Conundrums for the Long Week-End

by Robert Kuhn McGregor

  If Miss Cattermole wished to defy the new conventions of her parents to pursue a traditional woman’s role, there were many women at Shrewsbury moving in the opposite direction. The struggle to gain acceptance and respect for women’s education was within the living memory of every don in the college; the first legitimate degrees for Oxford women graduates were not conferred until 1920. By choosing academe over marriage and family, every one of these women dons defied woman’s traditional role. Persecution by the college “poltergeist” inspired an ongoing debate among the dons regarding the wisdom and ethics of their decisions. The college secretary, Mrs. Goodwin, became the focal point for several heated discussions. Had the college given her the position simply because she was a widow with a small child in prep school? Was it right that she be excused from her work every time the child had an illness? Were the bursar and the dean indulging her to assuage their own guilt for not having children of their own? Touchy stuff, certainly. As tempers frayed in the face of failure to identify the poltergeist, such arguments grew more heated.

  Another angle on the question of proper jobs and women’s roles comes when Harriet Vane, enjoying a spring walk in the park, encounters Annie Wilson, one of the college scouts, strolling with her two daughters. Annie is conventional in the extreme, fervently determined that her girls will become good wives and mothers. Naturally, she is much distressed when her older daughter announces different designs on life:

  “I want to ride a motor-cycle when I’m bigger,” said Beatrice, shaking her curls assertively.

  “Oh no, darling. What things they say, don’t they, madam?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Beatrice. “I’m going to have a motor-cycle and keep a garage.”

  “Nonsense,” said her mother, a little sharply. “You mustn’t talk so. That’s a boy’s job.”

  “But lots of girls do boys’ jobs nowadays,” said Harriet.

  “But they ought not, madam. It isn’t fair. The boys have hard enough work to get jobs of their own. Please don’t put things into her head, madam. You’ll never get a husband, Beatrice, if you mess about in a garage getting all ugly and dirty.”

  “I don’t want one,” said Beatrice, firmly. “I’d rather have a motor-cycle.”

  Annie looked annoyed, but laughed when Harriet laughed.

  “She’ll find out some day, won’t she, madam?”

  “Very likely she will,” said Harriet. If the woman took the view that any husband was better than none at all, it was useless to argue. (231)

  Annie’s view went way beyond that. Not only was a woman’s—any woman’s—sole job to get and serve a husband but also to stand by him, no matter what. In Annie Wilson’s understanding, the world belonged exclusively to men. The man’s part in the arrangement was to put the family welfare ahead of all other considerations. Lying, stealing, cheating—these matters of personal integrity within the public sphere came a distant second as far as she was concerned. Regrettably, her own husband had shared in this belief and had paid. Exposed as a scholarly liar by a woman, the man had turned to drink and eventually shot himself. This confutation of all she believed was too much for Annie Wilson. Her mind had snapped. She was the campus poltergeist.15

  Annie’s husband was an academic named Arthur Robinson. A promising scholar, he nonetheless failed the most important of intellectual tests: personal integrity. In an obscure archive, Robinson had found a letter that undermined a thesis he had long developed. Rather than owning up to the error and reworking his thesis, he stole the letter to prevent exposure. Unfortunately for him, he ran up against another scholar, one who regarded academic integrity as the measure of all worthwhile. Miss de Vine had no choice but to expose him; the result was disgrace and eventual suicide.

  Here is the nexus of the moral problem that Sayers has posed. Arthur Robinson, Miss de Vine, and Annie Wilson have each defined their own jobs according to vastly different sets of values. Robinson stands for what Sayers refers to as the “doctrine of snatch” (180); he will go after what he thinks he wants, paying no heed to consequences or decency. Annie becomes the conventional woman, imprisoning herself and her children in bonds of assumption about women’s proper role. Miss de Vine represents the potential of the fulfilled human being; despite her sex, her age, and her health, she is secure in serving the higher morality of collective academe. Miss de Vine is saddened by the consequences of exposing Robinson but knows she had no alternative. She is an honorable human being. Arthur Robinson, on the other hand, was narrow and dishonest; he is dead by his own hand. Annie Wilson, the woman who defined her job and herself in standing by her man, has become a psychopath.

