Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  Cournos’s seeming indifference, throughout their year-long relationship, saddened and bewildered Sayers at a time when she was vulnerable. It was clear to her that she was less important to him than his book, which he hinted dramatically was driving him to unprecedented contortions of the soul; his desire to keep her separate from his literary friends must also have disappointed her, as it cut off a potential entry to the world she longed to join. And she was chastened by his apparent belief that a writing life was incompatible with personal attachments. Her own romantic experience was limited – apart from Eric Whelpton, she had entertained fleeting, unrequited passions for various actors and Dr Hugh Allen, the eccentric conductor of the Oxford Bach Choir – and this was the first relationship for which she had seriously contemplated a future. Despite her matter-of-fact demeanour and her firm belief in women’s intellectual equality to men, the life Sayers had begun to envisage was not so distant from the ideal of marriage and children propounded in her vicarage upbringing: she was determined to devote her energies to work, but – unlike H. D. – didn’t necessarily aspire to unconventionality in other areas of life, and there were limits to how far she would allow her disregard for social norms to go.

  In 1919 she had, on request, sent a poem – a lightly erotic elegy for a lost love – to The Quorum, a magazine founded by members of the radical British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology and the Order of Chaeronea, a society for gay men which aimed to challenge puritanical ideas about family and relationships. But despite this intriguing and incongruous contribution (she was the only female writer to feature in the magazine, which closed after a single issue), she was at pains to insist in her letter to the editor that her own inclinations were heterosexual: ‘Few friendships among women will stand the strain of being romantically considered … I avoid them like the plague.’ She was always, however, adamant that she would not settle for any man who placed her on a pedestal, like the Victorian ‘angel in the house’: she was too comfortable in her Mecklenburgh Square boarding house, despite its disadvantages, to be in any hurry to preside over a traditional family home. In 1917, at a dinner party in Oxford, she had been shocked to receive a flustered proposal from an acquaintance, the Reverend Leonard Hodgson (‘a man I wouldn’t have touched with the tongs’), while their hosts were making coffee in the kitchen. ‘Don’t get agitated!’ she wrote to her parents. ‘I’ll never marry a man I don’t care for.’ Later, when Hodgson attempted to renew his suit, she elaborated. ‘To have somebody devoted to me arouses all my worst feelings. I loathe being deferred to. I abominate being waited on. It infuriates me to feel that my words are numbered and my actions watched. I want somebody to fight with!’

  But her idea of a partnership of equals, fuelled by spirited arguments and easy-going affection, was not to be found with Cournos. His experiences with H. D. and Arabella had left him suspicious of women and wary of attachment; he preferred to spend his time on the work that gave him purpose and wouldn’t deceive him. His abiding air of gloom dampened Sayers’s natural enthusiasm, but she was compelled, she later realised, by a ‘sort of abject hero-worship’ to try to please him, miserable though it made her. And she hated that her desire for him to love her forced her into a submissive role; that competing for his attention made her feel she was compromising her independence. With hindsight, Sayers acknowledged that Cournos was ‘a rotten companion for a poor girl’, who never appreciated her wit but ‘drilled and sermonised the poor thing out of existence’. ‘How stupid you are!’ she wrote to him later, admonishing him for his lack of patience with music halls, crossword puzzles or the ‘grimlies’ at the Little Theatre. (She recalled ‘having tramped half London with a bad blister on my heel’ before he could find a cinema showing a film he would ‘condescend to see’.) ‘It wasn’t that I wanted to dance – I wanted somebody to think I was worth teaching to dance. I’d never been treated as a woman – only as a kind of literary freak.’ It’s a poignant and revealing statement. In public, Sayers was the first to insist that men should treat women as fellow humans, that any gallant concession to femininity was condescending and unnecessary – which made it hard to articulate her disappointment at Cournos’s lack of chivalry, though it was clear his behaviour was not the product of any respect for women. H. D. had been devastated when Aldington told her he was attracted to her mind but not her body, that he saw her as an intellectual companion but not as a lover. But Sayers’s situation was even worse: not only did Cournos show no appetite for romance, he also cared nothing for her writing.

