Tag: DLS (page 1 of 1)

January 10, 2026

done, not done, undone

A few days ago I submitted my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers to my editors at Oxford University Press. I always find this stage of the book-writing process emotionally complicated. At the moment, while I feel gratified that I have told my story, that I have taken this person in words from the cradle to the grave, I also know that I’m not done. Indeed, just a few hours after I sent the file I got files back: an Author Questionnaire for marketing, the assignment to summarize each chapter of the book for the Oxford Scholarship website.

Later I will get suggestions from my editors, and probably suggestions from peer reviewers, and then later still there will be rounds of copy-editing with many queries, at least some of which I won’t know how to answer. All of this will take months, and I doubt that the book will appear until 2027. The one thing I know for certain is that at the end of the process I will be heartily sick of the book and will never want to think about it again — but I will have to, because there will be interview requests to respond to.

It hasn’t always been like this, at least not for every writer. Consider:

20 September 1935 (approx.): Sayers sends the complete typescript of Gaudy Night to Gollancz.
4 November 1935: Gaudy Night is published.

And remember, this was in the days of mechanical printing: no digital editing or typesetting. All the editing was done by people with pencils, and the typesetting and printing done on a Monotype machine.

The speed and efficiency of the operation meant that Sayers could then immediately turn to whatever she wanted to write next. What a beautiful dream.

December 15, 2025

Claudia’s dream

Dorothy L. Sayers’s sequence of twelve radio plays, The Man Born to be King, happened because the BBC asked her to put the life of Christ, distilled from the Gospels, in dramatic form. But Sayers was not content simply to string together episodes: she wanted to make something thematically coherent and aesthetically powerful. The through-line of the plays, it seems to me, can be put in the form of a question Jesus asks in all three of the synoptic Gospels: “Who do you say I am?” (Matthew 16:15, Mark 8:29, Luke 9:20.) In these plays, everyone who meets Jesus is implicitly confronted by this question, which most of them answer. They may admire or worship or mock or comdemn or despise, but they all respond. They seem compelled to.

But it is not just individual persons who need to respond to Jesus. The two Great Powers whom Jesus challenges are the Sanhedrin and Rome; and the members of those bodies respond in complex and often contradictory ways.

For Caiaphas, the High Priest, Jesus is not an unique figure: he is, rather, exemplary of an ongoing problem: the inability of the Sanhedrin to command the respect and obedience of the Jewish people. And that inability leads to the increasing dominance of Roman power in Judaea. In the eleventh play, which concerns the Crucifixion, Caiaphas reflects despairingly on this situation:

CAIAPHAS … It is the duty of statesmen to destroy the madness which we call imagination. It is dangerous. It breeds dissension. Peace, order, security — that is Rome’s offer — at Rome’s price.

JOSEPH [of Arimathea] (gloomily): We have rejected the way of Jesus. I suppose we must now take yours.

CAIAPHAS: You will reject me too, I think…. Be content, Jesus, my enemy. Caiaphas also will have lived in vain.

I may have more to say in a later post about the role of the Jewish authorities in these plays. These are matters that call for great delicacy, and I think it’s fair to say that delicacy was not Sayers’s strong suit. So stay tuned.

What Jesus means for Rome — and what Romans think Jesus means for Rome — is the question I want to focus on here.

One of the more intersting minor characters in these plays is a Roman named Proclus. We see him in the first play as a young soldier assigned to the household of Herod the Great; later we see him, a much older man, as the one Les Murray calls “the say-but-the-word centurion”; and we see him once more giving vinegar to the dying Jesus. Sayers’s decision to make these disparate figures one character is striking — and a reminder of how brief the earthly life of Jesus was. For a Roman soldier who was beginning his career when Jesus came into the world could still have been on duty to see this strange man out of it.

To Pilate Jesus is an object of little interest — though he does admire the fortitude with which the prophet bears his suffering: he muses that Jesus should have been a Roman. For most of the Roman soldiers he’s just another criminal they must deal with, along with the usual crowd-control problems. For one of the aristocrats his execution is worth seeing: it’s a pleasing “novelty” to watch a god being crucified.

But the most interesting figure here is Claudia Procula, the wife of Pilate. As Jesus hangs on the cross, Pilate asks her about this dream she has had, and she replies (I must quote at length here):

CLAUDIA: I was in a ship at sea, voyaging among the islands of the Aegean. At first the weather seemed calm and sunny — but presently, the sky darkened — and the sea began to toss with the wind….

(Wind and waves)

Then, out of the east, there came a cry, strange and piercing …

(Voice in a thin wail: “Pan ho megas tethneke — Pan ho megas tethneke– ”)

And I said to the captain, “What do they cry?” And he answered, “Great Pan is dead.” And I asked him, “How can God die?” And he answered, “Don’t you remember? They crucified him. He suffered under Pontius Pilate.” …

(Murmur of voices, starting almost in a whisper)

Then all the people in the ship turned their faces to me and said: “Pontius Pilate.” …

(Voices, some speaking, some chanting, some muttering, mingled with sung fragments of Greek and Latin liturgies, weaving and crossing one another: “Pontius Pilate. … Pontius Pilate … he suffered under Pontius Pilate … crucified, dead and buried … sub Pontio Pilato … Pilato … he suffered … suffered … under Pontius Pilate … under Pontius Pilate…. )

… in all tongues and all voices … even the little children with their mothers….

(Children’s voices: “Suffered under Pontius Pilate … sub Pontio Pilato … crucifie sous Ponce Pilate … gekreuzigt unter Pontius Pilatus … and other languages, mingling with the adult voices: then fade it all out)

. . . your name, husband, your name continually — “he suffered under Pontius Pilate.”

This is an extraordinary scene in several ways. Note, for instance, the inclusion, in the midst of the Second World War, of French and German voices. If you listen to the performance of this play available online and compare it to the book, you’ll discover that the performed version of the scene is considerably shorter than the published version and is placed after the death of Jesus rather than when he is dying — the book has the Roman soldiers giving the dying Jesus vinegar, then switches to Claudia Procula and Pilate, then returns to the cross for Jesus’s last outcry and death. It’s impossible to be sure, but it seems likely that Sayers allowed changes to her script in order to meet the exigencies of radio broadcast but then restored the full version for publication — because she thought what she had written and her placement of it are important.

The most remarkable thing about the scene is Sayers’s inclusion of words written by the Greek historian and biographer Plutarch, a pagan who was born probably just a few years after Jesus was crucified. Plutarch was from the village of Chaeronea in Boeotia, about twenty miles from the famous temple of Apollo at Delphi, where he served as a priest. His devotion to Apollo seems to have been sincere and deep. Therefore he was appropriately concerned about the silence of the oracles, his essay/dialogue on which I wrote about at some length here.

Philip, one of the characters in the dialogue, tells this story:

As for death among such beings, I have heard the words of a man who was not a fool nor an impostor. The father of Aemilianus the orator, to whom some of you have listened, was Epitherses, who lived in our town and was my teacher in grammar. He said that once upon a time in making a voyage to Italy he embarked on a ship carrying freight and many passengers. It was already evening when, near the Echinades Islands, the wind dropped, and the ship drifted near Paxi. Almost everybody was awake, and a good many had not finished their after-dinner wine. Suddenly from the island of Paxi was heard the voice of someone loudly calling Thamus, so that all were amazed. Thamus was an Egyptian pilot, not known by name even to many on board. Twice he was called and made no reply, but the third time he answered; and the caller, raising his voice, said, ‘When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead.’ On hearing this, all, said Epitherses, were astounded and reasoned among themselves whether it were better to carry out the order or to refuse to meddle and let the matter go. Under the circumstances Thamus made up his mind that if there should be a breeze, he would sail past and keep quiet, but with no wind and a smooth sea about the place he would announce what he had heard. So, when he came opposite Palodes, and there was neither wind nor wave, Thamus from the stern, looking toward the land, said the words as he had heard them: ‘Great Pan is dead.’ Even before he had finished there was a great cry of lamentation, not of one person, but of many, mingled with exclamations of amazement. As many persons were on the vessel, the story was soon spread abroad in Rome, and Thamus was sent for by Tiberius Caesar. Tiberius became so convinced of the truth of the story that he caused an inquiry and investigation to be made about Pan; and the scholars, who were numerous at his court, conjectured that he was the son born of Hermes and Penelopê.

Tiberius, of course, was Caesar at the time of Jesus’s death. So, though Plutarch was writing around 100 A.D., this story concerns an event that occurred decades earlier; and it seems likely that Philip, who gives the account in a for-what-it’s-worth spirit, is suggesting that the oracles may have fallen silent because the gods or demigods who spoke through them have died.

The Christian interpretation of this story is of course that the coming of Jesus is what silences the oracles, whether by slaying the gods or by rendering them powerless.

Brief Digression: Conversely, the implication of Arthur Machen’s superb horror story “The Great God Pan” (1894) is that such deities have neither died nor lost all their power but have gone underground, as it were, conducting a permanently furtive campaign of resistance to a triumphant Christianity. And of course the justly famous “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” chapter in The Wind in the Willows (1906) makes a similar suggestion, but in a gentler and sunnier key. The survival of paganism in Europe is the subject of Francis Young’s Paganism Persisting: A History of European Paganisms since Antiquity and his consistently interesting Substack. Here is a recent piece by him on the renewal, real or imagined, of British paganism. These matters too deserve more attention than I can give them here. End of digression.

