Conundrums for the Long Week-End

by Robert Kuhn McGregor

  Massive unemployment inspired the right as well. As Germany lurched toward Naziism in 1932, Sir Oswald Mosely left Ramsey MacDonald’s cabinet to form the British Union of Fascists. His ideas for ameliorating the effects of the Depression were rather mild, but his intended means of achieving them were not. Like fascists everywhere, Mosely felt that a multiparty system produced only weakness, confusion, and compromise. Constitutionally, but by force if necessary, he would impose single-party hegemony. Over the next four years, perhaps one hundred thousand Britishers would call themselves fascists at one time or another. Most were of the chronically unemployed classes from traditionally poverty-ridden pockets of major cities. Only six thousand ever actually paid dues to belong to the British Union of Fascists, though the organization claimed one hundred eighty local branches. They held a large rally at London’s Olympia Hall in June 1934; demonstrators were savagely attacked and beaten, repelling many. The Union was definitely on the wane by the end of 1936.9

  Was this, then, what modernism had come to? Did the rejection of tradition, the destruction of conventional social and political order, the denial of history’s influence pave the road for the coming dictator? Bereft of stabilizing influences and shorn of their traditional managers, too many European states found themselves turning to the savior, the all-knowing superman who would think for everyone. Freedom from convention in the end perhaps meant no freedom at all. In creating the new, the efficient, the modern state, everything not expressly forbidden became mandatory.

  Radical sympathizers from the left and the right populate the later Wimsey novels. Bolshevism was in fact a favorite theme of Dorothy L. Sayers almost from the beginning. Peter’s sister almost married the communist organizer George Goyles. The Soviet Club turns up in several novels and short stories; the mysterious but rickety Mr. Perkins of Have His Carcase was a member. The suggestion seems to be that all this Soviet business should not be taken too seriously. Mrs. Weldon is convinced that Bolsheviks have done in poor Paul Alexis, but the police are certain that none of the handful of communist agents in England could have been involved.

  Sayers takes the fascist threat more seriously. At Pym’s Advertising, company photographer Mr. Prout is highly dissatisfied with working conditions. No one is willing to listen when he argues that “What we want in this country is a Mussolini to organize trade conditions.” Several weeks later, Prout “created a sensation by coming to the office in a black shirt.”10

  Sayers is sensitive to the anti-Semitic and misogynist tendencies latent in English society, recognizing in these trends the mind-set of the extreme right. In Murder Must Advertise, the hysterical woman who witnesses Doctor Herbert Garfield shoving another member of the drug gang beneath a train believes him to be “a prominent member of a gang whose object is to murder all persons of British birth and establish the supremacy of the Jews in England” (265). And, though women occupy important positions at Pym’s, they are not treated on exactly the same footing as men. When Brotherhood’s, an important client, sends representatives to visit the agency, there are no special directives for the men, but the women must not smoke or expose too much neck and shoulders. None of the men at Pym’s are prepared to admit the possibility of women’s equality. Even Peter is far more mysogynist than usual, agreeing that women cannot use catapults and generally disparaging their reliability: “‘You cannot trust these young women. No fixity of purpose. Except, of course, when you particularly want them to be yielding.’ He grinned with a wry mouth” (114).

  If such sentiments are suggested by the merest hints in Murder Must Advertise, they become essential grist for the plot of Gaudy Night. The shadow of totalitarianist threat broods through the entire novel, while antifeminist feelings and questions regarding the proper role of women in society are integral to the entire plot, both in its mystery and in its novel of manners threads.

