Striding Folly (2 page)

    Then, strangely as it may seem to us today, this learned, somewhat eccentric lady became a copywriter in the firm of Messrs S. H. Benson Ltd. She stayed with them from 1923–31, by which time her creation, Lord Peter Wimsey, had given her financial security.

    She was an extremely complex character. She loathed all the publicity which a popular novelist is bound to attract, often giving offence by refusing to open fetes, sign autographs, etc. Yet by her eccentricities and outspokenness she could not fail to attract attention. There is a story told of her that when she was dining with her equally famous contemporary she said in a voice so loud it echoed round the crowded room ‘God, I’m sick of Wimsey. Aren’t you sick of Poirot, Agatha?’ Miss Christie’s reply has not been recorded but she, of course, has more than one detective on her list. Dorothy L. Sayers did invent another, Montague Egg, a commercial traveller, who appears in quite a number of short stories. The stories are good and the character drawn to life – she must have come across many such while at Benson’s – but he never caught the imagination of the public as did Wimsey.

    It is difficult, as Conan Doyle found, to discard a character once invented and adored by the public – he becomes an alter ego and dogs one’s footsteps through life. Even marriage, much more fatal to a romantic character – and Wimsey was as romantic as any – than death failed to finish him off as the stories in this volume testify. He lives today, sixteen years after his creator’s death as strongly as ever. Indeed he has lately taken on a new lease of life, on television and radio, but more than ever in the form in which he first began, between book covers. Apart from short stories he has not appeared in any new work since 1938, and that was in the novel version of a play, written in collaboration with Muriel St. Clare Byrne in 1936. It was Miss St. Clare Byrne who introduced Miss Sayers to the theatre; a milieu in which she had hitherto relentlessly refused to place Wimsey. But once there she fell ‘like Lucifer, never to rise again’, for most of her work after that was concerned with drama. She wrote the
Zeal of Thy House
, still popular, and added new dimensions to radio with her religious sequence of plays
The Man Born to be King
. When she died in 1957 she was at work on a new translation of Dante’s
Divine Comedy
. So Wimsey had fulfilled himself. He had done that which every author dreams of – enabled his creator to cast him off and to please herself as to what and when she wrote. But what of Wimsey, the unquenchable – practically disowned by his maker but not by his public?

    In a book of essays
Unpopular Opinions
* – so called because some of them had been rejected by the people who commissioned them, one by the B.B.C. because ‘our public do not want to be admonished by a woman’ – Miss Sayers writes:

The game of applying methods of the ‘Higher Criticism’ to the Sherlock Holmes canon was begun many years ago by Monsignor Ronald Knox, with the aim of showing that, by those methods, one could disintegrate a modern classic, as speciously as a certain school of critics have endeavoured to disintegrate the Bible. Since then the thing has become a hobby among a select set of jesters here and in America. The rule of the game is that it must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lords, the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere.

* Gollancz – 1946, p. 7.

Later in the same book she herself plays the game, proving with the help of Cambridge University lists and guides, which college Holmes went to, and what he read there. But although Miss Sayers played the game with Sherlock Holmes, she made every effort to prevent us doing the same with Wimsey by seeing that every facet of him was documented by
her
. Most of the books are prefaced by a ‘Who’s Who’ type paragraph.

WIMSEY, Peter Death Bredon, D.S.O., born 1890. 2nd son of Mortimer Gerald Bredon Wimsey 15th Duke of Denver, and of Honoria Lucasta daughter of Francis Delagardie of Bellingham Manor, Hants.

Educated: Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford
(1st Class Honours, school of Modern History 1912)
,
served with H.M. Forces 1914/18
(Major Rifle Brigade)
.
Author of ‘Notes on the collecting of Incunabula’, ‘The Murderer’s Vade-Mecum’, etc.

Recreations: Criminology; bibliophily; music; cricket. Clubs:. Marlborough, Egotists. Residence 110A Piccadilly, W. Bredon Hall, Duke’s Denver, Norfolk. Arms: Sable, 3 mice courant, argent; crest: a domestic cat crouched as to spring, proper; Motto: ‘As my whimsy takes me.’
*

* All books.

Later Wimsey books contain a long biographical note contributed by an unlikely sounding uncle, Paul Austin Delagardie. Although Lord Peter first sprang to prominence in 1923, this disreputable old uncle does not actually appear until 1938, most of his life, if we are to believe him, having been taken up with things French. Mr. Delagardie’s contribution to the Wimsey saga is really nothing more than a smoke screen. As Miss Sayers once said the recipe for detective fiction is the art of framing lies. To lead the reader up the garden path and make him believe lies. ‘To believe the real murderer to be innocent, to believe some harmless person to be guilty. To believe the false alibi sound, the present absent, the dead alive, the living dead.’*

*
Unpopular Opinions
, p. 185.

   Although Paul Delagardie may have had a little influence on forming Wimsey’s character – teaching him discrimination in wine and suspicion of women – he probably gives himself a great deal more credit than is his due. Miss Sayers has used him to draw so thick a smokescreen, that it is now impossible to identify Wimsey in the way that D.H. Lawrence scholars can seize on a character and cry, ‘Ah, that of course is Lady Ottoline Morrell, and this person is quite definitely Peter Warlock.’ Mrs. Farren of
Five Red Herrings
weaving away in her Renaissance white woollen dress, could easily be yet another sketch of poor Lady Ottoline. Scarcely any writer of the 1920’s had self control enough to leave her out, but who the prototype of Wimsey was remains a mystery. It can be said that he was entirely the writer’s creation, but this rarely happens, especially with so well drawn a character as Wimsey. He could be an amalgam of various characters, except for one point: throughout the sixteen or so books, and the many short stories in which he appears, he is absolutely consistent, he never does an un-Wimseylike thing or utters an un-Wimseylike speech. The first hint we have of him is in the first volume of verse published in 1916. It is called
A Man Greatly Gifted
and the subject is likened to an elusive jester. Wimsey was certainly greatly gifted.