Sayers probably was alerted to Philip’s story by Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (1925), which offers a very interesting take on the meaning of Philip’s tale. His suggestion is that Jesus did not have to kill Pan, because the disenchanting bureaucratic system of the Roman empire had already done so:

The Empire at the end was organised more and more on that servile system which generally goes with the boast of organisation; indeed it was almost as servile as the modern schemes for the organisation of industry. It is proverbial that what would once have been a peasantry became a mere populace of the town dependent for bread and circuses; which may again suggest to some a mob dependent upon doles and cinemas. In this as in many other respects, the modern return to heathenism has been a return not even to the heathen youth but rather to the heathen old age. But the causes of it were spiritual in both cases; and especially the spirit of paganism had departed with its familiar spirits. The heart had gone out of it with its household gods, who went along with the gods of the garden and the field and the forest. The Old Man of the Forest was too old; he was already dying. It is said truly in a sense that Pan died because Christ was born. It is almost as true in another sense that men knew that Christ was born because Pan was already dead. A void was made by the vanishing of the whole mythology of mankind, which would have asphyxiated like a vacuum if it had not been filled with theology. But the point for the moment is that the mythology could not have lasted like a theology in any case. Theology is thought, whether we agree with it or not. Mythology was never thought, and nobody could really agree with it or disagree with it. It was a mere mood of glamour, and when the mood went it could not be recovered. Men not only ceased to believe in the gods, but they realised that they had never believed in them. They had sung their praises; they had danced round their altars. They had played the flute; they had played the fool.

So came the twilight upon Arcady, and the last notes of the pipe sound sadly from the beechen grove.

The superior organization of the great Empire governed from a great City easily defeated this ancient pastoral paganism, which was, after all, “a mere mood of glamour.” (Stalin famously asked how many divisions the Pope had; one might imagine Tiberius Caesar asking how many legions Pan can command.)

Sayers’s use of all this is fascinating, and especially powerful is her decision to embed it in her narrative as a dream. For like all important dreams, that of Claudia Procula has an iron logic beneath its chaotic surface. The surface confuses the death of Jesus and the death of Pan; in fact, Pilate in his role as a Roman bureaucrat has indeed helped to kill Pan, though his acquiescence in the death of Jesus … well, that’s a more complicated matter. It is true that Jesus, at the very moment that Claudia Procula tells her dream, is dying on a Roman cross; but it is also true that, as King Melchior says in the sequence’s first play, “It is written in the stars that the man born to be king shall rule in Rome.” Immolatus vicerit.

November 17, 2025

W.H.A. and D.L.S.

Dorothy L. Sayers had written ”Kings in Judaea,” the first play of a series she had been asked to write for the BBC Children’s Service, in the autumn of 1940, the project fell apart when Sayers refused to make changes demanded of her by the Children’s Service staff. But the Rev. James Welch, the BBC’s director of religious broadcasting, who had originated the idea, was unwilling to let it drop and eventually managed to get Sayers writing again, with the Children’s Service no longer involved. In late 1941, then, she resumed writing the plays that would become The Man Born to Be King, and would work on them through the middle of the next year. (A play was performed every four weeks between December of 1941 and October of 1942.)

You may read more about this contentious and often comical situation in this excerpt from Kathryn Wehr’s outstanding critical edition of the sequence — which includes James Welch’s own preface to the original publication of the plays in book form.

Curiously enough, at the same time in 1941 that Sayers resumed work on her plays, W. H. Auden began writing what could become For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio — a task he would complete in the late spring of 1942.

Two gifted Christian writers, then, asking themselves at the same time the same question: How might one portray, for a 20th-century audience, the life (or part of the life) of Jesus Christ in a manner that is artistically and religiously serious?

In an introduction to the published version of the plays, Sayers writes incisively and shrewdly about the challenges she faced:

This process is not, of course, the same thing as “doing the Gospel story in a modern setting.” It was at a particular point in history that the Timeless irrupted into time. The technique is to keep the ancient setting, and to give the modern equivalent of the contemporary speech and manners. Thus we may, for example, represent the Sanhedrin as “passing resolutions” and “making entries in the minute-book,” for every official assembly since officialdom began has had some machinery for “agreeing together” and recording the result. We may make a Roman officer address his squad with modern military words of command, since some similar verbal technique must always and everywhere have been used to start and turn and stop bodies of soldiery, or to inspect their kit and parade-order. We may make a military policeman or a tax-collector lard his speech with scraps of American slang; for the local speech must have been full of catch-phrases picked up from the foreign soldiers and merchants who swarmed along the great trade-routes of the Empire; and for these bits and pieces of vulgar Latin, bastard Greek, and Syriac dialects the language of Hollywood is the modern equivalent.

The American cultural imperium!

These changes were necessary, she felt, precisely because the story was so well-known to many BBC listeners in the lovely cadences of the Authorized Version:

It is this misty, pleasant, picturesque obscurity which people miss when they complain, in the words of one correspondent, that in the modern presentation “the atmosphere created seems so different from that of the original story ….. where it is all so impressively and wonderfully told.” So it is. The question is, are we at this time of day sufficiently wondering and impressed? Above all, are we sufficiently disturbed by this extremely disturbing story? Sometimes the blunt new word will impress us more than the beautiful and old. “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man,” said Jesus — and then, seeing perhaps that the reaction to this statement was less vigorous than it might have been, He repeated it, but this time using a strong and rather vulgar word, meaning “to eat noisily, like an animal” chew? Munch? Crunch? Champ? Chump? (But in the end, I was pusillanimous, and left it at “eat” not liking to offend the ears of the faithful with what Christ actually said.)

Thus far, then, concerning the language. I should add that no attempt has been made at a niggling antiquarian accuracy in trifles. The general effect aimed at has been rather that of a Renaissance painting, where figures in their modern habits mingle familiarly with others whose dress and behavior are sufficiently orientalised to give a flavor of the time and place and conform with the requirements of the story.

Auden was faced with few of the challenges that beset Sayers: no grumpy listeners writing under the impression that “the original story” was made by King James’s translators, no Protestant Truth Society denouncing the plays before they even had been written. But when he sent his oratorio to his father — a physician and a learned man, but not especially literary — he received much the same kind of criticism.

Auden replied on 13 October 1942 — as it happens, five days before the final play of Sayers’s sequence, “The King Comes to His Own,” was broadcast — with gentle firmness:

Sorry you are puzzled by the oratorio. Perhaps you were expecting a purely historical account as one might give of the battle of Waterloo, whereas I was trying to treat it as a religious event which eternally recurs every time it is accepted. Thus the historical fact that the shepherds were shepherds is religiously accidental — the religious fact is that they were the poor and humble of this world for whom at this moment the historical expression is the city-proletariat, and so on with all the other figures. What we know of Herod, for instance, is that he was a Hellenised-Jew and a political ruler. Accordingly I have made him express the intellectual’s eternal objection to Christianity — that it replaces objectivity with subjectivity — and the politician’s eternal objection that it regards the state as having only a negative role. (See Marcus Aurelius.) . . .

I am not the first to treat the Christian data in this way, until the 18th Cent. it was always done, in the Mystery Plays for instance or any Italian paintings. It is only in the last two centuries that religion has been “humanized,” and therefore treated historically as something that happened a long time ago, hence the nursery picture of Jesus in a nightgown and a Parsifal beard.

If a return to the older method now seems startling it is partly because of the acceleration in the rate of historical change due to industrialization — there is a far greater difference between the accidents of life in 1600 AD and in 1942 than between those of 30 AD and 1600.

That last point is a very shrewd one, and an explanation of why Auden makes such a point of modernizing his narrative: he rarely misses the opportunity to introduce a chronological incongruity, and is not afraid to relish the resulting humor. Here, for instance, is King Herod reflecting on his reign in Judaea:

Barges are unloading soil fertiliser at the river wharves. Soft drinks and sandwiches may be had in the inns at reasonable prices. Allotment gardening has become popular. The highway to the coast goes straight up over the mountains and the truck-drivers no longer carry guns. Things are beginning to take shape. It is a long time since anyone stole the park benches or murdered the swans. There are children in this province who have never seen a louse, shopkeepers who have never handled a counterfeit coin, women of forty who have never hidden in a ditch except for fun. Yes, in twenty years I have managed to do a little. Not enough, of course. There are villages only a few miles from here where they still believe in witches.There isn’t a single town where a good bookshop would pay. One could count on the fingers of one hand the people capable of solving the problem of Achilles and the Tortoise. Still it is a beginning. In twenty years the darkness has been pushed back a few inches.

Sayers could not have done this, even if she had wanted to — and she was unlikely to have wanted to. She was tasked with sticking closely to a narrative shape clearly recognizable from the Gospels, and I think she enjoyed that challenge. Auden’s (self-chosen) job was a very different one. But both of them were moved to reflect, and reflect very intelligently, on the ways that the Gospel story demands that we understand it both historically and contemporaneously. It is Then and it is Now.

August 11, 2025

the truth in view

One of the finest poems by the great Richard Wilbur is called “Lying.” Says Wilbur: When we make things up, when we claim to have seen a grackle (or some more numinous creature) when we didn’t really, this is a displaced “wish … to make or do.” But when we lie in this way we misunderstand our situation — misunderstand ourselves and our world:

In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light:
Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment
Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law
Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof,
Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town
In sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck
Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones
Beginning now to tug their shadows in
And track the air with glitter. All these things
Are there before us; there before we look
Or fail to look; there to be seen or not
By us, as by the bee’s twelve thousand eyes,
According to our means and purposes.