  Sayers began work on Gaudy Night immediately after completing The Nine Tailors. Having essentially kept the problem of Peter’s love for Harriet Vane at arm’s length for more than two years, she now at last determined to move matters to their foregone conclusion. Even before completing the novel, she had begun collaborating on a play framing the first few days of the happy couple’s marriage—the title: Busman’s Honeymoon. Still, actually splicing the pair together proved a challenge. She confessed the problem to the co-author of the play, former Oxford schoolmate Muriel St. Clare Byrne: “I think I have got over most of the technical snags in Gaudy Night now, but the writing is being horribly difficult. Peter and Harriet are the world’s most awkward pair of lovers—both so touchy and afraid to commit themselves to anything but hints and allusions!”11

  Perhaps the writing would have been less of a trial had Sayers confined herself to writing a straightforward romance. This would not have been worthy of the Wimsey series, however, nor would such a vapid exer-cise have satisfied Dorothy L. Sayers. Gaudy Night was to be a romance, a drawing-room comedy, a detective story of the combined puzzle-thriller variety, a paean to Sayers’s beloved Oxford University, and a story exam ining a serious question while pointing a serious moral. In a letter to Victor Gollancz, Sayers later confessed of Gaudy Night:

  [This is] the only book I’ve written embodying any kind of a “moral” and I do feel rather passionately about this business of the integrity of the mind—but I realize that to make a “detective story” the vehicle for that sort of thing is (as Miss de Vine says of the Peter-Harriet marriage) reckless to the point of insanity. But there it is—it’s the book I wanted to write and I’ve written it—and it is now my privilege to leave you with the baby! Whether you advertise it as a love-story, or as educational propaganda, or as a lunatic freak, I leave to you.12

  Yes, writing this one had been most difficult.

  In no small part, Sayers was driven to writing such a story because the things she so passionately believed in were in mortal danger. The tramp of mindless marching feet could be heard in too many European nations; the pall of anti-intellectual, antithinking totalitarianism loomed ominously large in democratic England. The few and tentative gains accomplished by women stood endangered; the essential human right to choose one’s own path could be denied. To be sure of tomorrow’s bread, was it necessary that the mass of humanity surrender every freedom they possessed? Was dictatorship desirable, in any form? Dorothy L. Sayers did not think so.

  As a counterpoint to the totalitarian potentials of the modern state, Sayers presented the essence of one form of British tradition: Oxford University. Steeped in a heritage of higher learning compassing several centuries, Oxford stood for the uncompromising search for absolute and knowable truth. Each of its colleges, each of its avenues of learning, extended the traditions of the past: true knowledge is the result of honest inquiry constructed on the foundations of past discovery. There can be no break with the past, only a relentless sifting of all that has gone before.

  Returning to Oxford for the Gaudy after several years away, Harriet Vane finds herself exhilarated and exalted by the academic atmosphere: “She saw it as a Holy War, and that whole wildly heterogeneous, that even slightly absurd collection of chattering women fused into a corporate unity with one another and with every man and woman to whom integrity of mind meant more than material gain—defenders in the central keep of Man-soul, their personal differences forgotten in face of a common foe” (29).

  Gaudy Night is set largely in the university town of Oxford, more specifically within the confines of Shrewsbury College for women, an institution that Sayers has invented and located on Balliol College’s “spacious and sacred cricket ground.” Although she models much of Shrewsbury life on her own experiences at nearby Somerville, Sayers is careful both to update the quality of the educational experience and to disassociate it from her alma mater. Like Somerville—mentioned enough times in the text to emphasize its separate existence—Shrewsbury’s faculty consists entirely of women, roughly twenty dons referred to collectively as the Senior Common Room. They are, of course, res
ident in the college, assuming responsibility for the education of some one hundred fifty students. Unlike the students of Sayers’s generation, the Shrewsbury women of the thirties demonstrate little cooperative enthusiasm and are generally unwilling to participate in any sort of class pageantry. They are more anxious to exercise independence than to promote camaraderie. These students are, in fact, the products of such freedom for women as has been achieved in England by 1935. On the surface, it seems to their elders that they are unappreciative.13

  For all their ungracious disrespect, their unwillingness to participate in community projects, and their cavalier attitude towards the necessity of the academic gown, the students—the “slack little beasts”—are fiercely loyal to the academic traditions resting at the heart of Oxford. They may be selfish in most ways, but in the face of persecution and adversity they will not betray the college. They are the next generation of warriors in the “Holy War” that Harriet Vane has glimpsed at the Gaudy. “If it ever occurs to people to value the honor of the mind equally with the honor of the body,” Peter Wimsey later intones, “we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort—and very different from the kind that is being made at the moment” (352)—being made at that moment, in fact, in Germany, in Italy, in Russia, in far-off Japan, and knocking on the door in safe old England.