  Sayers shared Cournos’s absolute dedication to work, but not his supercilious conviction that his books’ obscurity was due to an undiscerning public. (‘You can’t be both a “best seller” and a great man,’ he loftily wrote after receiving a royalty statement printed with a damning ‘No Sales’.) Sayers encouraged her parents to read his novels, brushing aside his enigmatic hints that they would be shocked by his ideas: ‘Personally, I think The Wall is not nearly so alarming as John thinks it is. Why do men love to make themselves out such wonderful devils when they aren’t anything of the sort? John imagines he’s a terrible person!’ But Cournos – whether or not he even read it – dismissed Sayers’s writing as lowbrow nonsense. ‘I fear he has no sympathy with Lord Peter, being the kind of man who takes his writing seriously and spells Art with a capital A,’ she wrote, her bullishness disguising a touching vulnerability. Unlike H. D., she wasn’t part of an established literary circle with whom she could exchange ideas as equals; her Somerville friends remained supportive and kind by letter, but she was far away now from the bedrooms where the Mutual Admiration Society had gathered over toasted marshmallows, roast chestnuts and cocoa. It probably didn’t cross her mind that Cournos’s lack of interest in her work was a symptom of his insecurity about his own. Later, vindicated by sales and prestige, she could laugh at his scornful attitude towards the work she took so seriously. But at the time, the sneering of this older, experienced writer must have significantly shaken her already faltering self-belief. But Sayers was cheered by a quotation she had read in the newspaper from the essayist Philip Guedalla, suggesting that ‘the detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds’: ‘It makes me feel ever so noble,’ she wrote proudly to her parents. She was not about to give up on Lord Peter Wimsey for John Cournos.

  *

  While Cournos remained in Oxford, rarely tempted down to London, Sayers finished writing Whose Body? at the rectory in the summer of 1921. She had sublet her room in Mecklenburgh Square to an Oxford friend, Egerton Clarke, who left the cupboards ‘full of mouldy sandwiches’. By 8 November, Lord Peter was at the typist’s (‘I expect he’ll cost about £7, curse him!’). But doubts, exacerbated by Cournos’s condescension, were setting in. ‘I’ve been promised introductions to various publishers,’ she wrote, ‘but I don’t suppose anything will ever come of it. I really haven’t the least confidence in the stuff, which is a pity, because I really enjoy turning it out.’ She built up the courage to send the manuscript to a literary agent, who promptly died: ‘I think of advertising him as “the book that killed an agent”.’ Nonetheless, she began straightaway on her second Wimsey novel, Clouds of Witness. ‘I spend all my time reading or writing crimes in the Museum! Nice life, isn’t it? I’ve done the coroner’s direction to the jury today, and I feel quite exhausted.’

  Towards the end of November 1921, Sayers received bad news: she was no longer able to live in the first place where she had felt at home. Miss James was leaving Mecklenburgh Square, and asked her tenants to vacate their rooms by 5 December. ‘I shall either have to find somewhere else to live – without either money or job! Or else give up beloved London and return ignominiously home.’ The latter, she insisted, was hardly an option. ‘I shall really want to be in town just now to try if there really is the smallest chance of getting Lord Peter published.’ Her parents gently suggested, for the first time, that her writing might be better kept as a hobby rather than relied on for subsistence, but Sayers
’s determination to be professional did not waver, and she defended her choices staunchly, offering to sell her violin rather than apply for extra teaching. ‘I’m afraid he could never be “only a jolly extra”, because as a matter of fact, it takes all one’s time and energy to invent even bad, sensational stories.’ She acknowledged, however, that her parents’ anxiety was understandable: ‘Nobody can feel more acutely than I do the unsatisfactoriness of my financial position,’ she wrote. ‘I wish I could get a reasonable job, or that I could know one way or another whether I shall be able to make money by writing … If you like, I’ll make a sporting offer – that if you can manage to help me to keep going till next summer, then, if Lord Peter is still unsold, I will chuck the whole thing, confess myself beaten, and take a permanent teaching job.’ Her exhaustion is palpable, but, keen to demonstrate that her intentions to live a Bloomsbury life had not faltered, she took a flat at 24 Great James Street, just a couple of minutes’ walk south from Mecklenburgh Square, and resolutely continued to work, hoping against hope that this time her luck would be in.