  The strength that allows Miss de Vine to carry on her own life in the face of such a tragic affair derives both from the essential rightness of her position and the community of like-minded people surrounding her. She possesses a will of iron; her one allegiance is to the fact, in any circumstance. After hearing what has become of Robinson and Annie, she feels remorse, not because she had done wrong in exposing him, but because she took no steps to see to his welfare afterward. By Sayers’s yardstick, morality was clearly on her side, as every one of the Shrewsbury dons understood. That unanimity of commitment to learning, to doing one’s job properly, saved them all.

  Annie Wilson’s long campaign of cruel psychological warfare was intended to undermine the dons’ belief in themselves and their calling. To Annie, they were all hypocrites, pretending to a man’s place in the world, taking bread from children’s mouths. Though they lived through an agony of mutual suspense that spawned bitter personal antagonism, every don remained true to her faith that her proper place was in academe. This was a bond of strength that Annie could not crack. When Lord Peter came as inquisitor to question them, they “tended to avoid one another’s eyes; yet they gathered together as though for protection against a common menace” (331). When Peter at last exposes Annie as the poison pen, he pays homage to this sense of community:

  The one thing which frustrated the whole attack from first to last was the remarkable solidarity and public spirit displayed by your college as a body. I think that was the last obstacle that X expected to encounter in a community of women. Nothing but the very great loyalty of the Senior Common Room to the college and the respect of the students for the Senior Common Room stood between you and a most unpleasant publicity. . . . This particular kind of loyalty forms at once the psychological excuse for the attack and the only possible defense against it. (441)

  Nothing, no matter how unpleasant, would sway these women from doing what they understood themselves meant to do.

  It is Lord Peter Wimsey who solves this case in less than two weeks, after Harriet Vane had struggled with it for months. Peter is the first to point out that he could not have solved it without Harriet’s groundwork. She had methodically collected all the documentary evidence; she had maintained a careful chronology of the poison pen’s activities. Examining this material, Peter immediately perceives a pattern worth tracing. After conversing with the dons, he quickly runs down the story of Arthur Robinson and his embittered widow. Why did Peter succeed, after Harriet had come so far only to falter in the process of putting two and two together?

  The plain fact is that Harriet Vane was experiencing a great deal of trouble determining her proper job. She was a writer first and foremost, a head rather than a heart. Reaching (snatching?) after this self-defined essence of self, she has returned to Oxford, not merely to catch the Shrewsbury poltergeist but to devote herself to endeavors of the intellect. Peter recognizes immediately that she is leaning toward “a spot of celibacy.” But she is uncertain. The reason she wants “to get clear of people and feelings and go back to the intellectual side is that that is the only side of life I haven’t betrayed and made a mess of” (302–3). The problem is, that kind of life may betray her. Does sheltered residence in college lead to abnormality, to the asylum? Before the investigation is done, Harriet is prepared to believe that any of the dons is capable of being the po
ison pen. Fear clouds her judgment.

  Harriet’s writing, normally her refuge from a too-often beastly world, provides no solace this time. Her latest effort, an elaborate puzzle entitled Twixt Wind and Water, has bogged down, the characters too symmetrical. As Peter points out, the best solution is to give the characters greater depth, to turn them into real human beings. It will be her first attempt to capture human realities in a detective story, and she is sure it will “hurt like hell” (311).

  She is willing to endure this pain, to write the novel she knows she is capable of writing, because she is beginning to grow again. The two-headed misery inflicted by Philip Boyes and the criminal court has at last begun to fade. Harriet can begin to examine herself without reference to that horrid time, to ask whether she is genuinely all head or if she has a heart as well. Can a person possessed of both satisfy the needs of both without betraying one or the other? Can Harriet Vane define a job for herself that allows her to remain true to her intellectual muse without denying her emotions? Does Harriet dare to fall in love?

