Nine Notes on Dorothy L. Sayers and The Nine Tailors

1 I came to Dorothy L. Sayers last week as a reaction to the intellectual drama of Robert Musil: I was in search of something straightforward and cozy, a world where questions had answers and everything would ultimately find its place. I first seized on Gaudy Night (1936) because in Michael Dirda's appreciation of Agatha Christie in Classics for Pleasure (2007) he notes in passing, "I bow to no one in my admiration for Gaudy Night." I opened it with much anticipation.

The early pages were excellent. I enjoyed the company of the protagonist, Miss Harriet Vane, as she attended a reunion of her Oxford class, an occasion that allowed Sayers to offer some splendid observations of the early days of women's education there--including a complaint from a staff member that the young ladies had the previous spring taken to sunbathing in their underwear rather than the more concealing bathing costumes of the day. The observations at the heart of this bit of dialogue, too, were memorable:

"Yes," Miss de Vine smiled oddly. "If you were to listen at those windows, you would find it was the middle-aged ones who were making the noise. The old have gone to bed, wondering whether they have worn as badly as their contemporaries. They have suffered some shocks, and their feet hurt them. And the younger ones are chattering soberly about life and its responsibilities. But the women of forty are pretending they are undergraduates again, and find it it rather an effort. Miss Vane--I admired you for speaking as you did tonight. Detachment is a rare virtue, and very few people find it lovable, either in themselves or in others. If you ever find a person who likes you in spite of it--still more, because of it--that liking has very great value, because it is perfectly sincere, and because, with that person, you will never need to be anything but sincere yourself."

Page after page went by, however, and the only mystery to arise was the rather dreary question of which member of the college had been sending some poison pen letters. Instead, the focus of the book seemed to be rapidly settling on the question of whether Harriet would accept Lord Peter Wimsey's proposal of marriage. In the face of such a desultory mystery, that choice seemed far from unreasonably--but as I didn't know Lord Peter as anything other than a famed detective and was only just getting to know Harriet, the fact that their romance was dominating what was purportedly a detective novel began to chafe. With nearly four hundred pages still ahead, I decided to chuck it.

2 When I explained my plight to my friend Sarah, she pressed a different Sayers novel, The Nine Tailors (1934) into my hands, arguing that it was more typical of Sayers--and probably closer to what I'd been looking for. The title was familiar, but it wasn't until I got home that I realized that this novel had served as Exhibit A in Edmund Wilson's amused evisceration of the genre, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" (1945):

Well, I set out to read The Nine Tailors in the hope of tasting some novel excitement, and I declare that it seems to me one of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field. The first part of it is all about bell-ringing as it is practised in English churches and contains a lot of information of the kind that you might expect to find in an encyclopedia article on campanology. I skipped a good deal of that, and found myself skipping, also, a large section of the conversations between conventional English village characters. . . . There was also a dreadful stock English nobleman of the casual and debonair kind, with the embarrassing name of Lord Peter Wimsey, and, although he was the focal character of the novel, being Miss Dorothy Sayers's version of the inevitable Sherlock Holmes detective, I had to skip a good deal of him, too.

This did not bode well.

3 Having now read The Nine Tailors, I can say that Wilson was right about everything but the dullness . . . yet it doesn't really matter. Yes, the bits of campanology are too much. The bell-ringers' jargon is almost entirely unintelligible to the layman, and the interest of the passages is slight--they have nothing of the thematic force of the similar insertions of encyclopedic materials in Moby-Dick, to take a brutally unfair example. And, yes, the rustic dialogue is perhaps too cute at points, and Lord Peter is for much of the book a more blithe and amusing figure than is perhaps believable. Yet it works: the campanology fleshes out and roots the characters Lord Peter encounters; the rustic dialogue provides Dickensian verbal tics and some moments of genuine humor, and Lord Peter's breeziness in the early part of the novel serves to lend his harrowing experience at the novel's real power. To argue, as Wilson does, that the clever solution to the case is appropriate to the sort of story that Sherlock Holmes could have dispensed with in thirty pages is to utterly miss the point: Wimsey likes these people and their odd rural interests--and so do we, so neither of us is in a hurry to be shed of them. His having a mystery to solve gives us both an excuse to stick around for a while.

4 And now on to the fun bits. Sayers's Foreword begins:

From time to time complaints are made about the ringing of church bells. It seems strange that a generation which tolerates the uproar of the internal combustion engine and the wailing of the jazz band should be so sensitive to the one loud noise that is made to the glory of God.

