Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  As Strong Poison unfolded, Sayers increasingly felt that simply to marry off her characters under the circumstances outlined in the novel would be ‘in every respect false and degrading’. Having invented Harriet Vane – the ‘Bloomsbury bluestocking’ with a distinct resemblance to herself – Sayers realised that to relegate her character to the passive role of Wimsey’s love interest would undermine her own creation: there was no way that this ambitious woman, previously hurt in love, could quietly marry the man who had saved her from the gallows ‘without loss of self-respect’. ‘Notwithstanding the usual practice of heroines rescued from humiliating positions,’ wrote Sayers five years later, ‘it soon became clear to me that no good could ever come of a marriage founded on gratitude and an inferiority complex.’ After the disappointments of Cournos and White, and the pain of giving up her child, Sayers had found her greatest satisfaction in her career and wanted to afford her character the same freedom – yet hesitated to deprive Harriet of a chance at the productive relationship of equals, and possibly the happy motherhood, that had eluded her author.

  Nonetheless, at the end of the novel, when Wimsey has secured her release from prison, Harriet rejects his proposal. ‘The best remedy for a bruised heart,’ wrote Sayers in her next Harriet Vane novel, Have His Carcase (1932), ‘is not, as so many people seem to think, repose upon a manly bosom. Much more efficacious are honest work, physical activity, and the sudden acquisition of wealth.’ It was a lesson Sayers had learned herself. Rather than luxuriating in a life of leisure on the Denver estate, Harriet goes travelling around Europe with a woman friend, gathering material for novels and selling travel articles. When she returns, she moves into a new, superior, one-bed flat in Mecklenburgh Square. Her address represents the self-sufficiency Harriet prizes so dearly: a decade after Sayers had left the square, it remained a byword in her mind for a life devoted to intellectual endeavour. From her new home, Harriet continues to write detective fiction which, thanks to the publicity of the court case, is making her a tidy income of her own.

  If Lord Peter were to become a suitable husband for Harriet, Sayers decided, his character would require ‘a major operation’: his psychology had to be deepened, his moral compass steadied, all ‘squared somehow or other with such random attributes as I had bestowed upon him over a series of years in accordance with the requirements of various detective plots’. Fortunately, right from Whose Body? Sayers had given Wimsey the depth that would enable this metamorphosis: the work she had done in Mecklenburgh Square, creating a detective who was already unusual in his sensitivity to ethics and attention to the real-world ramifications of his entertainment, now enabled her to make a further leap towards a new kind of detective novel. Strong Poison is the first Wimsey book in which Lord Peter’s investment in the case overreaches the pure intellectual challenge: for the first time, dead ends leave him not titillated but helpless, terrified that he will fail and be unable to ‘save the woman he imperiously wanted from a sordid death by hanging’. In Have His Carcase, Harriet discovers a corpse on a beach and once again finds herself under suspicion. Wimsey is called to investigate and the pair work together, not entirely comfortably: Harriet keeps him at a distance, unwilling to weaken her position by acknowledging the ‘detestable burden of gratitude’ she owes him. It doesn’t help that Wimsey has instigated a regular pattern of proposals, on 1 April each year. (One is delivered simply as a telegram containing the single Latin particle ‘Num?’ – as Sayers’s father would have taught her, the prefix to a question expecting the answer ‘No’ – which occasions Harriet to rummage in her grammar book for ‘polite negatives’.) But she strives to keep her relationship with Wimsey strictly professional, determined to investigate the case alongside him not as wife or Watson but on equal terms as partners.

  *

  Sayers ruminated on the question of Harriet Vane’s future for several years. Like H. D., she could not expunge the pain of her time in and after Mecklenburgh Square until she had worked out how to write about it. She had learned, from that period, not to depend on others for her own sense of worth: throughout her life, she would extol the importance of vocation, convinced that it was only in ‘good work, well done’ that a person could find real ‘spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction’. Sayers’s insistence on the value of work was inextricable from her firm belief that women must be treated ‘as human beings, whose activities are not all and always comprised within their sexual function’.

  In her essay ‘The Human-Not-Quite-Human’ (published in her 1946 collection Unpopular Opinions) she describes the brain as ‘that great and sole true Androgyne’, echoing Virginia Woolf’s phrasing in A Room of One’s Own, which H. D. also picked up in Bid Me to Live: ‘in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female … The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually cooperating.’ The absurdity of women’s exclusion from intellectual activities was apparent to Sayers, as it was to Woolf, and to H. D. too. All these women were absorbed, in their life and their work, in finding ways to live in a society which still refused to allow those powers to reconcile – which still believed women’s needs and desires must be quite different from men’s, and imposed expectations accordingly. Responding in another essay to the question ‘What on earth do women want?’, Sayers wrote that she was not sure ‘that women, as women, want anything in particular, but as human beings they want, my good men, exactly what you want yourselves: interesting occupation, reasonable freedom for their pleasures, and a sufficient emotional outlet’. It’s difficult to think of two writers and personalities more different than Dorothy L. Sayers and H. D. – but they are linked on a level far deeper than that of their shared address, and their shared acquaintance with John Cournos. When Sayers pointed out that society had made little provision for women ‘who are cursed with both hearts and brains’, she was expressing the same thought as H. D. when Julia in Bid Me to Live describes her urge to live ‘in two dimensions’. As they tried to assert themselves as writers, both of these women had to negotiate the double standards that threatened to split them into pieces and diminish their sense of self. As she contemplated what to do with Harriet Vane, Sayers was also seeking an answer to the question that had occupied both her and H. D. since their time in Mecklenburgh Square: how a woman can live without having to compromise between intellectual and emotional fulfilment, between a desire to write and the bounds of accepted femininity.