He was a respectable scholar in five or six languages, a musician of some skill and more understanding, something of an expert in toxicology, a collector of rare editions, an entertaining man-about-town, and a common sensationalist . . . His passion for the unexplored led him to unravel the emotional history of Income Tax collectors and to find out where his own drains led to.
*

*
Clouds of Witness
, p. 71.

He could perhaps have been the sad ghost of a lost war-time lover. Oxford, as everywhere else in the country, was filled with bereaved women, but it may have been more noticeable in university towns when a whole year’s intake could be wiped out in France in less than an hour. The jester simile of the poem is echoed throughout all the Wimsey books, becoming rather absurd in
Murder Must Advertise
when his lordship rushes round the countryside disguised in a harlequin costume, enticing a wanton woman to her destruction with a tune played on a whistle.

    The pose, however, of never taking things seriously is just a front which he found difficult to reconcile with his conscience.

    He had taken up criminology as a hobby or, as we would say nowadays, a therapy to help him over his ghastly war experiences. He found it exciting and he enjoyed it – up to a point. When it was clear that his investigations were likely to lead a man to the scaffold, he despised himself for becoming involved because, unlike the professional policeman, he did not rely on the job for his living. Like all the best detectives in fiction Wimsey was an amateur in the true sense of the word. From the first book to the last he never ceased to have bad dreams about the villains he brought to justice. He shied away from responsibility. As his mother who, in spite of her apparent scattiness understood him very well, said, giving orders for nearly four years to men to go and get blown to pieces ‘gives you an inhibition, or an exhibition, or something, of nerves’. Miss Sayers was one of the few detective writers to make her hero follow through the consequences of his work, but fortunately for his peace of mind, not all his villains reached the scaffold. Two of the nicer characters took ‘the gentleman’s way out’. Penberthy in
Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
shoots himself as becomes an ex-officer, and Tallboy in
Murder Must Advertise
allows himself to be run over. In
Five Red Herrings
the murder was accidental. In
Unnatural Death
the villainess, quite the nastiest character Miss Sayers created, commits suicide, and the victim is a suicide in
Clouds of Witness
. Miss Sayers does not shrink from detailed descriptions of the state of her victims, but she is sparing of corpses; in only two books are there more than one.

    Wimsey’s looks and behaviour were meant to give the impression of the typical ‘silly ass’ of the period. He had straw coloured hair which romantic young ladies saw as gold. A long face, grey eyes and a pointed chin. A prominent nose which nothing could disguise but which proclaimed his aristocratic breeding. He wore his collars high, affected a monocle which was really a powerful magnifying glass and a proceeding which no reputable eye specialist would recommend, particularly in sunny weather. He carried a sword stick marked out in inches, with a compass let in the top. He was short for a romantic character, standing only 5 ft 9 ins., but strong as steel, expert, of course, at ju-jitsu. On only three occasions are we told that he carried a revolver, and only once is it fired but even then only to disarm the villain. He smoked a pipe, cigarettes or cigars as the fancy takes him. His passions are Bach, John Donne and buttered crumpets. We have ample evidence that Miss Sayers herself had a passion for Bach and John Donne, and, as she liked the good things of life, no doubt she had a passion for buttered crumpets too. He drives, at fantastically high speeds, specially built Daimler sports cars, all called Mrs. Merdle. His favourite epithet for his male friends is ‘old horse’ and his rallying call, ‘Come on Steve’. He moves with ease in the highest circles throughout Europe, and English royal personages have been known to bestir themselves on his behalf. He must have moved too in the same orbit as Bertie Wooster, though he preferred the eccentric Egotist Club to the effete Drones. His man Bunter and Jeeves must have frequently met in the Upper Servants’ Club and at the various country houses where their employers were guests. But it is doubtful if either the masters or their men were ever really friends. Wimsey, who must have been older than Wooster, had seen the horrors of the First World War, and the gap between those who had and those who had not gone through that holocaust is visible even today among old men in their seventies and eighties. Bunter, although cleverer, would not have been entirely at home with Jeeves, who was no doubt bred to domestic service for as many generations as his master’s family had been born to rule him. Bunter, however, was almost certainly a first generation gentleman’s gentleman. He had been Wimsey’s batman in the war, but his beginnings, if his language is anything to go by, were very common indeed!

    Why did Miss Sayers make her hero a lord? Well, she was a middle-class lady and, like many of her generation, romantic. Somerville College produced before, during and after the First World War a large number of outwardly formidable feminists – who nevertheless brought forth many dainty volumes of verse, almost all of them inspired by one theme, the quest of the Holy Grail, King Arthur and his knights, and, as the modern young have it, ‘all that jazz’. It was probably a mistake to have placed Wimsey among the English aristocracy ‘with sixteen generations of feudal privilege’ behind him. Very few English noble families go back that far in the first creation; rebellions and monarchial head choppings have seen to that. In Scotland, as in all other matters, it is different. A lordship there can be lost in the mists of time. This constant supply of new blood is one of the reasons why the English aristocracy is as firmly entrenched today as it ever was. Miss Sayers knew that ‘everyone loves a lord’ but assumed the wrong reasons. Everyone in England loves a lord, because almost any Englishman can, if he sets his mind to it, become a lord.