  With so much on her mind, Harriet may be forgiven for not identifying the college poltergeist. In any case, she is a writer, not a detective. It is not her proper job. Peter Wimsey is the true investigator. For Peter, the case is rather simple and straightforward, though not without its uncomfortable moments. The personal will intrude—and at the most troublesome junctures.

  Dorothy L. Sayers had more than the usual misgivings about Gaudy Night. She thought it a “peculiar book,” not really a detective story at all “but a novel with a mild detective interest of an almost entirely psychological kind.”16 She was much relieved when Victor Gollancz telegrammed in September 1935 to assure her that he liked the work. He brought it out immediately and was rewarded with huge sales. Though her books had attracted a steadily growing market for years, Gaudy Night was Sayers’s first bestseller. Very few of the thousands of readers probably cared much about Dorothy L. Sayers’s thoughts on moral integrity and doing one’s job. The attraction was in finding out how Peter and Harriet, “the world’s most awkward pair of lovers,”17 could ever find happiness.

  By this time, Sayers had strung the thing out over five years. If nothing else, Peter’s patience and Harriet’s sheer endurance were matchless. After introducing this most difficult love match in Strong Poison (and essentially writing herself into a corner), Sayers approached the problem with great caution. Of her next four novels, only one actually wrestled with Peter and Harriet’s difficulties. Have His Carcase provided a suggestion of hope for the couple’s future, but not much more.

  As far as romance is concerned, Have His Carcase begins inauspiciously. Harriet pointedly refrains from informing Peter Wimsey of her difficulties; Peter gets the word from a newspaper reporter. Harriet is not altogether pleased when Peter shows up to assist in the investigation. His persistent marriage proposals are more or less a joke, but they are an uncomfortable annoyance. Harriet does not want romance. She wants to be left alone to enjoy her freedom, to write, to heal.

  Yet she is maddeningly inconsistent, a reflection of her own confusion. Announcing that she must buy a new frock to carry on investigations at the Resplendent Hotel, Peter suggests she buy a wine-colored one, or claret, more specifically. She does so. Peter cannot help but think “that when a woman takes a man’s advice about the purchase of clothes, it is a sign that she is not indifferent to his opinion.” They dance together, not without some awkwardness, but ultimately “in silence and harmony” (161, 158).

  Peter knows that the ground is treacherous. For a year and a half he had struggled to build up a “delicate structure of confidence” between them (174). The Wilvercombe tragedy dashes it all to pieces. Harriet knows all too well that she is a notorious woman, that the police cannot help but suspect her of murdering Paul Alexis. She can only perceive Peter’s presence, ostensibly an innocent expression of his interest in crime as a hobby, as another example of his damnable knight-errantry—Lord Peter to the rescue. She does not want his help; she does not want to be grateful.

  Though it is not much help, Peter does not want her to be grateful either. As long as any debt of gratitude stands between them, true love is impossible:

  Do you think it’s pleasant for any man who feels about a woman as I do you, to have to fight his way along under this detestable burden of gratitude? Damn it, do you think I don’t know perfectly well that I’d have a better chance if I was deaf, blind, maimed, starving, drunken or dissolute, so that you could have the fun of being magnanimous? Why do you suppose I treat my own sincerest feelings like something out of a comic opera, if it isn’t to save myself the bitter humiliation of seeing you try not to be utterly nauseated by them? Can’t you understand that this damned dirty trick of fate has robbed me of the common man’s right to be serious about his own passions? Is that a position for any man to be proud of? (175)

  The only thing Peter and Harriet can do is try to fight it out as equals. Peter will not give up, and Harriet is just intrigued enough to keep herself from sending him firmly away. If only they had met as most couples do, without all this extra baggage.