(Job 39:19, the LORD to Job: “Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?”) The key phrase is “All these things / Are there before us.” We must simply discover the will and the wisdom to recognize what is already present to us. “The arch-negator” — that is, Satan — manages only briefly and imperfectly to obscure the radiance of the world: In Eden he was but

… darkening with moody self-absorption
What, when he left it, lifted and, if seen
From the sun’s vantage, seethed with vaulting hues.

Here we might remember one of Wilbur’s earlier masterpieces, “The Undead,” in which he counsels us to recognize the condition of vampires: “Their pain is real, and requires our pity.” Because all they can do is “prey on life forever and not possess it, / As rock-hollows, tide after tide, / Glassily strand the sea.”

Wilbur says that have this desire to make or do, and in our “moody self-absorption” sate it with lies, when we could find what we seek if we look — really look.

Closer to making than the deftest fraud
Is seeing how the catbird’s tail was made
To counterpoise, on the mock-orange spray,
Its light, up-tilted spine; or, lighter still,
How the shucked tunic of an onion, brushed
To one side on a backlit chopping-board
And rocked by trifling currents, prints and prints
Its bright, ribbed shadow like a flapping sail.

Here let me direct you to the second chapter of Robert Farrar Capon’s wonderful book The Supper of the Lamb, in which he teaches you how to look at an onion. But back to Wilbur.

Simply making a simile is a way of seeing — or perhaps the making of a simile is a natural product of seeing. And even the the smallest simile, Wilbur says, is “tributary / To the great lies told with the eyes half-shut / That have the truth in view.” I love that phrase, that way of describing our artful tales and tropes. It’s worthy of being placed alongside Sidney’s Defence of Poesy.

Our eyes are half-shut because we’re partly viewing the world and partly retreating within ourselves to find an a response to what we have already seen — to find what the poet Donald Davie called “articulate energy” — syntax adequate to the thing. Wilbur’s offers three examples of such great lie, and the third is this:

That matter of a baggage-train surprised
By a few Gascons in the Pyrenees
Which, having worked three centuries and more
In the dark caves of France, poured out at last
The blood of Roland, who to Charles his king
And to the dove that hatched the dove-tailed world
Was faithful unto death, and shamed the Devil.

(Re; shaming the devil: this is an old proverb, most famously used in Henry IV, Part I by Hotspur to Owen Glendower, who has been boasting of his power over sprits: “O, while you live, tell truth and shame the devil!”)

Wilbur is talking about The Song of Roland of course, and these words, coming at the end of the poem, tell us of two ways of shaming the devil: to be “faithful unto death” in one’s deeds and in one’s words.

That is my Thought for Today, but I want to add a postscript. For my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, I have been reading her translation of The Song of Roland — the last work she completed in her life. She begins her long and remarkably helpful introduction to the poem by describing, quite flatly, a minor skirmish in the year 778, an ambush of the rear-guard of one of Charlemagne’s armies in the Pyrenees in which a few people were killed. A chronicler writing in 830 named some of them; another chronicler ten years later mentioned the skirmish but did not name the dead, since, he said, they had already been named.

So goes Sayers’s first paragraph. And when you read the second one you’ll see where Wilbur got his inspiration for the conclusion of his poem:

After this, the tale of Roncevaux appears to go underground for some two hundred years. When it again comes to the surface, it has undergone a transformation which might astonish us if we had not seen much the same thing happen to the tale of the wars of King Arthur. The magic of legend has been at work, and the small historic event has swollen to a vast epic of heroic proportions and strong idealogical significance. Charlemagne, who was 38 at the time of his expedition into Spain, has become a great hieratic figure, 200 years old, the snowy-bearded king, the sacred Emperor, the Champion of Christendom against the Saracens, the war-lord whose conquests extend throughout the civilised world. The expedition itself has become a major episode in the great conflict between Cross and Crescent, and the marauding Basques have been changed and magnified into an enormous army of many thousand Saracens. The names of Eggihardt and Anselm have disappeared from the rear-guard; Roland remains; he is now the Emperor’s nephew, the “right hand of his body”, the greatest warrior in the world, possessed of supernatural strength and powers and hero of innumerable marvellous exploits; and he is accompanied by his close companion Oliver, and by the other Ten Peers, a chosen band of superlatively valorous knights, the flower of French chivalry. The ambuscade which delivers them up to massacre is still the result of treachery on the Frankish side; but it now derives from a deep-laid plot between the Saracen king Marsilion and Count Ganelon, a noble of France, Roland’s own stepfather; and the whole object of the conspiracy is the destruction of Roland himself and the Peers. The establishment of this conspiracy is explained by Ganelon’s furious jealousy of his stepson, worked out with a sense of drama, a sense of character, and a psychological plausibility which, in its own kind, may sustain a comparison with the twisted malignancy of Iago. In short, beginning with a historical military disaster of a familiar kind and comparatively small importance, we have somehow in the course of two centuries achieved a masterpiece of epic drama – we have arrived at the Song of Roland.

That is, a “small historic event” has been magically transformed into one of “the great lies … that have the truth in view.” The idea of a simple story going “underground,” deep into the unconscious lives of a people, and then emerging as something altogether other and more resonant is the image that Wilbur, with his poet’s alertness, picks up from Sayers.

July 19, 2025

Sayers and Graves

I really appreciated this post by Adam Roberts on his long-term fascination for the work of Robert Graves, especially The White Goddess, which Adam calls “One of my holy books.” I told Adam that I appreciate this post because I have always found Graves not only alien to my sensibility but even alienating — and Adam, justifiably, asked me what I meant by that. So I replied thus (I’ve edited and expanded, and added some links):

Well, primarily it’s that he strikes me as a monomaniac: he’s done a vast amount of reading, but only what supports, or can be turned in such a way as to seem to support, his White/Triple Goddess thesis ever makes its way to the reader. Nothing ever points in the other direction, nothing ever complicates his vision: everything is grist for his endlessly turning mill. Even his famous two-volume edition of the Greek Myths — books I bought fifty years ago and have often enjoyed — grinds his small collection of axes. It feels inhuman to me. And when you couple this with the intensity of his hatreds, he seems a pretty unpleasant character.

By the way, when Sayers was working on her Paradiso translation she read Graves’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, with its notoriously vitriolic introduction: Graves despised Lucan and sought to portray him in every possible negative light, and especially emphasized Lucan’s astronomical ignorance. (E. V. Rieu thought that introduction so hostile that he threatened to cancel the contract unless Graves toned it down, which he did, but only a bit.) I should add that Graves is following A. E. Housman’s lead here: Housman called Lucan a “blundering nincompoop.”

Brief digression: I have long thought that the great classicist Seth Benardete made a brilliant point with exemplary concision: “All the careful exactness of Housman goes along with a pettiness of spirit that at least at times is out of control and expresses a contempt for whatever he does not understand.”

Anyway: Sayers thought it was Graves who was ignorant, and sought to prove it, even enlisting as a temporary research assistant an exceedingly bright undergraduate named Brian Marsden, who later became a very distinguished astronomer at Harvard. He helped her to discover many points on which Graves was wrong and Lucan right. (Decades later he wrote an enjoyable essay about the experience.) Sayers also meticulously went through Lucan’s Latin to show that Graves had deliberately mistranslated him to make him seem more stupid. For instance, in the translation Lucan mentions a lunar eclipse than was followed the very next day by a soar eclipse, and Graves calls attention to the ridiculousness of this in a note. But, Sayers discovered, Lucan didn’t write that it happened the next day; Graves had added that. This appears to have been only one among several, or even many, additions to the Lucan’s text, though I would need to do a lot more work than I’ve done to confirm the point.

Sayers spent most of the last year of her life on Graves’s manifold intellectual wickednesses; it’s the main reason she didn’t finish her translation of Dante. When asked why she was doing it, she answered:

because I can’t bear to see a man treated like that, even if he is two thousand years dead, and because I believe Lucan is substantially talking sense, and I want to get to the bottom of it. I don’t care what it costs or how long it takes. I want justice. I want honest scholarship and accurate translation. The classical scholars won’t take an interest; either they think astronomy is too remote and boring to bother with, or they say, “Oh, Graves! what does he matter?” But he is distributing his sneers to a quarter of a million Penguin readers, and I don’t like it. (End of speech)

“Damn the fellow!” she writes in another letter. “I wouldn’t mind so much his murdering Lucan if he didn’t dance on the body.” I want to be more generous to Graves, more receptive to his ideas, but I don’t think working on Sayers is making that any easier….

She was at least comforted to find some allies. A distinguished professor of classics from St. Andrews University, H. J. Rose, sent her his review of Graves’s The Greek Myths, which he called “a series of tangled narratives, difficult and tedious to read and made none the better by sundry evidences of their author’s defective scholarship.” Sayers replied with gratitude, saying that Rose’s review “filled me with malignant joy.”

