There may be very good reasons for this omission from the novels. Sayers herself was college educated and politically conservative, albeit something of a social radical. She might conceivably have had some sympathy for the miners’ problems, but their world was so foreign to hers that empathy was impossible. Then, too, she had created Peter Wimsey as an aristocrat; his opportunities to hobnob with the working classes were severely limited. To maintain consistent character, it would be difficult for Peter to deal with working people without some condescension, however inadvertent or unintended. It was better just to avoid the whole thing.
The more compelling reasons for the omission of the general strike lay closer to Dorothy L. Sayers’s heart. The years 1923 to 1926 were especially difficult ones for her. Her second novel, Clouds of Witness, gave her considerably more difficulty than the first. Events that Sayers had sketched out to occur in 1923 did not reach print until 1926. A big hole had opened in the envisioned Wimsey career. More critically, Sayers was emotionally wounded by personal woes during this long period. One love affair had closed in 1922, but she continued to pick at the scabs in 1924 and 1925. A second affair ended disastrously with the birth of an out-of-wedlock child in January 1924. She finally found some happiness late in 1925 and married on April 13, 1926, about three weeks before the general strike. She never made mention of the strike in her correspondence. Chances are, she took in stride the inconvenience during the strike of staying home more often.
Dorothy L. Sayers probably met John Cournos, the first of her wretched lovers, through mutual friends among London’s Bohemian crowd in 1921. Older, mysteriously foreign, a gifted intellectual and writer, Cournos was almost everything Sayers could dream of in a man. He was a Russian Jew, born in Kiev in 1881. When he was ten his family emigrated to the United States, where he became a rags-to-riches story. He rose to an assistant-editor position in Philadelphia before moving to England as a freelance writer in 1912. There he joined a literary community that included William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound; he produced a highly regarded novel, The Mask, in 1919. By this time he had become a man of “advanced views.”6
As a minister’s daughter and an Oxford student, Sayers had led a fairly sheltered life. Her first hope of love, Eric Whelpton, spurned her. Cournos then crossed her path with the impact of an explosion. She fell passionately in love, determined to marry Cournos and have children with him. Cournos was not interested—at least not that interested. He believed in free love, he said, and would never marry. Bed would be all right, after a visit to the “rubber shop” (Sayers’s disdainful euphemism for birth control). In the meantime, he used his modicum of highbrow success to impugn much of Sayers’s own literary activity, especially her creation and development of Lord Peter. Cournos was in fact the devil’s own snob. On one night the couple traipsed through half of London, looking for a movie he would condescend to watch. He did not like the one they chose—too lowbrow. Sayers, nursing blisters, was less than awed by his unrelentingly fastidious attitude.7
Frustration piled on frustration, and the unhappy affair dwindled out in 1922, when Cournos left for the United States. Bitter and still virginal at age twenty-nine, Sayers quickly fell in with an unemployed motorcycle mechanic named Bill White. Not caring “tuppence” for the man, Sayers gladly visited the rubber shop, but the birth control failed. When Whose Body? reached print in May 1923, she was two months pregnant. White could make no commitment and soon passed out of her life. Desperately anxious to keep the pregnancy a secret from her parents and her employers, grinding out a living in advertising, Sayers had hit bottom. She took two months’ leave from Benson’s in November 1923, ostensibly to write, actually to have her baby in secret. She gave birth in a nursing home on January 3, 1924, named the boy John Anthony, and turned him over to a cousin to raise. Fortunately, proceeds from the sale of Whose Body? paid all the expenses. She returned to work, determined to make enough to give her child the best circumstances and education possible. There was little else to look forward to. Then she found out that John Cournos had married in America.8
The man had abandoned all his principles. Not only had he married, but his wife was an author of detective stories. Hearing of his temporary return to England in the summer of 1924, Sayers determined to write him a letter. What followed was a most extraordinary correspondence, as Sayers poured out the love and wrath consuming her soul. “I love thee still,” she admitted, “and as you’ve no use for me I must be in a very stupid and false and painful position.” The pain burnt into the pages of her letters. She confessed that “If I saw you, I should probably only cry—and I have been crying for 3 years now and am heartily weary of the exercise.”9
