But then the worst happened. With ‘the Beast’, she overcame her loathing of contraceptives, but despite her precautions, something went wrong, and she fell pregnant. When she broke the news to ‘the Beast’, he flounced out in a temper, pausing only to blurt out that he already had a wife and daughter. Sayers had slept with him on the rebound, and she dared not tell her friends about her humiliation. Confiding in her elderly, respectable parents, who were the embodiment of Victorian values, was equally unthinkable. Her father, an elderly vicar, would be horrified, while her mother had no time for babies. She had no confidence that Philip Benson would sympathize. Probably he would sack her. Money was tight, and she dared not risk being thrown out of work.
Overwhelmed by shame and misery, she thought about parting with the child to an orphanage or a charity for waifs and strays. Adoption was impossible; it would not become legal for another three years. In despair, she contemplated abortion, but quite apart from the fact that it was a crime, and highly dangerous, her religious faith made such a ‘solution’ unthinkable.
She had first encountered ‘the Beast’, alias Bill White, when he rented a small flat above hers. Seeking work in the motor trade, he had left his wife Beatrice and young daughter Valerie in an attic flat in Southbourne, near Bournemouth. He stained the wooden floor of Sayers’ sitting-room for her, and took her for trips on his motor-cycle. After teaching her fashionable dance-steps – the bunny-hug, the shimmy and the black bottom – he accompanied her to a dance at Benson’s, wearing a borrowed dinner jacket. Two lonely people, with not much in common, each craving a little fun. She lent him cash, and even introduced him to her parents. The fun stopped the moment she told him about the baby.
With a chilling mixture of cheek and selfishness, Bill asked his wife to help him wriggle out of this calamity. Shocked as she was, Beatrice White agreed, and met up with Sayers. It was an excruciating encounter. They were both tormented by distress and embarrassment, but they were also sensible and decent women whose only mistake had been to fall for an unworthy man. A problem needed to be solved – so what should they do?
They talked things over constructively, without wasting time on recriminations. The outcome was a pragmatic deal. Sayers promised not to see Bill again, and to have the child fostered. Beatrice arranged for Sayers to stay in a guest house at Southbourne, and for her brother, a doctor, to attend the birth at a nearby nursing home. Meanwhile, Beatrice moved into Sayers’ flat in Great James Street, and forwarded her post, so that Sayers could correspond from her London address. This meant she could keep everyone in the dark about the truth of her absence. She cobbled together an excuse to explain to her mother why she would not be home for Christmas. The baby was due to be born at around the turn of the year.
She was a good liar. Once she summoned the courage to ask for time off, the hierarchy at Benson’s accepted what she said at face value. So did her parents. Resting in bed at Southbourne, Sayers scribbled away at Clouds of Witness, her second book about the aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, and mapped out the future in her mind. On New Year’s Day, she wrote to her much-loved cousin Ivy Shrimpton, asking if Ivy and her mother, both experienced and trustworthy foster careers, would look after another infant. She didn’t mention she was the mother. Two days later her son, John Anthony, was born.
When Ivy agreed to look after him, Sayers told her the truth. Her parents must not be told, she insisted. The news would mortify them. Giving birth to an illegitimate child was not, she told Ivy, the kind of ‘ill-doing’ which her mother would tolerate. The Sayers were proud of their clever, lively daughter, and she could not bear to let them down. Perhaps she underestimated their love for her, but Ivy proved utterly reliable. The Sayers went to their graves without ever learning that they had a grandchild. Bill White had no further contact with his son John Anthony. Within four years, he had met someone else, and divorced Beatrice. After that, he never saw his daughter Valerie again either.
To the end of Sayers’ life, the existence of her child was known only to Ivy and a handful of trusted confidants. Beatrice kept quiet too. Not until Sayers died did she tell Valerie that she had a half-brother. Valerie and John Anthony never met, because by the time she plucked up the nerve to contact him, he was dead.