  On 13 June 1934 – her forty-first birthday – Dorothy L. Sayers returned to Somerville for a celebration in honour of her old French tutor Mildred Pope. Asked to propose a toast to the University of Oxford, Sayers meditated on the preparation for life the university had given her, not as ‘a passport to wealth and position’, but in teaching her the value of knowledge for its own sake. (There was, she noted darkly, ‘perhaps never a time in the world’s history when scholarship was so bitterly needed’.) At the reunion, she recognised that the Oxford women’s college offered her a route towards solving her fictional problem: how to effect the marriage of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane without loss of dignity to either party. Her time at Somerville had given her the confidence to pursue a writing career; while she did not regret leaving the college and striking out alone, she was reminded of how grateful she’d been for the support she had received from its community of women, among whom her talents were appreciated and nurtured and her scholarship never deemed incompatible with her gender. In this setting, where (uniquely for women) intellectual achievement was prized above emotional commitments, Harriet could at last stand ‘free and equal with Peter’. And, wrote Sayers, thinking back on Cournos’s insistence that she compromise her beliefs, ‘By choosing a plot that should exhibit intellectual integrity as the one great permanent value in an emotionally unstable world I should be saying the thing that, in a confused way, I had been wanting to say all my life.’

  At the time, Sayers was working sporadically on an idea for a ‘straight’ novel about ‘an Oxf
ord woman graduate who found, in middle life, and after a reasonably satisfactory experience of marriage and motherhood, that her real vocation and emotional fulfilment were to be found in the creative life of the intellect’. This autobiographical work, provisionally titled Cat O’Mary, grew out of some reminiscences she had started drafting under the title ‘My Edwardian Childhood’. In its new form, the first-person narrator morphs into the fictional heroine Katherine Lammas – a refraction of Dorothy L. Sayers, and also of Harriet Vane – whom the novel follows through her childhood in rural Cambridgeshire. The manuscript breaks off just before Katherine goes up to Somerville, but a short series of fragmented vignettes – and a notebook with further jottings and notes – continue the story into Katherine’s later life. Now married to a city worker whose career takes precedence over her own, Katherine is trapped as a leisured upper-class wife, overcome by domestic concerns, bored and pregnant. In the next section, she has divorced her husband after his affair with a young secretary, and plans to return to academic work, to his fury: ‘I suppose you want to go and turn into a sort of Bloomsbury frump with all your Museum friends,’ he sneers. His words recall Sayers’s early fears of being dismissed as a ‘literary freak’ – yet now, given a different slant, this insult is merely comical. A life of Bloomsbury independence, surrounded by like-minded friends and ignored by judgemental men, is exactly what Katherine wants, and she’s no longer ashamed to admit it. In the final scene, Katherine is interviewed by a professor, who asks her why she has been wasting so much time on domestic pursuits, since she has ‘the mind of a scholar’. The happy ending comes not with Katherine finding a new partner but with her discovering a purpose, not as somebody’s wife or mother, but as herself.

  It’s hard not to imagine that her trajectory reflects Sayers’s own feelings. By this point, Sayers herself was married, not entirely happily. After her relationship with Bill White ended, Sayers had told Cournos that she was ‘learning to cope with loneliness’, and had decided to forgo romance because ‘it interferes with one’s work’ – though she admitted that she would welcome ‘a man that’s human and careless and loves life, and one who can enjoy the rough-and-tumble of passion’. In the autumn of 1925 she met Mac Fleming, a divorced News of the World journalist who reported largely on crime and motor cars. Little is known of their courtship, but they married, quietly, the following April; she only informed her parents via an extremely casual letter five days before the ceremony, aware that they would be distressed to learn that the marriage could not take place in a church. Mac had recently moved away from his wife and two daughters and was no longer supporting them financially, but Sayers was glad to report to Ivy that he seemed ‘quite satisfied to throw the eye of affection and responsibility over John Anthony in the future’. She had initially suggested to her cousin that Anthony (as he came to be known) might come to live with her later on, when his care would be less consuming and her parents ‘too old, if they are still alive, to worry much about anything’. But this never transpired, despite Mac nominally adopting him in 1935: the child was content with Ivy, and though she wrote to Anthony diligently, if somewhat formally, through her life, neither Sayers nor Mac was eager to give up work to care for him full-time. (He had been brought up to believe Sayers was his cousin, and discovered their true relationship – which he had already suspected – by accident when applying for a passport.)