  Have His Carcase ends on a note of qualified hope, as Harriet agrees to accompany Peter back to town to escape the horrors of Wilvercombe. There is no promise beyond that, no resolution of their difficulties. Sayers essentially avoided the problem in her next two Wimsey novels, making only an oblique and veiled reference to Harriet in Murder Must Advertise. Gaudy Night, therefore, opens essentially at the point where Have His Carcase leaves off. Peter and Harriet remain attracted to one another but have found no way past their mutual difficulties.

  As Sayers began work on Gaudy Night, her own experiment in romantic love was on exceedingly shaky ground. Her marriage to Mac Fleming had been rocky almost from the beginning, due in large part to his health problems. Things seemed to grow worse with each passing year. In a letter written to her cousin in August 1934, Sayers gave some hint of the situation:

  The fact is that Mac is getting so queer and unreliable that it is not safe to trust him to do anything at all, and if he is told that he has forgotten anything, he goes into such a frightful fit of rage that one gets really alarmed. The doctors say that he is getting definitely queer—but there doesn’t seem to be much that one can do about it. . . . It also makes the financial position very awkward, as he can’t earn any money, and what with his illness and the difficulty of managing his odd fits of temper and so on, it isn’t easy for me to get any work done regularly and properly.18

  At best, life on the home front was a domestic truce. Mac Fleming had become a sick and embittered man, unable to provide his wife the support and respect she needed and deserved. The entirety of Gaudy Night was written under this cloud. Desperately unhappy in her own marriage, she chose to explore the ingredients of true romantic happiness in her novel. Peter and Harriet both possessed some understanding of those ingredients after five years. The question was whether she could bring them to a relationship with each other.

  As three full years had passed between the awkward dance of Have His Carcase and the beginning of Gaudy Night, Sayers sets the stage by reviewing Peter’s long-suffering progress in wooing Harriet. After the Wilvercombe fiasco, Peter began again the long process of constructing some foundation of mutual confidence and equality. Harriet kept her distance, spending much of her time writing bestsellers and traveling abroad. She tells herself that Wimsey will surely give up if she remains firm, but he is dug in for a long siege. He promises not to make a nuisance of himself but continues to propose at decently spaced intervals:

  “ . . . as a birthday treat, and on Guy Fawkes Day and on the Anniversary of the King’s Accession. But consider it, if you will, as a pure formality. You need not pay the smallest attention to it.”

  “Peter, it’s foolish to go on like this.”

  “And, of course, on the Feast of All Fools.” (63)

  The difficulty is that Harriet cannot quite bring herself to put an end to this foolishne
ss. The wounds inflicted by Philip Boyes and the criminal court are slow to heal; she is not capable of honest love. And she is especially incapable of loving Peter Wimsey; the much-cursed debt of gratitude lies between them like a concrete wall. Still, there is just enough there to attract her unwilling attention. Harriet is drawn to Peter, even as she rejects him. She senses that, beneath his blither, he is attempting to atone for something, and she is willing to allow him the opportunity.

  So the story of Gaudy Night begins. Essentially, the novel is a Harriet Vane story. Her presence in the story is continuous; action is interpreted almost exclusively through her eyes. Peter makes scattered appearances in the early sections of the story, mostly through letters, but does not appear on the scene until the last third of the book. Sayers affords Harriet ample opportunity to explore the conflicts in her own mind. Just what is her proper job? Is she sick of the Bloomsbury crowd? Does she really desire the cloistered life of the Shrewsbury academic? How does she feel about Peter Wimsey, in her heart of hearts? Although Sayers never allows Harriet to reach any resolution to these issues as the novel progresses, she does provide the reader lavish opportunity to watch Harriet gnaw at them. For Harriet Vane, this is a process of growth or, perhaps more exactly, the shedding of a shell that has become too confining.

  Peter Wimsey can only stand by, watch her grow, and hope for the best. He too is in the process of reforming himself, a more deliberate and focused campaign to make up for past errors. It is one thing for him to see that Harriet is the one and only, quite another to make himself worthy of her.