Sayers destroyed Cournos’s half of the correspondence, but it is easy to infer his remarkable insensitivity from her replies. He degraded her popular fiction efforts, showed no sympathy or understanding over her pregnancy, and even mocked the choice of names for her young son. The man really was despicable. Sayers wrote him at least thirteen letters before the exchange ended in October 1925. By that time, she had met her future husband.10
No one knows exactly how Sayers met Atherton “Mac” Fleming. He was a journalist by trade but worked sporadically because of chronic illness—he was a veteran, still suffering the effects of shell shock. The war had changed him profoundly, so much that his first wife had recently divorced him. When able to work, Fleming was a more than capable writer. In 1919 he had published a sensitive and helpful little volume titled How to See the Battlefields, an aid to families coping with losses from the war. He also painted, produced excellent photographs, and was very skilled at cooking. Moreover, he was a good-looking fellow. He apparently triumphed over Sayers’s anguished passion for Cournos; Mac and Dorothy married in 1926, no more than ten months after their initial meeting.11
The writing of Clouds of Witness is framed by Sayers’s two destructive love affairs, the birth of her son, and her marriage. The book was the longest in production of any Wimsey novel—more than four years passed between its inception and publication. The turmoil of her personal life in part explains the delay, but still more was at work. The novel itself gave her trouble.
The story line that eventually took shape as Clouds of Witness was a far more ambitious project than the Battersea mystery. Set principally in two disparate locations, London and Riddlesdale (in Yorkshire), the action revolved around a member of the upper nobility accused of murder. Sayers was nothing if not attentive to accuracy of detail, and a plot such as this required considerable research. She knew little of the Yorkshire country, recognizing only that it was so different from town as to be almost a foreign country. This dictated much research into northern customs and beliefs. Eventually she vacationed in the district, hoping to absorb the local color more fully and correctly.12
Murder among the aristocracy was a tough nut to crack as well. Sayers sought to appeal to the international taste for scandal in high places by placing Gerald Wimsey, Peter’s older brother, the Duke of Denver, at risk. But a peer cannot be tried in the common courts; the only possible jury of his peers was the House of Lords. This was an intriguing spectacle to portray during the democratic bloom of the 1920s, offering readers a window into the hierarchical past. Sayers worried that a mystery built on the arcane traditions of the British aristocracy might be too much for American readers, but she plunged ahead.13 She detailed some of her research into the subject in a letter to Cournos, written in January 1925:
I spent a beautiful sunny afternoon in the B. M. [British Museum] today, reading up the trials of Lord Cardigan and Lord Pembroke. Lord P. was a splendid picture of London night life in 1678. He had a row with a man in a pub in Haymarket and knocked him down and kicked him. The man died and Lord P. was had up for murder. . . . Anyway, the Lords brought it in manslaughter, and the culprit “pleaded his clergy” and so got off scot free!!! The whole tale is characteristic!14
Such careful research into the antecedents of her stories became characteristic of Sayers.<
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Carrying on the research and writing amid the travails of heartache and the demands of work, Sayers completed the novel early in 1925. As she had feared, her American agent did not care for it. She explained the situation to Cournos: “[The agent] doesn’t like the new book and . . . I shall either have to chuck it up or re-write great chunks of it—and you can imagine how much I shall enjoy going over that old ground again.—I hope Anthony and I don’t come to the workhouse! but it’s so hard to work. It frightens me to be so unhappy.”15 Somehow, she persevered. In some ways, she flowered. After purchasing a motorcycle in 1925, she rode out the long miles of the great northern highway alone to visit her parents at Christchurch (where her parents had moved in 1916), scandalizing the neighbors by standing out behind the rectory to smoke cigarettes. A working woman with a motorcycle and a secret sexual past, Dorothy L. Sayers had become an advanced woman—and a successful author. T. Fisher Unwin of London published Clouds of Witness in February 1926, two months before she married Mac Fleming.16
Clouds of Witness shared much in common with its predecessor, Whose Body?, but it still represented something of a departure. The community of actors assembled to carry the action of the first novel largely continues in the second, with a few intriguing additions. Several of the stock characters are fleshed out, and Wimsey himself acquires some new qualities. Most important, however, is a shift of emphasis. In Whose Body? all of the principal actors are men. Clouds of Witness is the first story in which the activities of women become critical.
