School. When Dorothy was four, he accepted a parish appointment at Bluntisham-cum-Earith, a remote country town in the fenlands of East Anglia. Educated there by her parents and tutors, Sayers remained at home until the unusually advanced age of fifteen, when she enrolled at the Godolphin Boarding School, Wiltshire. Here she quickly demonstrated her formidable scholastic aptitude, and here also she had her first unhappy encounter with medical practice. Ill with measles, pneumonia, and other ailments through much of 1911, she underwent therapies that caused her hair to fall out.1

  Despite leaving Godolphin early with illness, she successfully competed for a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford. Sayers was admitted for the Trinity term in 1912. Somerville, the first Oxford University college for women, was still not allowed to bestow university degrees, but it did offer a thorough grounding in the humanities. Dorothy L. Sayers flourished, becoming one of the leaders of her class and achieving a first in modern languages in 1915. When the university finally relented in 1920, granting women the right to receive the degrees they had earned, Sayers was among the first women’s graduating class. The days at Oxford were perhaps the most treasured of her life. The heady intellectual atmosphere steeped her very essence. No matter her subsequent occupation or situation, she firmly remained an Oxford scholar.2

  The Great War touched the life of Dorothy L. Sayers very lightly. Like many young Britishers in 1914, she did not take the threat of war at all seriously, actually going on holiday in France that malignant August. She escaped to England only after the British Expeditionary Force had assumed positions in northern France; the French army was in full retreat westward. Returning to Oxford for her final year, she found the university in disarray. Most of the male students had enlisted; buildings were given over to Belgian refugees and wounded soldiers. Somerville was moved to new headquarters for the duration of the war, the buildings converted to a hospital. Sayers devoted some time to nursing the sick and wounded but never fully committed herself to this task. She was young, with much of a purely intellectual nature to accomplish. For her at least, the horrors of the Great War were very far away.3

  Would that such had been true for more of England. While Sayers grew up, attended university, and began the search for a career, the British nation absorbed shock after brutalizing shock as the great conflagration redefined the meaning of warfare. For the vast majority of Britons, the war came to define the routine of existence. Most people were either on the frontline or agonizing for loved ones in danger. The fear was well placed. By November 1918 more than nine hundred thousand English soldiers had died in Europe and Asia Minor. Sayers was one of the very few who did not lose a close friend or relative. It was the tragic end to a century of comparative peace.

  As much as anything, the Great War was a consequence of misplaced faith in European cultural superiority. Cultural arrogance led European nations to carve much of the world into exploited colonies, touching off a competition for resources that left them at each other’s throats. Unforgivable smugness and cultural nearsightedness allowed them to believe that they had progressed too far along the path of civilization to descend into general conflagration.

  There had been no general European war since the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. In the ensuing century, Britain leapt ahead of its neighbors, exploiting newfound industrial capacity and establishing a vast overseas empire. The nation’s supreme position in world affairs remained essentially unchallenged until the 1890s, when the new German Empire embarked on a military and formidable naval buildup intended to match British strengths. The British felt obliged to respond to this challenge, and the arms race was on.4

  At this same time Britain went to war against the Boers in South Africa and discovered it had no friends. No continental power supported the effort to extend British imperial authority; several nations openly sympathized with the Boers. Though Britain eventually crushed all resistance, the lesson of the Boer War was not lost. Continued existence of the empire would depend on finding allies among the European powers.

  Traditionally, Britain had remained aloof from all alliances, instead practicing “balance of power” diplomacy, ensuring that no one continental nation became powerful enough to dominate all others. Generally this had meant siding with Prussia against the French and probably against the Russians or the Austrians. Now the aggressive rise of Germany had rewritten the diplomatic map. Germany dominated its weaker ally, Austria, and seemed to have attracted Italy to its orbit. France, fearful of this powerful neighbor and recalling past humiliations, had come to an understanding with Russia. Leery of Russia but still more apprehensive of Germany, the British now swallowed hard and came to an understanding with their old enemy of several centuries’ standing: the French. Europe had resolved itself into two overarmed camps, waiting for someone to toss a grenade.5

  The powder keg almost went off any number of times; it finally did so, in June 1914, when a Serbian operative of the “Black Hand” murdered Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, in the streets of Sarajevo. Austria demanded an impossibly grovelling apology from Serbia and attacked when the Serbians did not quite measure up. Russia came to Serbia’s defense, which obligated Germany to support Austria. The French had to come to Russia’s defense. Europe was at war.6

  Most thinking people believed that Europe was too civilized to hurl itself into a full-blown conflagration, but they also believed that if war did come, it would be over very quickly. Technology would see to that. The vast network of railroads would allow rapid movement of masses of men, ordnance was louder and far more deadly, and the submarine would destroy overseas supply. Above all, the machine gun would be the irresistible weapon of attack, mowing down resistance as invaders moved across the battlefields. All that mattered was who got the most men,
equipment, and supplies to the important points quickest.7

  Germany had a plan. Rightly assuming that the ponderous Russian military would mobilize slowly, a rapidly moving German army would sucker punch the French, knocking them out of the war before Britain could mount effective aid. With the western front secure, the Germans could then turn to face Russia. Given that Germany faced enemies on two long, separate fronts, this was, on balance, a realistic set of calculations. But the risks were high. This was a gambler’s plan, and it required a gambler’s nerve to carry it through.

  Architect of the German strategy was Count Alfred von Schlieffen, German chief of staff for fifteen years through 1906. Von Schlieffen looked into the souls of his French adversaries and saw character shaped by unthinking aggressiveness and the desire for revenge. The French still smarted from the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. As soon as hostilities broke out, the French would march westward to reclaim the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, lost to Germany in the war settlement of 1870. This was exactly what von Schlieffen needed to execute his plan. He would place a small residual defense in those provinces, men who would beat an orderly retreat before the French onslaught, drawing the enemy ever eastward. All the while, the main body of German forces would drive through Belgium and wheel southward, falling on the French rear. The vise would close; victory would be achieved.