July 15, 2025

the original of Wimsey

Roy ridley 9fb1d2cb 5fce 4f9f 9af4 b930c69b7e6 resize 750. In 1935, when Dorothy L. Sayers was working wit her friend Muriel St. Clare Byrne on the play Busman’s Honeymoon, she wrote from Oxford:

I have seen the perfect Peter Wimsey. Height, voice, charm, smile, manner, outline of features, everything — and he is — THE CHAPLAIN OF BALLIOL. What is the use of anything? … Such waste — why couldn’t he have been an actor?

Though Sayers did not remember it, she had seen this man — whose name was Maurice Roy Ridley — many years before, and had swooned then also. In July 1913, at the end of her first year at Oxford, she reported to her friend Catherine Godfrey about what she saw at the Encaenia:

But the Newdigate [i.e., the winner of the Newdigate Prize] was a darling. His poem was on ‘Oxford’, and he recited it so nicely. He had a very clear, pleasant voice, and spoke as if he meant it. He read from the rostrum close to us, so we saw and heard splendidly. His poem was not frightfully full of genius, and was very academic in tone and form (though it was in blank verse) but there was an appealing sort of youthfulness and pathos and Oxford feeling about it that made it quite charming.… He was very nervous, and he quivered all over all the time he was reciting. Charis and I fell head over heels in love with him on the spot. His name is Maurice Roy Ridley – isn’t it a killing name, like the hero of a six-penny novelette? He has just gone down from Balliol, so I shall see him no more – my loves are always unsatisfactory, as you know….

Surprisingly, this passionate love was altogether forgotten 22 years later.

The news that he was “the perfect Peter Wimsey” reached Ridley, who subsequently acquired all of the Wimsey novels and placed them prominently on a shelf in his Balliol rooms. (Whether he read them is not known.) Vanity was certainly one of Ridley’s most prominent traits — one of his pupils reported that he had a bust of Dante on the mantel over his fireplace and would stand next to it, posing in such a way that the resemblance between him and the great Florentine poet was clear to all observers — and the Wimsey connection gave that vanity more fuel. For instance, he already had a monocle, and began wearing it more regularly.

But Ridley was not content with mere appearance. In 1936 a Balliol student named Pat Moss died in a fire, in peculiar circumstances, and when the police arrived they found Ridley hopping around the scene of death with a magnifying glass. They ordered him to depart. Whether he continued to investigate crimes, or potential crimes, I do not know.

But because Pat Moss was Canadian and naturally friendly with other Canadians at Oxford, one of them who had seen him earlier on the evening before his death — as it happens, a pupil of Ridley’s — was thoroughly questioned. His name? Robertson Davies. (I get this information from Judith Skelton Grant’s biography of Davies, from which I’ve also taken the photos below.) No arrests were ever made, and Moss’s death could have been accidental, but in later years Davies said he thought Moss had gotten involved with gamblers and had been killed by them.

Another of Ridley’s pupils of the era said that he was not a good tutor, but was a great influence, and certainly he would have encouraged Davies — already quite inclined to flamboyance — to make a name for himself at Oxford. This Davies did largely through his participation in OUDS, the Oxford University Dramatic Society, where he served as sometime dramaturg, sometime stage manager, and sometime actor.

Something else Davies learned from Ridley was the usefulness of a monocle:

And a brief P.S.: Many of you will know that Sayers had a son out of wedlock, had him raised by her cousin, and only later told him that she was his mother. When John Anthony, after serving in the military during the Second World War, decided to attend university in 1946, what university did he choose? Oxford. And what was his college? Balliol. And who was his tutor? Why, Roy Ridley, of course.

July 11, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 6

Our attempts to understand the character of Constantine are befuddled by two mysteries, the first of which is: Constantine had his (second) wife Fausta and his (eldest) son Crispus executed, and we don’t know why. Some have speculated that he caught the two of them having an affair; Gibbon, more plausibly and with more deference to rumors current at the time, believes that Fausta falsely implicated Crispus in a plot against his father in order to clear the way for her own sons — Crispus being the son of Constantine’s first marriage — to inherit the throne. Gibbon:

The innocence of Crispus was so universally acknowledged, that the modern [by which Gibbon usually means “medieval”] Greeks, who adore the memory of their founder, are reduced to palliate the guilt of a parricide, which the common feelings of human nature forbade them to justify. They pretend, that as soon as the afflicted father discovered the falsehood of the accusation by which his credulity had been so fatally misled, he published to the world his repentance and remorse; that he mourned forty days, during which he abstained from the use of the bath, and all the ordinary comforts of life; and that, for the lasting instruction of posterity, he erected a golden statue of Crispus, with this memorable inscription: To my son, whom I unjustly condemned. A tale so moral and so interesting would deserve to be supported by less exceptionable authority; but if we consult the more ancient and authentic writers, they will inform us, that the repentance of Constantine was manifested only in acts of blood and revenge; and that he atoned for the murder of an innocent son, by the execution, perhaps, of a guilty wife. They ascribe the misfortunes of Crispus to the arts of his step-mother Fausta, whose implacable hatred, or whose disappointed love, renewed in the palace of Constantine the ancient tragedy of Hippolytus and of Phaedra.

Sayers in The Emperor Constantine more-or-less endorses this interpretation, though she differs from Gibbon in another respect: Sayers has Constantine executing Crispus in a blind rage, whereas Gibbon says that his murder was carefully planned well in advance. It was a settled decision, not a moment of wrath. (As we shall see in a future post, this sets a pattern for his family.) Sayers is not excusing him, but I think she does make him a more impetuous and less coldly calculating figure than the real Constantine was — though Sayers’s Constantine does inform Fausta that he will have her executed, but only after she accompanies him as his consort in a grand public ceremony. Which is pretty cold: The imperial show must go on. (And Fausta calmly plays her part.)

The second puzzle about Constantine: Why did he delay his baptism until he was on his death-bed? One possible answer: it was not uncommon in that era for converts to delay baptism until near death, because they believed that if they died immediately after baptism — without the opportunity to commit more sins — that would allow them to go straight to Heaven. Sayers hints that Constantine may have been aware of this: in the scene in which he orders the death of his son Crispus and others he believes to have been conspiring against him — about which more in a moment — he says, “How fortunate that I was never baptised! I can damn myself with a clear conscience.” As though to say: I am not officially a Christian and so do not betray my Lord by this sin — though I can make amends later.

(FYI: You may now choose to read an exemplary tale, taken from an American novel published in 1964, that illustrates in a distinctive way the theological and moral implications of the once-common theology of baptism that I have just described. Or you may simply continue.)

However we might read Constantine’s murderous gratitude that he is unbaptized, something becomes quite clear in the play’s last scene, when the people whom Constantine has had murdered appear before him as spectral images, horrifying him. It is then that, for the first time in his life, he confronts the true depth and extent of his sins:

Sin is more terrible than you think. It is not lying and cruelty and murder — it is a corruption of life at the source. I and mine are so knit together in evil that no one can tell where the guilt begins or ends. And I who called myself God’s emperor — I find now that all my justice is sin and all my mercy bloodshed…..

How can he be forgiven? How can he not pay the price for his wickedness?

It is Helena, his mother — yes, in fact she predeceased him, but shut up about that — who tells him the terrible and wonderful truth:

HELENA: The price is always paid, but not always by the guilty.

CONSTANTINE: By whom, then?

HELENA: By the blood of the innocent.

CONSTANTINE: Oh no!

HELENA: By nothing else, my child. Every man’s innocence belongs to Christ, and Christ’s to him. And innocence alone can pardon without injustice, because it has paid the price.

CONSTANTINE: That is intolerable.

HELENA: It is the hardest thing in the world — to receive salvation at the hand of those we have injured. But if they do not plead for us there is nobody else who can. That is why there is no redemption except in the cross of Christ. For He alone is true God and true Man, wholly innocent and wholly wronged, and we shed His blood every day.

What Constantine must understand, here at the end of his life, as the waters of Holy Baptism are prepared for him, is that the formulation he himself oversaw at Nicaea — that Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, is also “true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father” — is not just a theologically accurate statement, but the only hope of the dying. Constantine must throw himself upon the mercy of the Crucified One — the one whom he himself, in his sins, helped to crucify. As John the apostle put it: “He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2).

And this is where the two helices of the story of this flawed but remarkable play meet and merge. It is when we grasp for ourselves the truth of what was articulated at Nicaea that the dogma indeed becomes the drama.

July 9, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 5

I have said that one helix of The Emperor Constantine is the clarification of Christian doctrine at Nicaea, and the other is the personal theological development of Constantine. When we first see him in the play, he demonstrates a religious sensibility — but one totally subordinated to the needs of the Empire. He asks his mother whether Christ is a “strong god,” because “The Empire needs pulling together — a new focus of faith and energy.” As the Emperor Julian — subject of a future post — will later think, Constantine for a time believes that Sol Invictus is the ideal “focus of faith and energy.” But when he starts winning victories under the sign of the Labarum he starts to suspect that his mother may be right when she says that Christ “is the one true God.”

At one point his Christian servant Togi — accompanied by the bishop Hosius — sees an opportunity to put his master to the test:

CONSTANTINE: Here, Togi, is there a table in this blasted barracks?

[TOGI looks at CONSTANTINE, as if wondering how far he dare go with him. Then —

TOGI: Here you are, Augustus! (He sweeps the offerings from the table dedicated to the Lares.)