Did anyone else guess the truth? At first, Sayers congratulated herself on managing her absence from Benson’s with the utmost discretion, although on returning to work, people noticed she had put on weight. One colleague at least, it seems, saw though the mysterious ‘illness’. Suspecting what had happened, he tried to make mischief, terrifying Sayers with the threat of exposure.
Courage was a quality Dorothy Sayers never lacked. Her tormentor had no hard evidence to support his guesswork, and she faced him down. Somehow she found the strength to say, ‘Publish and be damned’, and made sure he kept his mouth shut. Her secret was secure. Later, she would take her revenge on him, but not until it became safer to do so.
Before and after Benson’s, Oxford played a pivotal role in Sayers’ life. She was born in the city on 13 June 1893. Her father, an ordained priest, had been a contemporary of Oscar Wilde at Magdalen College, but his life followed a much less exotic course than Oscar’s. When his daughter was four, he was offered the living at Bluntisham, in East Anglia’s fen country. Oxford and Fenland provided the settings for two of Sayers’ most admired novels, Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors. After the Godolphin School in Salisbury, she won a scholarship to Somerville College, where she studied modern languages and medieval literature.
The feminist and pacifist Vera Brittain, an Oxford contemporary, described Sayers as ‘a bouncing and exuberant young female’. That bounce and exuberance never deserted Sayers, despite the blows that rained down on her over the years. Tall, thin, and with a neck that earned her the nickname ‘Swanny’, she stood out from the crowd, and made up for her lack of natural beauty with a flamboyant taste in clothes. She liked to wear a three-inch-wide scarlet riband round her head, and earrings in the form of miniature cages containing brightly-coloured parrots. Often she strode down the High, smoking a cigar while a cloak billowed around her.
Her busy social life included attending a lecture by G. K. Chesterton, whom she admired as a man, as well as for his detective stories. She also developed crushes on Dr Hugh Allen, director of the Bach Choir, and Roy Ridley, a handsome Balliol student who later became the college’s chaplain. Ridley was the physical original of a fictional Balliol man, Lord Peter Wimsey.
In August 1914, oblivious of the tense political climate in Europe, she set off for a long holiday in France, which was duly interrupted by the outbreak of war: for all her intellectual gifts, she could be hopelessly naïve. The following year Douglas Cole (like Chesterton, a future Detection Club colleague), a co-editor of Oxford Poetry, accepted one of her poems for publication. Before long, she produced a slim volume of verse. Having achieved a First in French, she applied for a job in the French Red Cross, but was turned down because she was too young. After a spell as a teacher, she worked for Blackwell’s, the publishers, in Oxford, where she fell in love with Eric Whelpton, a handsome soldier who have been invalided out of the Army.
After the war ended, Whelpton started teaching in France. Sayers chased him across the Channel, and took a job as his assistant. When he teased her about her enthusiasm for crime fiction, she told him some friends from Oxford were planning to make a fortune by writing detective stories. The group included Douglas Cole, his wife Margaret, and Michael Sadleir, later a successful publisher. They thought they could create a market, and had it in mind to set up a writing syndicate together. Sayers urged Whelpton to join them, but he was not interested. Worse, he did not reciprocate her devotion.
Whelpton became involved with a married woman, and a chastened Sayers returned to London to lick her wounds. Her morale received a much-needed boost when – in the same post-war mood that saw women given the vote (provided they were thirty years old), the first female MP returned to office, and the firs
t woman called to the Bar – Oxford University allowed women to graduate formally. Sayers was among the first group of female students from Oxford to be invested with both a B.A. and, because five years had passed since she had taken her finals, an M.A.
Equal rights for women remained, however, a distant dream. Working men worried about women taking their jobs, and trade union pressure pushed women towards the career cul-de-sac of domestic service. Even highly educated women found their horizons narrowing. Their choice was often between a career coupled with a life of celibacy, or redundancy and marriage.