Though anyone who has spent a quiet Sunday morning in the deserted streets of the City of London, with no accompaniment but the occasional church bells, can appreciate Sayers's point, she severely weakens her case by opening the novel with a scene of a rural vicar organizing a series of peals to be rung on New Year's Day for nine hours--from midnight until nine in the morning! Enduring such an ordeal while I was trying to sleep would be more than sufficient to shift me to the side of the bell-haters.

5 I've written before about a certain strain in English writing, both fiction and nonfiction, of casualness about ghosts and apparitions. Such an attitude appears in The Nine Tailors in a throwaway line by an uneducated housewife, a friend of whose daughter has been scared by a ghostly light (which turns out to be entirely explicable in earthly terms) in the graveyard at night. Lord Peter questions the woman:

"Did she tell her mother and father?"

"Not then, she didn't. She didn't like to, and I remember well, as a child I was just the same, only with me it was a funny sort of thing that used to groan in the wash-house, which I took to be bears--but as to telling anybody, I'd ha' died first."

My knowledge of the natural history of England is far from perfect, but I don't think bears have been groaning in wash-houses there since at least the days of Elizabeth I. Clearly it was a ghost.

6 I also enjoyed the following exchange between Lord Wimsey and his manservant, Bunting:

[Wimsey] put aside the vest and pants, filled a pipe and wandered down the garden, pursued by Mrs. Venables with an ancient and rook-proof linen hat, belonging to the Rector. The hat was considerably too small for him, and the fact that he immediately put it on, with expressions of gratitude, may attest the kind hear which, despite the poet, is frequently found in close alliance with coronets; though the shock to Bunter's system was severe when his master suddenly appeared before him, wearing this grotesque headgear, and told him to get the car out and accompany him on a short journey.

"Very good, my lord," said Bunter. "Ahem! there is a fresh breeze, my lord."

"All the better."

"Certainly, my lord! If I may venture to say so, the tweed cap or the grey felt would possibly be better suited to the climatic conditions."

"Eh? Oh! Possibly you are right, Bunter."

Surely Bunter later shared a quiet laugh about that moment with his friend Jeeves over brandy at the Junior Ganymede Club?

7 For Wimsey's appreciation of rustic pleasures, you can't do better than the somewhat ironic enthusiasm he expresses to a waiter in a rural restaurant about the festivities anticipated for the opening of a new drainage system for the fens. The waiter explains that it is hoped that the Duke of Denver--who, unbeknownst to him, is Wimsey's brother--will come to kick off the party:

"I'll make a point of jogging old Denver up to his duty. We'll all come. Great fun. Denver shall present gold cups to all the winners and I will present silver rabbits to the losers, and with luck somebody will fall into the river."

"That," said the waiter, seriously, "will be very gratifying."

Come the event itself, the pleasure is more than trebled:

The weather was perfect, the Duke of Denver made a speech with was a model of the obvious, and the Regatta was immensely successful. Three people fell into the river, four men and an old woman were had up for being drunk and disorderly, a motor-car became entangled with a tradesman's cart and young Gotobed won First Prize in the Decorated Motor-Cycle section of the sports.

8 Late in the book, Sayers offers up a string of headline phrases that would, I think, amuse any fan of the newspaper honor box:

The public memory is a short one. The affair of the Corpse in Country Churchyard was succeeded, as the weeks rolled on, by so many Bodies in Blazing Garages, Man-Hunts for Missing Murderers, Tragedies in West-End Flats, Suicide Pacts in Lonely Woods, Nude Corpses in Caves and Midnight Shots in Fashionable Road-Houses, that nobody gave it another thought.

If only we could get copies of Sayers's lurid imaginary newspapers into the hands of Michael Lesy or Felix Feneon!

9 Potty Peake, a man who could uncharitably be described as the village idiot, is described by one of Sayers's characters as a "natural." I'd never encountered that meaning of the word, but sure enough, Merriam-Webster's offers as the first definition of the noun form of natural, dating from 1533:

One born without the usual powers of reasoning and understanding.

--while the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary offers, as sense four,

A person mentally handicapped from birth.

Coda
Now that I've settled into the Sayers sensibility, any fans out there want to offer an opinion on whether I should once again attempt Gaudy Night?

"I think we should go on living," or, From Compton-Burnett to Conan Doyle

I'm returning briefly to Ivy Compton-Burnett's Manservant and Maidservant (1937) tonight both because I feel it would be wrong to give up before I've convinced each of you to slip one of her novels into the stocking of your favorite witty cynic and because I can't resist sharing the following scene. Set in the schoolroom of the novel's isolated rural family, it tells of the arrival of the long-suffering children's first tutor, Gideon. In the children's grilling of him, Compton-Burnett's dialogue hews closer to realism than usual--perhaps because children tend more towards cruel bluntness than adults do--but it's no less funny or cutting for that.