  At first, Sayers was happy in this egalitarian domestic partnership: Mac did most of the cooking (his 1933 cookbook, The Gourmet’s Book of Food and Drink, was dedicated to ‘my wife, who can make an omelette’), and enjoyed ‘looking after’ Sayers, who in turn liked knitting him socks and joining him at race meetings. Snapshots of their early relationship from her letters suggest an easy-going, teasing camaraderie, founded on a sense of fun, an enjoyment of cinema and theatre and a shared bent to independence. But Mac was deeply affected by his time serving as a major in the war, and was increasingly ill, distant and resentful of Sayers’s success. Their relationship became semi-detached after they bought a house in Witham in Essex, where Mac spent most of his time while Sayers retained Great James Street as her private sanctuary, a useful base for her busy professional life in London, and a reminder of her early days of independence at Mecklenburgh Square. In a way, marriage settled her domestic affairs and left her free to focus her energies on work; while it ultimately brought her little satisfaction, she took solace from the fact that her career was thriving – with high sales, glowing reviews, a devoted readership and new, prestigious commissions. But Sayers wanted something more for her character Harriet, something she had not herself achieved: a relationship which would not force a choice between private happiness and intellectual independence, but would instead provide the conditions for both. In her next Harriet Vane novel, Sayers sketched out the ideal solution to the emotional difficulties she had not been able to reconcile.

  *

  Gaudy Night (1935) opens with Harriet Vane sitting at her writing table, absent-mindedly gazing at the tulips and the tennis players in the Mecklenburgh Square garden, just as Sayers had done fifteen years earlier. Yet before long, Harriet is tempted out of the square by an invitation to a reunion (known in Oxford-speak as a gaudy) at her old college. Back at Shrewsbury – a fictional college standing on the cricket grounds of Wimsey’s alma mater, Balliol – Harriet finds herself wishing she hadn’t come. She is saddened to meet her old friend Mary, previously a lively personality heading for a first, who since leaving college ‘had married and scarcely been heard of’, and now seems dull and directionless, with a ‘haggard face and look of defeat’. Mary serves as an example of what might have happened to Harriet had she married Philip Boyes, or Sayers had she married John Cournos – a point made wickedly clear by the fact that Mary’s name is listed in the gaudy programme as Mrs H. Attwood, the official name of Cournos’s wife, Helen, who had previously been married to a Harry Attwood. Seeing Mary, Harriet thinks, ‘What damned waste’, and reaffirms her own desire never to allow marriage to erase her identity or foil her ambitions. ‘To be true to one’s calling, whatever follies one might commit in one’s emotional life, that was the way to spiritual peace.’

  Soon after the gaudy, Shrewsbury is ‘victimised by a cross between a Poltergeist and a Poison-Pen’, who is scattering across the buildings notes containing threats and misogynist insults. Suspects are confined to the college – the students, the dons and the servants – and all are under scrutiny. As newspaper reports begin to hint at an apparent outbreak of insanity in a closed environment of educated single women, Harriet sees at once that this scandal risks doing considerable damage to the ongoing fight for women’s education: ‘“Soured virginity” – “unnatural life” – “semi-demented spinsters” – “starved appetites and suppressed impulses” – “unwholesome atmosphere” – she could think of whole sets of epithets, ready-minted for circulation.’ Encouraged to use her novelist’s experience in the service of a real investigation, Harriet returns to Shrewsbury, by day working peacefully on a study of Sheridan Le Fanu, by night snooping the corridors and patrolling the grounds, and avoiding London with its incessant reminders of her turbulent past.

  Lord Peter Wimsey’s absence for most of the novel is atoned for by a cast of some of Sayers’s most brightly drawn characters, from a blackmailing former porter to a reckless band of male undergraduates, determined to scale the college walls for nocturnal liaisons with their cloistered counterparts. And the lack of an actual murder is compensated amply by a series of increasingly chilling incidents, from spiteful letters slipped into gown pockets to a full-blown midnight chase through the college, the ‘poltergeist’ rushing madly through the quadrangles blowing fuse boxes, hurling ink bottles at portraits and chucking books through windows.

  But this premeditated attack on an institution of women’s education also serves to dramatise Harriet’s private dilemma, as she wonders whether to accept Lord Peter’s suit. At Shrewsbury, the dons have dedicated themselves to their work
at the expense of family life (making them exemplify, to detractors, a monstrous perversion of woman’s natural instincts). Among the characters Harriet encounters are the proudly unmarried Miss Hillyard, who displays a suspiciously acute interest in the technical aspects of historic crimes by women against men, and the austere economic historian Miss de Vine, who left her fiancé when she realised that ‘I simply wasn’t taking as much trouble with him as I should have done over a disputed reading’. Yet it is de Vine who shows Harriet, during a discussion of ‘the difficulty of combining intellectual and emotional interests’, that there may be a way to avoid the sort of choice Sayers had felt she had to make in the early 1920s. Harriet wonders aloud whether one should marry anyone if one is not prepared to make them one’s full-time job. ‘Probably not,’ the don replies, ‘though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don’t look on themselves as jobs but as fellow-creatures … If you ever find a person who likes you in spite of [your detachment] – and still more, because of it – that liking has very great value, because it is perfectly sincere, and because with that person, you will never need to be anything but sincere yourself.’