With so many young men killed in combat, marriage was often not an option. The problem of the ‘surplus woman’ was widely debated by the chattering classes. One successful Golden Age suspense novel (written by a single woman) even saw a deranged serial killer decide to solve that problem by ridding the world of unmarried females. For Sayers, the answer lay in building an independent and fulfilling career, preferably as a writer. After being turned down for a series of jobs, she returned to teaching as a stopgap. Meanwhile, she tried her hand at a detective story.
She began with the mystery of ‘a fat lady found dead in her bath with nothing on but her pince-nez’. After the victim – a sympathetically presented Jew – underwent a sex change, this became the opening of Whose Body? In Sayers’ original version, Lord Peter Wimsey deduces that a body in a bath is not that of Sir Reuben Levy, a financier, because it is not circumcised. The publishers thought this too coarse for the delicate sensibilities of readers, and required her to change the physical evidence so as to suggest that the corpse belonged to a manual worker, rather than a rich man.
Originally, Wimsey featured as a minor character in an unpublished story. This was probably intended for the Sexton Blake series, produced by a writing syndicate. Sayers also toyed with the idea of introducing Wimsey in a play (‘a detective fantasia’ called The Mousehole) that she did not finish. When she embarked on a novel, she decided this son of a duke would be her detective.
Her intentions were satiric rather than snobbish. A detective who was not a professional police officer, she reasoned, needed to be rich and to have plenty of leisure time to devote to solving mysteries. She conceived Wimsey as a caricature of the gifted amateur sleuth, and found it amusing to soak herself in the lifestyle of someone for whom money was no object. When Wimsey first comes into the story, ‘his long amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.’
Sayers endowed Wimsey with criminology, bibliophily, music and cricket as favourite recreations. He is a Balliol man, equipped with a magnifying glass disguised as a monocle, a habit of literary quotation and an engaging, if often frivolous, demeanour. His valet and former batman, the imperturbable Mervyn Bunter, became devoted to him when they fought together during the war. Conveniently, his sister, Lady Mary, is to marry Detective Chief Inspector Charles Parker of Scotland Yard. Like many amateur sleuths, Wimsey benefits from keeping close to the police. The dialogue is flippant, but Wimsey’s worldview is darkened by his wartime experiences. He suffered shell-shock and had a nervous breakdown. When Parker is bothered by the idea of a corpse being shaved and manicured, Wimsey retorts, ‘Worse things happen in war.’
A distinctive amateur sleuth, a lively style and unorthodox storyline compensated for the fact that it is easy to guess whodunit. Sayers was always more interested in describing the culprit’s methods of carrying out and concealing the crime. In a nod to E. C. Bentley’s ground-breaking whodunit Trent’s Last Case, she had the killer refer to ‘that well-thought-out work of Mr. Bentley’s’. Later, it became a regular in-joke for Detection Club members to reference each other in their books.
Having fun with Wimsey offered relief from the depressing reality of life on a tight budget. The rent for her flat was seventy pounds a year, and she struggled to make ends meet. As she told her parents, in one of her innumerable frank and entertaining letters, writing about Wimsey ‘prevents me from wanting too badly the kind of life I do want, and see no chance of getting …’ If the novel did not sell, she intended to abandon her literary ambitions, and take up a permanent job as a teacher. But it was not what she wanted. When an American publisher offered to take Whose Body? she was overjoyed. Soon a British publisher accepted it as well.
While Sayers was working on her first novel, she began a relationship with someone very different from Whelpton, the writer John Cournos. Russian-born, Cournos came from a Jewish background, and his first language was Yiddish. His family emigrated to the United States when he was ten, but he moved to England and established a reputation as a novelist, poet and journalist. Cournos was disdainful about Sayers’ aristocratic detective, but she cheered up when Philip Guedella, a Jewish historian, asserted in the Daily News that ‘the detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds’.
Dorothy L. Sayers and the mysterious Robert Eustace – photographed to publicise The Documents in the Case (by permission of the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL).
Dorothy L. Sayers (by permission of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society).