  And in the spring of 1922, just when Sayers was at her lowest ebb, her fortunes began to change. In May she was offered work as a copywriter with the Holborn-based advertising firm of S. H. Benson; she was paid a salary of £4 a week, and found herself at last ‘actually settled in a job, and quite a nice job with prospects, too’. Writing jingles allowed her to use her talent for wordplay, and her parents enjoyed reading her witty promotions for Guinness and Colman’s Mustard in the newspapers and adorning billboards across the country. She found the work ‘full of energy and rush’ and was delighted when her manager told her she ‘showed signs of eventually turning into a first-class copywriter. It really does seem to be the right job for me at last!’ Humbled and greatly relieved, she wrote to her parents: ‘I want to thank you again and again ever so much for the wonderful patience with which you’ve stood by while everything was so unsatisfactory – never cursed me or told me I was a failure, and have forked out such a lot of money and been altogether ripping to me.’ And moreover, the publication of her debut novel was looking increasingly likely. That April, a friend had introduced Sayers to a literary agent, Andrew Dakers (‘he has a strong sense of humour, and likes a spicy story’), who pronounced himself ‘very confident’ about Lord Peter’s prospects and was ‘certain of selling him, though it may take a little time’. In July 1922, to Sayers’s delight, the publishers Boni & Liveright in America offered her an advance of $250 for Whose Body?. Dakers came to Great James Street for a celebratory dinner, charming her by turning up in evening dress and engaging her in ‘a lively discussion of many things – werewolves, religion, marriage, fashions in dress and the mechanicalness of the present civilisation’. By April 1923, the book had been sold in the UK to Fisher Unwin, and Lord Peter Wimsey was launched.

  *

  But while her career was taking off at last, John Cournos showed no signs of offering Sayers – who was ‘passionately wanting to be loved and to be faithful’ – the sort of partnership she hoped for. Whenever she raised the subject of commitment, Cournos closed her down with ‘talk about being free to live and love naturally’: though he had dreamed of marriage to Arabella, he now insisted that he had no desire to take on the responsibility of a wife or potential child, conditions which, to Sayers, ‘stripped love down to the merest and most brutal physical contact’. On 18 January 1922, she wrote to her parents that Cournos had ‘turned up the other day and was all right, though deeply buried in Babel. He and I have had a difference, though, on a point of practical Christianity (to which he strongly objects) and I may hear no more of him.’ He visited Great James Street for dinner on a few more occasions, which sent Sayers, still eager to impress, into fits of culinary frenzy (‘I had 5 courses, and they were all thoroughly successful, and none of them came out of tins – except the jelly mixture, of course’). But that October, Cournos abruptly left England and sailed to New York. On 28 November, she wrote ruefully that ‘John hasn’t so much as sent me a post-card since he went’.

  The ‘point of practical Christianity’ which shook their relationship related to the use of contraception – an issue at the heart of contemporary debates about women’s economic freedom, sex and the modern family. On 17 March 1921, around the time Sayers must have met Cournos, Marie Stopes had opened the British Empire’s first free birth-control clinic at a house in Holloway, not far north of Mecklenburgh Square. Trained nurses and midwives dispensed advice to queues of women, to the distress of conservative commentators, who condemned Stopes for lowering the nation’s moral standards and enacting irreversible damage to the sanctity of matrimony. Stopes saw her mission as to make birth control respectable, and firmly directed her advice towards ‘the married and the about-to-marry’. (She also advocated the sterilisation of those she deemed unfit to reproduce.) But after her 1918 book Married Love became a bestseller – despite being published privately, since no publishing house would take the risk – Stopes received hundreds of letters from young women, caught between their Victorian upbringings and a new, more permissive status quo, who were terrified that early motherhood would limit their careers but in anguish about what the Anglican Church, in July 1920, denounced as the ‘grave physical, moral and spiritual perils incurred by the use of contraceptives’.