First and foremost is a new stock character, Peter’s sister, Lady Mary Wimsey. Mary, five years younger than Peter, is drawn as a thoroughly modern woman. Her rich golden hair is bobbed, her actions are the product of headstrong decisiveness, and her opinions, if a trifle confused, are decidedly her own. If her considerable financial inheritance is controlled by her brother, she is willing to forego it to escape the lifeless obligations accompanying her title. She would rather work as a secretary for a socialist.
Other witnesses describe her relationship with Dennis Cathcart, her fiancé and the victim of foul play at Riddlesdale, as “offhand” and undemonstrative. This was due in part to the fact that the two did not really love each other, but “that sort of thing was the fashion nowadays.”17 Mrs. Pettigrew-Robinson, another of the guests at Riddlesdale Lodge, “had never liked Lady Mary; she considered her a very objectionable specimen of the modern independent young woman; besides, there had been that very undignified incident connected with a Bolshevist while Lady Mary was nursing in London during the war” (37). Lady Mary’s mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, had not thought much of Mary’s nursing efforts during the war either. Mary could have performed far more valuable work elsewhere, but she was simply dying to get up to London, on whatever pretext (124).
Much of the confusion that created the Riddlesdale mystery is the fault of Lady Mary Wimsey. She had agreed to marry Cathcart as a convenience to escape the dreary conventional life of the aristocratic lady, “opening bazaars and watching polo and meeting the Prince of Wales” (160). Naturally reluctant to actually enter into a loveless marriage, she jumped at the chance to elope with a former lover, the Bolshevik George Goyles. As luck would have it, the night of their proposed elopement is also the night that Dennis Cathcart chooses to commit suicide. First Goyles discovers the body and runs off, then Gerald Wimsey finds the body, and finally Lady Mary discovers her brother bending over the body. Contriving to give evidence at the inquest in such a way as to shield Goyles, Mary manages to incriminate her brother, the Duke. Thus begins the march to all the rigmarole of a capital trial in the House of Lords, the first in more than two centuries.
Peter readily admits that he does not know his sister well. First he went to Eton, followed by Oxford, the war, and the studied separation from the rest of the family in Piccadilly; the two had shared little contact before the death of Cathcart. But Peter is well aware of the family’s exasperation with Mary, a difficult and independent woman of twenty-eight who refuses to settle down in an acceptable fashion. When Charles Parker allows his infatuation with Lady Mary to show a little too plainly, Peter details the situation: “—to put it on the lowest grounds, do think what it might have been! A Socialist Conchy of neither bowels nor breeding, or a card-sharping dark horse with a mysterious past! Mother and Jerry must have got to the point when they’d welcome a decent, God-fearing plumber, let alone a policeman. Only thing I’m afraid of is that Mary havin’ such beastly bad taste in blokes, won’t know how to appreciate a really decent fellow like you, old son” (221–22). A determined, independent woman in her late twenties with a “beastly bad taste in blokes”—Sayers must have modelled Lady Mary on herself.
As matters resolve, Mary proves herself a decent sort. She goes to incredible lengths to protect Goyles, obscuring investigations by one brother intended to save the other, eventually claiming to be the murderer herself. But when Goyles exposes himself as a hypocritical, unworthy ass, Mary at last tells the truth. From that point on, she is a stout ally in the investigation, joining forces with her mother to protect the other mysterious woman in this case, the stunning Mrs. Grimethorpe. Sir Impey Biggs is bemused. “Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman,” he intones, “but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force” (258).