Cournos believed in free love, but Sayers, a High Anglican, was wary about sex outside marriage. Times were changing, and Marie Stopes, author of Married Love, had recently set up the country’s first clinic dispensing contraceptive products and advice – a crucial step towards making birth control socially acceptable. Sayers, however, had not yet overcome her objection to contraception as she did later with the Beast, Bill White. She did not want her relationship with Cournos to have the ‘taint of the rubber shop’.
This mismatch of expectations killed off their affair. She presented a fictionalized version of her emotional battle with Cournos eight years later, when she published Strong Poison. Harriet Vane, a detective novelist and Oxford graduate, is accused of murdering her selfish former lover Philip Boyes. She tells Wimsey that Boyes demanded her devotion, but ‘I didn’t like having matrimony offered as a bad-conduct prize’.
Cournos retaliated with a more intimate and brutal account of their relationship in The Devil is an English Gentleman. Stella, based on Sayers, resists Richard’s overtures, thinking: ‘If I give myself to him, he’ll forsake me.’ Meanwhile Richard ‘waited for the generous gesture, for a token of abandonment on her part; it did not come’. Cournos, who eventually emigrated to the USA, continued to publish books until the early Sixties. His destiny was to be remembered for his doomed romance with Sayers rather than for his own literary efforts.
Sayers started working for Benson’s shortly before Whose Body? was accepted. The job taught her how to use publicity to promote her writing, and the value of branding (before it was known as branding). Not from cussedness, but because she knew the value of a distinctive brand, she insisted on being known as Dorothy L. Sayers, not simply Dorothy Sayers. When her publisher, Ernest Benn, missed out her middle initial on the spine of one book a few years later, she was incandescent. After all, she said, people did not talk about E. Bentley, or G. Chesterton or G. Shaw.
Bill White was earthier than Cournos, and part of his appeal was that he did not share his predecessor’s lofty disdain for crossword puzzles and vulgar limericks. Thanks to him, Sayers experienced at last the sexual pleasure she craved. But once again, a man let her down. It was becoming a pattern in her life.
Sayers had never intended her affair with Bill White to be more than ‘an episode’. On returning to Benson’s, she worked furiously during the day, and then on her new book in the evenings. But the pretence of business as usual took a toll on her health. Her hair fell out, a visible symptom of severe emotional strain, and when it grew again, she decided her ‘little rat’s-tail plaits’ were hideous, and had her hair cut short and started wearing a silver wig.
She kept in touch with Cournos, but was deeply wounded when, having said he was not the marrying kind, he married Helen Kestner Satterthwaite, an American who wrote detective stories under the pen name of Sybil Norton. Biting back despa
ir, Sayers wrote him a letter of congratulation, confiding that she had ‘gone over the rocks’, and that the result was John Anthony. Cournos’s reaction was anger that she had given herself to someone else, after refusing him. ‘Why not me?’ he demanded.
Sayers’ reply amounted to a scream of pain. ‘I have been so bitterly punished by God already, need you really dance on the body?’ The correspondence continued, as she agonized over what had gone wrong between them. One line explains a great deal about the way she led the rest of her life: ‘I am so terrified of emotion, now.’
That terror of emotion never left her. Sayers was devoted to her child, but in her own mind, she had committed ‘a bitter sin’. These were dark days, and she told Cournos, ‘It frightens me to be so unhappy.’ Although she had hoped things would improve, each day seemed worse than the last, and her work was suffering. She dared not even resort to suicide, ‘because what would poor Anthony do then?’ In Cournos’s novel, Stella threatens to kill herself, and Sayers did more than talk about self-harm in her correspondence: suicide forms a significant plot element in each of the first five Wimsey novels.
Yet there were lighter interludes. Cournos sent her an article by Chesterton about writing detective fiction, and she responded with a four-page critique. Game-playing mattered more to detective novelists at this point than the study of psychology, and she argued that characters in the detective story did not need to be drawn in depth. Clouds of Witness was most notable for a trial scene in the House of Lords where Peter Wimsey’s elder brother is accused of murder, a plot element she hoped would attract American readers.
The Golden Age of Murder Page 3