CONSTANTINE (leaping to catch them): Here, damn it! what are you doing? That’s sacrilege, you little swine! You’ve offended all the household gods. What the devil’s come over you? By Jupiter I’ll — (He checks the blow in mid-air, and looks from the table to the Chi-Ro and back again, while a ludicrous succession of emotions — rage, alarm, shame, irritation, superstitious awe, schoolboy mischief and defiance chase one another across his face. Then he grins, and the tension is relaxed.) Toleration, I said — not religious intolerance. Is that what happens when we stop persecuting you? Must you persecute others and break down their altars? Does your Christ want all the sky to Himself, and all the offerings too? (He laughs a little uneasily, and looks sideways at Hosius. His tone changes.) By the gods, I believe that’s what you do want.

HOSIUS (steadily) There is only one true God, my son, and He cannot be served with half-measures.

CONSTANTINE So! … Well, that’s logical enough, but I hadn’t thought of it that way. … That’s His strength, of course, He knows the secret of rule. One God… one Emperor. (It is the birth of a new idea; he ponders it.) One. (He goes and stares at the Chi-Ro.) You won our battle for us…. One, true, and mighty…. Give us Your favour and protection — and ten more years of life — (He turns away, discovers that he is clutching an apple in his hand, gazes at it in astonishment and takes a large bite out of it.) All right, Togi. But do remember that, Christ or no Christ, I’m still Pontifex Maximus.

Nope his epithets: “By Jupiter,” “By the gods.” Gradually, though, Constantine becomes more and more committed to the belief that the Christian faith is the One True Faith. But even then he is a kind of theological minimalist: when he learns about the Arian controversies, he says,

CONSTANTINE: It really is heart-breaking — after all I’ve done for them — not to speak of what God has done! For two pins I’d knock their reverend pates together! … All this hair-splitting about texts! Why can’t they agree to differ, like sensible people?

HOSIUS (cautiously): Why indeed, Augustus? Unless the difference of opinion is really so fundamental that —

CONSTANTINE: It isn’t. It’s only some obscure metaphysical point — nothing but sophistry. All anybody wants is faith in God and Christ and the simple Gospel message. These theologians are getting swelled heads, that’s what it is. They feel safe, they enjoy the Imperial favour, they’re exempt from taxation, and instead of looking after the poor and converting the heathen, they start heresy-hunting and playing a sort of intellectual catch-as-catch-can to jockey one another out of benefices. I won’t have it. It’s got to stop.

But, again gradually, he comes to realize that there may be more at stake in these debates than he had suspected. And his experience at the Council — long hours listening to to the Arians and the Athanasians going at each other — ultimately confirms the point. So when the Council is struggling to come up with a formal dogmatic statement, he finally intervenes. (Note: Eusebius of Nicomedia is one of the leading Arians, not to be confused with the more famous Eusebius of Caesarea, who throughout this debate sits on the fence.)

CONSTANTINE: Will you give me leave to speak?

EUSTATHIUS: But of course, sir. Pray do.

CONSTANTINE: There was a phrase mentioned earlier in the proceedings which struck me very forcibly. It was, if I remember it rightly, “of one substance with the Father.”

EUSEBIUS OF NICOMEDIA: Oh lord!

That Constantine was the person to introduce this word is not Sayers’s invention: when Eusebius of Caesarea wrote a letter about the Council to his own church, he described what the council articulated as “our faith” — in essence what is now called the Nicene Creed — and then added,

When we presented this faith … our emperor, most beloved of God, himself first of all witnessed that this was most orthodox. He agreed that even he himself thought thus, and he ordered all to assent to subscribe to the teachings and to be in harmony with them, although only one word, homoousios, was added, which he himself interpreted, saying that the Son might not be said to be homoousios according to the affections of bodies, … for the immaterial, intellectual, and incorporeal nature is unable to subsist in some corporeal affection, but it is befitting to think of such things in a divine and ineffable manner. And our emperor, most wise and pious, thought philosophically in this manner.

The other Eusebius, of Nicomedia, cries out when he hears the word homoousios because he knows that it is irreconcilable with the views that he and Arius hold. But those who agree with Athanasius are delighted:

HOSIUS: Why, yes, sir — “consubstantial” — quite a familiar term in the West. The Greek, I believe, is “homosoious”. (He pronounces it to rhyme with “joyous”.)

CONSTANTINE (deprecatingly) “Homo-ousios”, I think.

HOSIUS I told you my Greek was bad. Your Majesty is of course quite right.

[The word has taken everybody rather aback — but since it is the Emperor’s suggestion nobody likes to speak first. Murmurs.

CONSTANTINE (insinuatingly): It seems to me a very definite and unambiguous sort of word.

ARIUS (to ARIANS): And I took that man for a simpleton!

CONSTANTINE: As the Apostle says, I speak as a fool — there may be objections to it.

EUSEBIUS OF NICOMEDIA (to ARIANS): They’ve put him up to it. (Aloud) There is every objection to it.

This is a bold move, but Constantine through his ostentatious humility has invited it — or so Eusebius of Nicomedia hopes. Interestingly, the next person to speak is the other Eusebius, who, as I have said, is fence-sitting. He does not explicitly agree that the term is “objectionable,” but he points out that “It is not scriptural.” Here we might remember that Arius constantly emphasizes that his own views are derived directly from Scripture — and indeed he takes this opportunity to pounce:

ARIUS (with satisfaction): Ah! … Do you think you know better than the Holy Ghost? Which will you have? The Word of God or the word of Constantine?

[Everybody is shocked, except CONSTANTINE.

CONSTANTINE (mildly) Nobody, I hope, would hesitate. But I did not invent the word…. What does Athanasius say?

A shrewd move by the Augustus! He could make the case himself, but why not turn that job over to one who has already shown himself a master of disputation?

ATHANASIUS: Surely it is not a question of substituting our words for those of the Holy Spirit, but only of defining with exactness our understanding of what the Spirit says in symbols and mysteries. And Our Lord Himself set us the example when He interpreted to His disciples the parables which He had taught them.

JAMES: Do not we all do as He did? When I preach to my simple desert folk, I tell them a story, or read them a psalm, and then I say, “this is how we must understand it”.

SEVERAL VOICES: Quite right.

ATHANASIUS: I should … greatly prefer a scriptural word. But our urgent need just now is of a word that nobody can possibly misinterpret — not even Arius.

And if we look at the text of the Nicene Creed that Christians still affirm, we can see how devoted it is to eliminating Arian wiggle-room: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God” — so far Arius would perhaps agree, but then: “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light” — did you hear that about his actually being God? In case you didn’t, let’s say it again: “true God from true God.” Did you hear that about his being begotten? Let’s say that again: “begotten, not made, of one Being [ousios] with the Father….” The repetitions are not accidental.

Yet Athanasius is perhaps too hopeful. A little later the Arians whisper among themselves:

THEOGNIS: We can always say that we understood “homoöusios” in the sense “homoiousios”.

EUSEBIUS OF NICOMEDIA: True — between “of one substance” and “of like substance” there is the difference only of an iota.

This anticipates Gibbon’s famous jibe:

The Greek word, which was chosen to express this mysterious resemblance, bears so close an affinity to the orthodox symbol, that the profane of every age have derided the furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited between the Homoousians and the Homoiousians. As it frequently happens, that the sounds and characters which approach the nearest to each other accidentally represent the most opposite ideas, the observation would be itself ridiculous, if it were possible to mark any real and sensible distinction between the doctrine of the Semi-Arians, as they were improperly styled, and that of the Catholics themselves.

But Gibbon is imperceptive here, as Constantine was at first when he derided the controversy as “hair-splitting” and “sophistry.” For, as Athanasius explains, if Christ is not God but only in some sense like God, then he cannot redeem us, and we are still dead in our sins. Or else God the Father (whoever He is) redeems us (by some means or another) and the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are irrelevant to this redemption. In either case nothing remains of Christianity.

Constantine now grasps this point — to some degree. But there is one more stage in his development still to come.

July 7, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 4

In my previous post I referred to the bihelical structure of The Emperor Constantine; today I’m going to discuss one of those helices.

Since the Council of Nicaea was called to deal with the views of Arius and his followers, Sayers rightly gives him a lengthy speech to introduce the debate:

Certainly, I say that the Son is “theos”, that is to say, “divine”, but not that He is “ho Theos”, that is to say, God himself. Our Latin friends who have no definite article in their woolly language may be excused for woolly thinking; but for those who speak Greek there is no excuse. For it is written: “The Lord your God is one God — there is none beside Him: He is God alone.” Are we heathens and polytheists, to worship two gods, or three, or a dozen? The Father alone is eternal, underived Being, that which is — as He Himself said to Moses, “ I AM THAT I AM”. And in His eternity, before all time, He begat the Son, whom St. Paul also calls, “the first-born of every creature” — not a part of Himself, since God cannot be divided, but called forth by Him out of nothing, as the Book of the Proverbs says: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way; when there were no depths, I was brought forth.” And this is His Logos, that is to say, His Wisdom or Word, by whose means He afterward made all things, and without whom, as St. John writes, “nothing was made that has been made”. And this Logos, being in the fullness of time joined to the body of a man, was — in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews — “faithful to Him that made Him” — so that, as it is written of Him in the Acts of the Apostles, “God hath made Jesus both Lord and Christ”.

By the way, throughout this part of the play Sayers is drawing on, and often quoting from, the many surviving records of the Council.