  In Gaudy Night, Sayers addresses the question of totalitarianism most obviously in her drawing of the Shrewsbury College porter, Padgett. He is a good man—resourceful, honest, and reliable—a vast improvement over the previous porter. Despite these admirable qualities, Padgett is deeply flawed: he does not think, save in conventions. Carrying out the oddest assignments with his customary acumen, Padgett nonetheless harbors a belief that a women’s college is a poor excuse for an institution, that women have no business dabbling in education. His solution to his dilemma is simple, as he reveals in private conversation with a decorating foreman:

  “Young ladies,” Padgett was heard to say, “will ’ave their larks, same as young gentlemen.”

  “When I was a lad,” replied the foreman, “young ladies was young ladies. And young gentlemen was young gentlemen. If you get my meaning.”

  “Wot this country wants,” said Padgett, “is a ’Itler.”

  “That’s right,” said the foreman. “Keep the girls at ’ome.” (120)

  Padgett, as it happens, had fought under Major Peter Wimsey in the Great War. Almost twenty years later, he cherished the memories and happily shared them with Harriet Vane. It seems that Padgett and another enlisted man had gotten into a fistfight, arguing whether Wimsey was manly enough to be an officer. Peter had responded by putting both men on extra detail cleaning the encampment. Apparently, “This affair of a mop and a bucket seemed to have made Padgett Peter’s slave for life.” Harriet could only conclude that “Men were very odd,” but the underlying message was more ominous. Too many responsible men like Padgett were only too happy to follow. They did not want to think for themselves (361).

  The fascist threat weighs heavily throughout all of Gaudy Night. For most of the novel, Peter is abroad performing diplomatic service for the foreign office. Much of his time he spends in Italy, trading cheerful banter while picking the minds of his rivals. Eventually he moves on to Poland before returning home, harrowed by the dangers he has witnessed. War was clearly in the air; it was only a matter of time: “The old bus wobbles one way, and you think, ‘That’s done it!’ and then it wobbles the other way and you think, ‘All serene’; and then, one day, it wobbles over too far and you’re in the soup and can’t remember how you got there” (287).

  Harriet Vane, in the meantime, encounters the fascist question all too often, both inside the cloistered walls of Oxford and in the familiar world of writers’ London. Harriet had witnessed at first hand the conditions in Hitlerite Berlin during a European tour undertaken in 1933; she is regularly invited to share her knowledge. Among the first dons she interviews at Shrewsbury is Miss Barton, author of a small volume entitled The Position of Women in the Modern State. Sayers tells the reader little of the volume’s content, but it is easy to infer that Miss Barton has taken it upon herself to defend the rights of women against fascist attacks, especially those in Germany. She is eager to hear Harriet’s impressions about the Nazi regime, though she mostly disagrees with them.

  Escaping the strange confines of Oxford, Harriet vacations in London between terms, catching up on gossip among the literary set. As a group, they are as narrow and conceited as ever, believing that the recent triumph of a novel entitled Mock Turtle should be construed solely as an affront to their collective genius. They can see nothing more than a corrupt bargain between publishers and agents or between publishers and advertisers. No one can take seriously the importance of Mock Turtle’s antifascist tone. Harriet hastens back to Oxford.