"You are rather old for a tutor," said Marcus, "I thought they were generally young."

"Some young men begin by being tutors, and pass on to something else."

"Then you are a failure?" said Tamasin.

"I think I should be called one. I paid too much attention to my studies when I was young, and that does lead to people's being tutors."

"How old are you?" said Marcus

"I am forty-one."

"Oh, quite a young man," said Tamasin.

"Does your wife think you are a failure?" said Marcus.

"I am not married. I live with my mother and sister. If they think so, they do not betray it. Women are so loyal."

"What do you do with the money you earn?" said Jasper. "If you have no wife, you can't have children, and you don't seem as if you spend very much on yourself."

"Part of it I subscribe to the family expenses, and part to a fund that is to give me an income when I am old."

"Your hair is gray now," said Marcus.

"Yes, but that is premature. It merely gives me a personality."

The scene is also unusual in that it develops along more typically comedic lines than most of Compton-Burnett's scenes: there are no surprise interruptions from a character who's not even been announced as entering the room, no unexpectedly murderous asides, not even a sense that the participants are scrapping for points. Given the freedom that comes from the natural inquisitiveness of children confronted with a new tutor, Compton-Burnett runs with it.

One technique that does tie Compton-Burnett to other English satire is her employment of negative constructions as a way of both softening and improving a joke. Born, presumably, of a real usage reflecting British reticence, the negative construction--"not entirely unexpected," "not particularly," "not without its charms," and the like--works as a way of tiptoeing up to a barb; it focuses the attention, and, in the case of a skilled satirist, reveals unexpected degrees of denial and diffidence. It is the stiff upper lip incarnate. Anthony Powell was a master of negative constructions, as was Evelyn Waugh, who employs it simply but to good effect in this line about the dictatorship of Neutralia in "Scott-King's Modern Europe":

"[They were] led to the reception hall which with its pews and thrones had somewhat the air of a court of law and was in fact not infrequently used for condemning aspiring politicians to exile on one or the other of the inhospitable islands that lay off the coast of the country.

But I've yet to encounter a writer whose employment of negative constructions is more effective than Compton-Burnett's. The following lines describing the role of a village shopkeeper, Miss Buchanan, as a receiving station for clandestine letters capture the understated effectiveness of the technique:

On this secondary traffic Miss Buchanan turned an equivocal eye, that did not add to the ease, already not complete, of those who availed themselves of it.

At its best, the negative construction works sort of like a hand brought to the mouth to hide the scurrilous details we're being told; its pretense to authorial reluctance make the bulk of the satire, expressed in positive, straightforward terms, seem even more viciously pointed.

And viciousness is unavoidable in Compton-Burnett; life in her novels is richly red in tooth and claw. Late in Manservant and Maidservant, two of the boys, on seeing their father headed for a bridge they know to be dangerously faulty, willfully neglect to issue a warning to him. After he passes, they reflect on their failing:

"We are worse than we have ever been. We are not meant to kill people, whatever the reason. We might meet him in a future state, and know that he knew about it. It would be what is called poetic justice."

"That would not be for a long time."

"It might be soon. Some people would die of remorse."

"I think we should go on living," said Jasper.

That scene came to mind the other day when I was reading Michael Dirda's appreciation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes in his Classics for Pleasure (2007). Dirda describes a feeling I've written about before, the sense of returning home that one gets every time one slips into the familiar world of a Holmes story:

[W]e discover a quiet refuge from our crowded lives as we glance again around the familiar flat with its chemical retorts, blazing fire, the bullet holes in the wall forming the initials V. R. Outside the fog rolls in and the rain beats down, but Mrs. Hudson is even now bringing up a cheering supper. Soon, there will be a knock on the door and a distressed gentlewoman will enter, or a puzzled policeman or a disguised nobleman, and the next grand adventure will begin. As Vincent Starrett observed: "they still live for all that love them well: in a romantic chamber of the heart, in a nostalgic country of the mind, where it is always 1895."

In Compton-Burnett's novels, it is always the early Edwardian era, a few years into the new century at best, and as I read Dirda's description, I began to picture Compton-Burnett's country houses, and the spite and viciousness they contain, as the flip side of Holmes's rationality: these are the locations, the people, the crimes, the competing hatreds and passions, that Holmes is called on to put to rights.

Conan Doyle provides us with answers and comforts us; Compton-Burnett provides us with unruly darkness and distaste. Perhaps an appreciation of both is a sign of emotional health?