Arius’s views are thoroughly grounded in Scripture, and he does not deny, and does not mean to diminish, the Lordship of Christ — though he is making a distinction between Lord (which Christ, he thinks, is) and God (which Christ, he thinks, is not). And if Christ is not God, then he might be venerated but cannot be worshipped: “Are we heathens and polytheists, to worship two gods, or three, or a dozen?” That woolly language Latin allows a distinction between latria (which we owe to God) and dulia (which we owe to the saints); Arius implicitly makes the same distinction, but between the Father and the Christ. It is not clear that he understands the full implications of his argument.

(N.B.: If I were to go into all the ways that the verses Arius cites might be differently interpreted — for instance, I could point out that it’s not the Son who speaks in Proverbs 8, it’s Wisdom — this would be a book-length post. I’m focusing on the essential points of disagreement. By the way, Sayers typically renders the biblical quotations of all parties in the Authorized Version, so if you want to know where a passage comes from, just copy it and paste it into a search engine.)

Arius continues:

This doctrine I received, and the Bishop of Nicomedia also, from the venerable Lucian our teacher, and from the tradition of the Saints: One God and Father of all, and of Him One Son or Word, sole-begotten before all worlds. But that the Son had no beginning, or that He is equal and co-eternal with the Father, this we deny: for it is the nature of a son to be subsequent to his father, and of that which is derived to be inferior to that from which it derives. This stands to reason, and for this cause the Word when He was made flesh said plainly: “My Father is greater than I.”

That is the truth of Scripture, which every sincere mind must acknowledge.

That last note is an important one: Arius believes himself faithful to the plain teaching of Scripture; and indeed, he finds his view so amply and obviously attested by Scripture that it’s impossible for him to believe that any “sincere mind” could see things otherwise. Therefore he treats his opponents as either mindless — he seems to think all Latin-speakers dim-witted — or insincere: he singles out for particular scorn his own bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, whom he suggests is trimming his sails to meet the prevailing political winds.

Alexander is rendered speechless by this personal attack, and allows his deacon, a young man named Athanasius, to respond to Arius. Athanasius is so superior to his bishop as a theologian and a debater than one suspects that Alexander would in any circumstances have found a way to be prostrated. Let’s pick up partway through Athanasius’s speech:

… the Son is God out of God, from the very substance and Being of God; therefore the blessed Apostle, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, calls Him: “the brightness of the Father’s glory and the express image of His person, upholding all things by the word of His power.” And the Apostle John, in the beginning of his Gospel which lies here open before you, declares very well both the distinct Person of the Son and His equal Godhead with the Father, saying: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

ARIUS: Why, then, does the Apostle call Him “the first-born of every creature“?

Notice that Arius ignored the passages from Hebrews and John’s Gospel that Athanasius has just cited.

ATHANASIUS: Because so He is. For when He became Man, He made Himself as one of the creatures; and therefore He said of himself when He was in the body, “My Father is greater than I”, because He had assumed our nature, being made a little lower than the angels. As it is written, “The first man was of the earth, earthy: the second Man is the Lord from Heaven”. Yet He Himself created the nature that He put on; and this was ordained by Him from eternity when time was not, so that He that is second on earth is first in Heaven. Who also went up thither, the first-born from the dead of all that He had created. Him likewise did John behold in his Apocalypse, in form like unto the Son of Man, and saying, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty”.

ARIUS: Spoken like a giant, little mannikin. You are so learned in the Scripture you know more about it than Christ Himself, who said to the rich young ruler: “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.”

ATHANASIUS: So he did — and the fool stood gaping. But what if he had answered, like Peter: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God“?

Athanasius’s point is that Jesus did not say, “Why do you call me good, since I am not God?” Arius thinks that’s what Jesus means, but, as Athanasius indicates, Jesus says that he should be called good only if he is God — which he may be. He is pressing his interlocutor to make a decision on that point. But Arius doesn’t get it: he reads as a denial what is in fact a genuine question.

ARIUS: He would have earned a blessing — and perhaps have been commended for knowing better than to confuse the Son with the Father.

For Arius, if you say Jesus is the son of God you are ipso facto saying that he is not God himself. Again, a reasonable enough assumption if you ignore the passages that suggest otherwise. But Athanasius is about to play his trump card:

ATHANASIUS: Was Thomas, then, rebuked when, looking upon the wounds of the Redeemer, he cried: “My Lord and my God!“? Rebuked he was, not for belief, but because he was so slow in believing…. And do not forget to remind your Latin friends, with your customary politeness, that he said, not “theos” but “ho theos mou“ — ” the Lord of me and the God of me” — with the definite article, Arius.

A hit, a palpable hit! That young Alexandrian deacon is pretty skilled in disputation.

He is also following one of the cardinal principles of biblical interpretation: passages that are unclear or ambiguous must be interpreted in light of those that are clear and unambiguous. Arius, by contrast, because he assumes that Christian monotheism is a simple thing, has simply ignored the passages (John 1:1, Hebrews 1:3) that in their (terrifying!) straightforwardness complicate what Arius would prefer to keep simple.

And now, by citing the words of Thomas (John 20:28), Athanasius has exploded the distinction that is most essential to Arius’s theology: that between God the Father and Jesus the Lord. Thomas confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord and God, and this, Athanasius reminds us, is indeed the confession of the Church — however distressing that confession might be for the familiar theological categories.

Later in the debate they raise an issue that does not get fully resolved for another 125 years, at the Council of Chalcedon, but the passage points to the incoherence of Arius’s position:

ATHANASIUS: You say that Christ had no human soul?

ARIUS: In Christ, the Logos took the place of the human soul.

ATHANASIUS: Then was He not true man, for man’s nature consists in a fleshly body and a rational soul. There are heretics who deny Christ’s Godhead and others who deny His Manhood — it was left for Arius to deny both at once…. Tell me, how did this compound of half-man and demi-god do the will of the Father? Freely, or of necessity?

ARIUS (hesitating — he sees the trap but cannot avoid it): Freely.

ATHANASIUS: That which is created free to stand is created free to fall. Was the Son, then, made fallible by nature, needing God’s grace to keep Him from sin? If so, the second Adam is no more than the first. Christ is but man or at most an angel — and to worship Him is idolatry.

(The language Sayers gives Athanasius here echoes that of Milton’s God in Paradise Lost, Book 3: “I made [Adam] just and right,/ Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.”) As noted above, I am not certain that Arius has fully grasped that, if the Son is not God, then the Son cannot be worshipped — it would indeed be idolatry to do so. But Christians do worship the Son along with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God. This is why Athanasius says, near the beginning of his first Oration Against the Arians, “Those who consider the Arians Christians are in great error.”

But — you may well be asking — where in all this is Constantine, the Emperor who called this Council? We’ll get to him in the next post.

July 3, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 3

The Emperor Constantine is not a great play, largely because Sayers, who had done a tremendous amount of reading in preparing to write it, seems to be under some compulsion to share as much of that reading as possible. So we get a lot of backstory and political context hammered into the dialogue in classic “As you know, my Lady” style.

FLAVIUS [Constantinus Chlorus]: Yes. The old man sent me west and kept the boy at court — as a hostage for my loyalty, I suppose. He trusts no one. But when Diocletian retired, I sent to Galerius — who has succeeded him, you know, as Augustus of the East —

HELENA: Yes, yes, I know.

It’s painful, and even more painful when Sayers uses The Common Folk to mediate it:

So old Maximian starts cussin’ and swearin’ and tries to ‘ave the purple off ‘im, see? But the troops only laughs at ‘im, and the old boy runs off to Constantine, ‘owling blue murder. And Constantine treats ‘im very kind, but ‘e don’t give ‘im no power, see? because of upsettin’ Maxentius. Besides, the old boy was past it. But any’ow, Maxentius ‘ad is ‘ands full, because Africa goes and ‘as a rebellion and sets up a new Augustus on its own.

Stop. Please, make it stop. In his columns in the Irish Times Myles na gCopaleen would often introduce the thoughts of The Plain People of Ireland. Sayers seems to have had a similar idea of The Plain People of England and makes frequent use of them — even when she has to disguise them as Romans — from the East End of Rome, no doubt. Fossato di Riva. Or Cappella Bianca. (That was a joke for Londoners.) In general, though, while Sayers knows the shortcomings of the P. P. of E., she has more affection for them than Myles had for the P. P. of I., whom he called an “ignorant self-opinionated sod-minded suet-brained ham-faced mealy-mouthed streptococcus-ridden gang of natural gobdaws.”

But I digress. Back to the play.

There’s another bizarre moment when Sayers is describing the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and she gives us this:

OFFICER: We left the city by the Milvian Bridge, and when we got to the fork —

MAJOR DOMO: Where the Cassia turns into the Via Flaminia?

OFFICER: That’s it — we took the Flaminian Way. About a mile out, you come to a narrow defile between the hills and the river —

CRASSUS: I know it. The Red Rocks.

The Turn-by-Turn Navigation Is Definitely Not the Drama. This could not possibly be less relevant to the essential concerns of the play, and, alas, there’s more like it.