  Cournos didn’t want to marry Sayers, and told her as much; but he let it be known that he wanted to have sex, using protection. Sayers had qualms, not so much about the contraceptives themselves, but about what their use represented, and denied. Sex for itself – aided by ‘every dirty trick invented by civilisation to avoid the natural result’ – did not attract her: she was not moved, as Cournos was, by ‘animal passion’. She wanted to sleep with Cournos, but in the context of a loving partnership, not one which deliberately ‘excluded frankness and friendship and children’. Yet Cournos saw her reluctance merely as hypocrisy, a disappointing limitation on her professed desire for freedom. From the Algonquin Hotel in central Manhattan, Cournos hinted to Gould Fletcher at the source of the frustrations that had sent him away. ‘Everywhere, in the hotels, men meet women for the first time, look into each other’s eyes, and say “Yes, let’s!” And the same night they go to bed together! This, too, is love! This, too, is life! Dear John, do not regret “not living”.’

  *

  Sayers’s despondency at Cournos’s departure did not last long. ‘Don’t faint,’ she wrote to her parents on 18 December 1922. ‘I am coming home for Xmas on Saturday with a man and a motor-cycle, with request that you will kindly give same a kind welcome and a few words of friendly cheer.’ Bill White was a bankrupt former clerk now trying his luck in the motor trade, who had arrived in London that autumn in search of work and taken a temporary room above Sayers’s. She felt sorry for the ‘poor devil’, who – so she was led to believe – possessed ‘not a red cent or a roof’, and had begun to cook meals for him (‘I’m getting more and more ingenious in the cookery line!’). Her concern came from sympathy for his suffering, now that her own situation was more stable: ‘I’ve been lonely and poor enough alone in London to know what it feels like,’ she told her parents, ‘and I know you’ll have a fellow-feeling for the jobless.’ White was cheerful, roguish and fun, everything Cournos was not: he took her dancing to jazz at the Hammersmith Palais, polished her sitting-room floor and taught her to ride a motorbike. ‘Intellect isn’t exactly his strong point,’ wrote Sayers, tactfully. ‘In fact he’s the last person you’d ever expect me to bring home, but he’s really quite amiable.’ Their liaison was always far more casual than her fraught affair with Cournos; perhaps for this reason – or simply because he was more attractive, and made the prospect sound far more appealing – she did embark on a sexual relationship with White, using contraceptives. But in a cruel stroke of luck, in spring 1923, Sayers discovered she was pregnant.

  At this point, White – now living in ‘a revolting slum off Theobalds Road’ – admitted he was married, with a wife and seven-year-old dau
ghter living in Dorset. The revelation was a terrible shock to both women, but – Bill himself now sullen, reneging all responsibility – the situation brought them together in unlikely solidarity. Beatrice White, braced to deal with the consequences of her husband’s deception, came to London to meet Sayers. Learning that she was not seeking to marry Bill, but conversely was desperate – somehow – to keep the pregnancy hidden from her family and employer, Beatrice took charge and invited Sayers to give birth in her own hometown of Southbourne. In an act of exceptional unselfishness, she arranged a room for Sayers in a local guest house, and asked her brother, a doctor, to oversee the birth at a local nursing home, without mentioning that he would be helping to deliver his brother-in-law’s illegitimate child.

  The day Sayers left London she bumped into John Cournos on Southampton Row, in what must have been almost the same spot where he had encountered Arabella in 1917; she did not tell him she was pregnant and he didn’t guess. Meanwhile, Beatrice and her daughter Valerie stayed at Great James Street, feeding Sayers’s cat Agag and forwarding her letters to her parents with a London postmark. In November, seven months pregnant, Sayers had told them that she would not be returning home for Christmas, as she wanted to get her accounts straight and send her new book to press. ‘I’m awfully rushed and rather bothered,’ she had written. ‘Don’t come up till the Spring.’ Her managers at Benson’s were told she was ill with exhaustion, and signed her off on leave without suspecting. On 3 January 1924, Sayers gave birth to a son. Cournos must have remained on her mind, for she named the boy John Anthony.