  In a sense, Gaudy Night was Dorothy L. Sayers’s own version of Miss Barton’s The Position of Women in the Modern State. Though Sayers vehemently denied any advocacy of feminist views, the moral to which she points in the novel is raised because of the danger posed to women by the rise of totalitarian sentiments. As she describes it, the question she wishes to address is “integrity of the mind”—the necessity of comprehending one’s own gifts (whatever they may be) and pursuing a path that will give those gifts the greatest latitude to flower. Every person—man or woman—is different. No one should be slotted into an occupation, a position, or a marriage because of his or her sex, class, or racial background. Everyone has a job to do, and they need to be free, first to discover what that job is and thereafter to do it in peace. It must be up to the individual to decide, not society or the state. This is Dorothy L. Sayers’s answer, both to the fascists and to the traditional English who would shove women back onto the Victorian pedestal.14

  Sayers sketches out the essence of her argument in a long conversation between Harriet Vane and Miss de Vine, the new research fellow in residence at Shrewsbury College. Harriet has taken residence in Shrewsbury to investigate and, she hopes, expose a “poison pen” who has persecuted the college for several months with offensive notes, dirty words written on walls, and malicious pranks. Miss de Vine, a historian specializing in the intricacies of Tudor finance, is a formidable scholar whose “sole allegiance was to the fact,” possessing “a mind as hard and immovable as granite” (19). She is a great fan of Harriet Vane’s detective stories and is especially pleased to make Harriet’s acquaintance. She befriends Harriet in an intensely honest way, expressing a view of life’s responsibilities that Harriet finds enlightening and a little frightening:

  “I’m quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is.”

  “I made a big mistake once,” said Harriet, “As I expect you know. I don’t think that arose out of lack of interest. It seemed at the time the most important thing in the world.”

  “And yet you made the mistake. Were you really giving all your mind to it, do you think? Your mind? Were you really being as cautious and exacting about it as you would be about writing a passage of fine prose?” (179–80)

  After some reflection, Harriet must confess that she had not been as attentive to developing her relationship with Philip Boyes as she was to writing her books. Writing was her job, the one thing to which she devoted undivided attention, the one thing she would never lie about.

  The theme of doing one’s job ramifies throughout the novel. Peter Wimsey avoids getting shot by a plug-ugly because his mind was “momentarily” on his job. Mrs. Bendick, the Shrewsbury graduate become farmer’s wife who so shocked Harriet at the Gaudy, maintains that marriage is “really the most important job,” though she admits to reservations. Harriet cannot help but feel “that she had seen a Derby winner making shift with a coal cart” (69, 48–49).

  Harriet herself is forced to passionately defend her actions in terms of doing one’s proper job. At their first me
eting, Miss Barton presses Harriet to explain why she continues to write detective novels after her own near brush with the gallows. Harriet points out that economics played a part in her decision to continue, but adds, more fundamentally: “I know what you’re thinking—that anybody with proper sensitive feeling would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don’t see why proper feeling should prevent me from doing my proper job” (31).

  She goes on to defend Lord Peter’s choice to pursue criminals, whether “as a duty or as an intellectual exercise” (33). It is the legal responsibility of every citizen to enforce the law, and Peter had proven time and again his surpassing ability in detection. Despite whatever reason he gave, and despite his standing as an amateur, catching crooks was Peter Wimsey’s job.

  To Sayers’s mind, there were two difficulties in this business of doing one’s job: figuring out what it might be, and then doing it in the face of determined opposition. The world is full of stubborn and conventional people. Most will never trouble to find their own proper job but will instead meekly accept whatever society allots. Italy and Germany were suddenly full of people like that; England had far more than its share.

  Early in her stay at Shrewsbury, Harriet Vane rescues Miss Cattermole, an unhappy third-year student who has broken most of the rules in the book without getting much fun out of it. Taxed for the reason, Catter-mole confesses that she had never wanted to come up to Oxford at all. She hated it and was there only because her parents wanted her to take advantage of the new opportunities for women. Cattermole wanted to be a cook. Probably she would be a good one, if instinct meant anything. Not every woman was cut out to be an advanced woman: becoming a cook was Cattermole’s proper job.