But the story has a strong spine, and if you strip away the irrelevancies, you can see its shape. I’m borrowing the “spine” metaphor from Peter Jackson, who said that when he and Fran Walsh and Philippa Bowens were writing The Lord of the Rings they knew they couldn’t tell the whole story, so they had to find a spine, a firm but flexible narrative line which would hold the movie together. The Emperor Constantine has such a spine, though it’s less like a straight rod than a double helix. It looks something like this:

The complex process by which Constantine moves from a vaguely pious religiosity to belief in the defense of what we could now call Nicene orthodoxy — and, ultimately, achieves a complete existential reliance on the Triune God celebrated at Nicaea.
The complex process by which the Catholic Church came to realize that the account given by Arius and his followers of who Christ is could not be tolerated as a viable option — even if the refusal of the Arian position brought, for a time, increased division in an already-divided Church.

And so the Council of Nicaea itself, presided over by Constantine, becomes the point at which the two helices meet.

The (even more complex) sequence of events and achievements by which Constantine became first a Caesar and then, eventually, the sole Emperor of Rome, however intrinsically interesting it might be, has nothing to do with double-helical spine of this story, and it’s a shame that Sayers did not recognize that. If she had recognized it, this might not be a forgotten play. I wish I had the time to make a reduced and clarified version of this play — an Imperial Edit, as it were, by analogy to the Phantom Edit.

More in the next post about this double helix.

July 1, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 2

First post in this series.

In her Preface to The Emperor Constantine, Sayers explains why its subject is important:

The reign of Constantine the Great is a turning-point in the history of Christendom. Those thirty years, from A.D. 306, when he was proclaimed Augustus by the Army of Britain at York, to A.D. 337, when, sole Emperor of the civilized world, he died at Nicomedia in Asia Minor, exchanging the Imperial purple for the white robe of his baptism, saw the emergence of the Christian ecclesia from the status of a persecuted sect to power and responsibility as the State Church of the Roman Empire. More important still, and made possible by that change of status, was the event of A.D. 325: the Council of Nicaea. At that first Great Synod of East and West, the Church declared her mind as to the Nature of Him whom she worshipped. By the insertion of a single word in the baptismal symbol of her faith, she affirmed that That which had been Incarnate at Bethlehem in the reign of Augustus Casar, suffered under Pontius Pilate, and risen from death in the last days of Tiberius, was neither deified man, nor angel, nor demi-god, nor any created being however exalted, but Very God of Very God, co-equal and co-eternal with the Father.

The first Christian Emperor was thus, in the economy of Providence, the instrument whereby Christendom was brought face to face with two problems which have not yet found their full resolution: the exterior relations between Church and State; the interior relation between orthodox and heretic within the Church.

We shall return to all this, but at the moment I want to deal with another matter: Why tell this story at the Festival of Colchester?

It turns out that, if certain traditions are to be believed, Constantine has an intimate connection with Colchester, a connection which begins with the simple fact that Camulodunum, as the Romans called it, was the capital of the province of Britannia. More formally it was known as Colonia Claudia Victricensis — colonia, not municipia, which marked it as a kind of extension of the city of Rome itself rather than a mere town in the provinces. The residents of a colonia had the honor of Roman citizenship. (Similarly, Tarsus was the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia, which is how the apostle Paul, native of that city, gained the Roman citizenship that in a difficult situation he made good use of.)

It is said by some that the name Colchester means “fortress of Coel,” Coel being a king in semi-Romanized Britain. (Probably not the “merry old soul” of song, but who knows for sure?) This is the story that Geoffrey of Monmouth tells about Coel and Constantius, AKA Constantius Chlorus:

At that time Duke of Kaelcolim, that is to say Colchester, started a rebellion against King Asclepiodotus. He killed the King in a pitched battle and took for himself the distinction of the royal crown. When this was made known to them, the Senate rejoiced at the death of a King who had caused trouble to the power of Rome in all that he did. Mindful as they were of the setback which they had suffered when they had lost the kingdom, they sent as legate the Senator Constantius, a wise and courageous man, who had forced Spain to submit to Roman domination and who had laboured more than anyone else to increase the power of the State of Rome.

When Coel, King of the Britons, heard of the coming of Constantius, he was afraid to meet him in battle, for the Roman’s reputation was such that no king could resist him. The moment Constantius landed in the island, Coel sent his envoys to him to sue for peace and to promise submission, on the understanding that he should retain the kingship of Britain and contribute nothing more to Roman sovereignty than the customary tribute. Constantius agreed to this proposal when it reached him. Coel gave him hostages and the two signed a treaty of peace. Just one month later Coel developed a most serious illness which killed him within eight days.

After Coel’s death Constantius himself seized the royal crown and married Coel’s daughter. Her name was Helen and her beauty was greater than that of any other young woman in the kingdom. For that matter, no more lovely girl could be discovered anywhere. Her father had no other child to inherit the throne, and he had therefore done all in his power to give Helen the kind of training which would enable her to rule the country more efficiently after his death. After her marriage with Constantius she had by him a son called Constantine.

And now we know why the Festival of Colchester might well feature a play about Constantine. Indeed, the first scene of Sayers’s play is set in Colchester, with Helena as the point of focus. While modern historians believe that Helena was a native of Bithynia — as did Procopius — Sayers treats that as a mere legend: “It was said by some, both then and now, that she was [Constantius Chlorus’s] concubine, a woman of humble origin — a barmaid, indeed, from Bithynia. But an ancient and respectable tradition affirms, on the other hand, that she was his lawful wife, a princess of Britain.” And if Helena were from Camulodunum, it would be no surprise if she were also a Christian, since in her time Camulodunum not only had churches but sported its own bishop.

Whether historically accurate or not, a belief in her British birth makes for a better story — especially in Colchester. We’ll just set aside the inconvenient fact that in 330, just after her death, her son renamed the Bithynian town Drepanon as Helenopolis. Move along, nothing to see here.

So here, in Sayers’s play, we have Helena, whose husband Constantius Chlorus had divorced her for political reasons, though we are reminded that in the eyes of God they remain married. She lives with her aged, exhausted, and mentally incapacitated father Coel, and in this first scene will see her (former?) husband for the first time in a decade — and her son Constantine, now 21. The surprise of this scene is old King Coel emerging from his slumbers to utter a prophecy:

Coel the son of Coel the son of Coel the heaven-born;
I have harped in the Twelve Houses; I have prophesied among the Dancers;
Coel, father of the Light, who bears the Sun in her bosom.

Three times have I seen the Cross:
Air and fire in Gaul, under the earth in Jerusalem,
Written upon water in the place of the victories.

Three times have I heard the Word:
The word in a dream, and the word in council,
The word of the Word within the courts of the Trinity.

Three Crowns: laurel among the trumpets,
A diadem of stars with fillets of purple,
Thorns and gold for the Bride of the Trinity.

I have seen Constantine in the air as a flying eagle,
I have seen Constantine in the earth as a raging lion,
I have seen Constantine in the water as a swimming fish.

Earth and water and air — but the beginning and the ending is fire,
Light in the first day, fire in the last day, at the coming of the Word,
And Our Lord the Spirit descending in light and in fire.

Then he collapses back into sleep. The prophecy is incomprehensible to all, especially to the young pagan warrior Constantine. But the pattern of the story is now established.

P.S. Just a random note, but the Penguin Classics edition of Geoffrey of Monmouth that I quoted is edited and translated by Lewis Thorpe, the husband of Sayers’s great friend, collaborator, biographer, and goddaughter Barbara Reynolds — though he did this several years after Sayers’s death. Small world.

June 27, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 1

A theme that emerges strongly in Dorothy Sayers’s thought in the late 1930s — and continues to be central to her thought for the rest of her life — is expressed in a phrase that she uses repeatedly: “The dogma is is the drama.” Here is one articulation of that idea:

Let us, in Heaven’s name, drag out the Divine Drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slip-shod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction. If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much the worse for the pious — others will pass into the Kingdom of Heaven before them. If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like Him? We do Him singularly little honour by watering down His personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.

It is the dogma that is the drama — not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death — but the terrifying assertion that the same God Who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realise that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.

What’s especially interesting about this idea, for the biographer of Sayers, is that she seems to have discovered Dogma and Drama at the same time. That is, she started writing and speaking publicly about the Christian faith just as she began a new career as a playwright. Dogma and Drama provided an alternative to a path she had (though she did not admit it for a long time) written her way to the end of, that of the detective novelist.

Now, her first religious play, The Zeal of Thy House, is not fully committed to the dramatization of dogma. The play is more fundamentally concerned with the redemption of William of Sens. It describes how, after an accident that renders him paraplegic, an arrogant artistic dictator who thinks of the cathedral of Canterbury as his own creation becomes a more humble workman, aware both of his need for others to bring his ideas to life and also his subservience to God. That is to say, the play essentially concerns a man coming slowly to see that the human maker is what Tolkien called a sub-creator. (Neither Sayers nor Tolkien knew it, but they had virtually the same theology of work and articulated it very effectively, Sayers primarily in this play and and Tolkien primarily in the story of Fëanor in the Silmarillion and in the essay “On Fairy Stories.” I have sometimes wondered whether Tolkien read The Zeal of Thy House and was influenced by it, though I doubt it. Anyway, if he had, he’d never have admitted it.)

So The Zeal of Thy House doesn’t really test the proposition that “the dogma is the drama,” nor does her series of plays on the Life of Christ, The Man Born to Be King, because there the dramatic interest arises from events: this man’s teaching, suffering, death, and resurrection. There are of course dogmatic implications to this story, and Sayers embraces them … but that’s not the same thing as the dogma itself being the source of dramatic interest.