Mrs. Grimethorpe is not an advanced woman. The wife of a brutal Yorkshire farmer, trapped in the remote rural confines of Grider’s Hole, she is a prisoner of conventions not merely belonging to Victorian days but extending back to the evil days of feudalism. A more stark contrast to Lady Mary would be difficult to imagine. Mary is petulant and more than a little difficult, but she is capable of running her own life. She is the image of light, golden-haired, and pleasantly mannered. Mrs. Grimethorpe, as her name suggests, is reflected darkness.
We do not even discover Mrs. Grimethorpe’s given name. She is surpassingly beautiful, a true Helen; this is both her sole identity and her cross. Men seem to share a universal reaction to her, seeing only “a broad white forehead under massed, dusky hair, black eyes glowing under straight brows, a wide passionate mouth—a shape so wonderful that even in that strenuous moment sixteen generations of feudal privilege stirred in Lord Peter’s blood” (97). Gerald’s reaction seemingly was much the same; at risk to life and reputation, he slept with her at least twice. She had consented to the Duke’s overtures because he was kind to her, a welcome change from her husband’s ferocity.
A traditional woman in the bondage of a traditional marriage, Mrs. Grimethorpe is a true victim. Every emotion save fear has been savagely extinguished; she exists only as an object, a beautiful object to light up the eyes of men. She confesses to her liaison with Gerald only after Peter confronts her with incontrovertible evidence. When at last she does volunteer to testify in the Duke’s behalf, to risk the murderous wrath of her husband in order to save her lover, it is a gesture of despair. “I am a lost woman,” she says (216).
Here, in the characters of two very different women, Sayers sketches the range of the socially possible in the postwar era. If Lady Mary is the “new woman,” forthright and decisive, Mrs. Grimethorpe is her antithesis, a creature at the mercy of the wills of men. Lady Mary’s path is filled with complications and obstructions; she can make her way only with difficulty. But at least she is in control. Mrs. Grimethorpe can only react to whatever is set before her. More often than not, such choices as she has are equally poisonous.
Sayers does allow Mrs. Grimethorpe an escape in the end. The accidental death of her husband—killed in the act of trying to do her in—at least frees her from the tormented marriage. Mrs. Grimethorpe now has autonomy, justly inherited with her husband’s property. She grasps the meaning of this freedom in a spontaneous decision to buy a scarf:
“I have money,” she said. “I took it from his desk. It’s mine now, I suppose. Not that I’d wish to be beholden to him. But I don’t look at it that way.”
“I shouldn’t think twice about it,
if I were you,” said Lord Peter.
She walked before him into the shop—her own woman at last. (285–86)
The reader never discovers whether Mrs. Grimethorpe can sustain this tentative beginning. She announces her intention to return to her own people in Cornwall. One suspects that it will take more than that to make her an advanced woman. Can she really strike out on her own, run her life without the imprisoning walls of subjugating vow and obligation? Perhaps the best we can hope for is a more prudent second marriage.
If Mary Wimsey and Mrs. Grimethorpe represent the extremes of possibility for women in the twenties, the two settings of the story may be said to represent the extremes of country and town. While London and Paris are at the center of the modern age, Riddlesdale, Grider’s Hole, and the market village of Stapley remain enmeshed in a world increasingly alien to people like Mary Wimsey.
The mystery begins at Riddlesdale, but the reader is privy to the action only at second hand. Peter Wimsey is in Paris, preparing to enjoy the advances of modern civilization after three months in Corsica. Among the conveniences is the availability of the Times, delivered expeditiously each morning from London by air. Basking in the latest luxuries offered by the Hotel Meurice, Lord Peter studies the paper, entranced by transcripts of the inquest into the death of Dennis Cathcart.
The tragedy grew out of one of the hoariest and most privileged of aristocratic customs, a hunting party. The Duke of Denver, his sister and her fiancé, and several wealthy friends descended on the Yorkshire countryside to shoot birds in obscene numbers. Surrounded by surly folk who need to get on with making a living, they are accepted for the money they bring and the structures of social power they represent. They are not of the Yorkshire country and do not wish to be. They desire only those advantages appealing to privileged taste. In Gerald’s case, this includes exercising the right of seigneur with the wife of a local farmer.
Conundrums for the Long Week-End Page 7