So did she ever put her idea to a practical test? Yes, she did, a decade after The Man Born to Be King, in a play that she wrote for the Colchester Festival in 1951. This task was a distraction from her chief work at the time, translating Dante, but perhaps a welcome one. Colchester is only fifteen miles from her home in Witham, which made it possible for her to be fully involved with the performance of the play — costumes and staging and rehearsals were her great delight — without demanding too much travel, which as she aged was becoming more difficult for her. She was a gregarious person, and at that time was lonely — her husband Mac Fleming had died in 1950. And perhaps above all, the play gave her a chance to test her great thesis: she decided to write a play called The Emperor Constantine, and to place at the center of her play the debates at the First Council of Nicaea.

And since this year marks the 1700th anniversary of that Council, this might be a good time to talk about Sayers’s play. I’ll be doing that over the next week or two. Or three. Stay tuned! The dogma really is the drama!

June 17, 2025

the composer as ASS and other exasperations

In May of 1942, as Sayers was writing the eleventh play in the sequence called The Man Born to be King, she shot a quick letter to her producer, Val Gielgud:

As proof that I am doing something, and because it is urgent, I am sending you Mary Magdalen’s song to be set. You remember where it comes — the Soldiers will not let her and her party through to the foot of the Cross unless she sings to them — “Give us one of the old songs, Mary!”

The song is thus the, so to speak, “Tipperary” of the period, and must be treated as such. That is to say, the solo portion is nostalgic and sentimental, and the chorus is nostalgic and noisy; and the whole thing has to be such as one can march to. We want a simple ballad tune, without any pedantry about Lydian modes or Oriental atmosphere….

I want a tune that is both obvious and haunting — the kind that when you first hear it you go away humming and can’t get out of your head! And quite, quite, low-brow.

In September, when the company were rehearsing the play, DLS wrote to a friend,

We had an awful time with rehearsals. Everything seemed to go wrong — it was one of those days. Claudia’s Dream had been done badly (owing to my not being there to explain just what I wanted!) and the ASS who set the song disregarded all my instructions, and not only set it in ¾ time instead of march time, but had the vile impertinence to alter my lines because they wouldn’t fit his tune. I threw my one and only fit of temperament, and we sang the thing in march-time and restored the line, but it wasn’t a good tune anyway!

In another letter she wrote, “I’m still furious with the man who wrote that silly tune.” Who was this “ASS”? His name was … Benjamin Britten. Probably never made much of himself.

It’s fun to write about DLS in part because she is very entertaining when she is outraged by something. Some years after this incident she reluctantly gave an interview to a reporter from the News Chronicle, who then announced to the world that Sayers had declared that there would be no more Lord Peter Wimsey stories. Sayers to the paper’s editor:

Your interviewer appears to have misunderstood me. I did not say that I had given up writing detective stories. I did not say that there would be no more Peter Wimseys. I made no announcement on the subject one way or the other. I only said that for the next few years, I had another job which would take me all my time.

(The “another job” was translating the Divine Comedy.) The editor’s reply merely created further exasperation:

There is no need to wonder how your reporter came to misinterpret me. Your own letter provides the explanation, since it shows you to have fallen into a similar misunderstanding, and for the same reason; namely, that Fleet Street renders a man incapable of taking in the plain meaning of an English sentence. You say you are “glad to hear that there will, in fact, be further Wimsey stories”; how, pray, do you contrive to extract that conclusion from my statement that “I made no announcement upon the subject one way or the other”?

I have not said, and I will not and cannot say, whether I shall write any more detective fiction or not; for the excellent reason that I do not know. Is that sufficiently clear?

Three times your reporter tried to force me into promising that I would write more of this kind of story; three times I refused to commit myself to any such thing. This refusal he interpreted to suit his own fancy; you in your turn have done the same.

June 4, 2025

total action

In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye argues that the epic as a genre is characterized by what he calls “total action” (318). The total action of a story begins with the initiation of the conflict and ends with its resolution — but the epic poem does not straightforwardly tell this whole story.

For instance, the total action of the Iliad begins with the Judgment of Paris, and it ends … well, it’s a bit difficult to say exactly where it ends. In one view of the matter, it ends when Troy falls; in another, it ends when when the major participants in the story have concluded their part in it. You could argue that the total action of the Iliad is not complete — and certainly the total action of the Odyssey is not complete — until Odysseus has performed penance assigned to him by Athena (building an altar to Poseidon in a place where that god had previously been unknown) and returned to Ithaca — his final homecoming. But in any case, the concept as Frye develops it, suggests that no epic will narrate its total action. It will zero in on something essential, perhaps the pivotal moment in the whole tale. So however you would describe the total action of the Iliad, the poem itself narrates just a few days in the long Trojan War: the days in which Achilles withdraws from the fighting, which leads to the death of Patroclus, which leads to Achilles’s re-entry into the battle, which leads to the death of Hector, which leads to the fall of Troy, since the city has now lost its great champion and the inspiration of its warriors.

The total action of the Aeneid is something vaster. You could argue, if you wanted to see things from Virgil’s point of view, that it extends from the Judgment of Paris ever onward, because the Pax Romana is the culmination of all history. (No, Virgil, no.) But the action of the poem itself begins with Aeneas’s escape from a burning Troy and ends in Italy with his killing of Turnus in battle.

In short: “total action” is a useful concept, and it seems to me that it is not relevant only to epics. Of the other genres of narrative, the one to which the concept of total action is most relevant is, it seems to me, the detective story, and more particularly the murder mystery. The total action of any murder mystery begins when the conflict that leads to the murder begins. When was that first seed planted? Perhaps it was when Aunt Mabel chose to give all of her money to your cousin instead of you; or the first time that Walter flirted with his married neighbor, Isobel. And it ends — well, again, that can be hard to say, but in societies that have the death penalty, the terminus ad quem of the total action is the execution of the convicted criminal. (Matters are less fully resolved when a murderer might eventually be released from prison.)

But however you think about it, murder mysteries, like epics, rarely seek to encompass the total action of the story. Often we do get the the terminus a quo, the initiation of the conflict, typically through backstory: it’s the kind of thing discovered along the way by the investigators, whoever they happen to be. But the terminus ad quem may be anticipated without being narrated. So, for instance, it’s quite common for a a murder mystery to end with the arrest of the murderer. We imagine the conviction and imprisonment and possibly the execution of the criminal as things that will happen as a matter of course. We don’t need to read all the details.

But if W. H. Auden’s view of what the murder mystery is all about — articulated in his famous but very bad 1948 essay “The Guilty Vicarage” — is correct even in broad outlines, then the novel can’t really stop before the arrest of the criminal. And that’s because in Auden’s view, the murder mystery is fundamentally a consoling revision of the story of Eden. It begins with a healthy (Auden would, wrongly, say “innocent”) community; that community is then profoundly disrupted by a killing; and what must happen in the course of the story is a restoration of the community’s orderly health. And that restoration of order is something that only happens if the criminal is captured, is identified, arrested, and convicted. “The phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law.”

A small note en passant: In G. K. Chesterton’s stories we only sometimes see the arrest of the criminal Father Brown has identified, but that’s not because Chesterton is uninterested in the restoration of innocence. However, the innocence Father Brown wants to see restored is that in the conscience of the criminal. He doesn’t especially care about whether a criminal goes to jail, but he is passionately concerned to prevent the criminal from going to Hell. Confession and absolution restore a sinner to right relation with God, which is arguably more important that the kinds of restoration that many murder mysteries are concerned with. Arguably. Auden seems to accept the point, because he finds Father Brown to be one of the few wholly successful detectives.

In any case, if the restorative arc Auden describes is necessary to the murder mystery, then something funny is going on in the later mysteries of Dorothy L. Sayers — the exception being her final one, Busman’s Honeymoon, which for certain specific reasons, perhaps to be discussed in another post, takes the story all the way to the execution of the criminal. That makes it very different than the other late novels, which I will have to describe in some detail. So if you haven’t read those stories, stop reading this post and go read them instead. They’re very much worth reading, and I wouldn’t want you to miss them. I’ll say as little as I can about the details, but

⚠️ SO MANY SPOILERS COMING ⚠️

Consider Have His Carcase (1932), her eighth Lord Peter Wimsey novel and the second in which Harriet Vane appears. It’s quite a long novel, the longest that Sayers had written up until that point. It begins with Harriet, holidaying on England’s South Coast, discovering a dead man lying on a large rock at the seaside; we don’t see Lord Peter until the fourth chapter. In the final chapter, Lord Peter — working with Harriet, but he’s the one who stitches together the evidence — discovers who murdered the man, and also how, why, and when they did it. The whole shebang. But he and Harriet are then told by the local police inspector that if he tells the story to the Chief Constable, the Chief Constable may very well not believe it, or, even if he does believe it, may think a conviction sufficiently unlikely that prosecution is not worth seeking. In response, Peter and Harriet give up the whole situation as hopeless and return to London. The End.

So we never learn whether the murderers are convicted. We don’t even learn whether they’re arrested. And what makes that a little more disconcerting is that the circumstances which led them to commit murder are still in place. The story centers on a man who feels that he will be cheated out of his inheritance, and drafts two others to help him kill the man he fears will get the money that’s rightfully his. But by the end of the story it’s strongly hinted that that another person could get the inheritance the murderer wants. So his motive for murder remains: if he’s not arrested and convicted we have no reason to believe that he won’t try again. If what readers want from a story is the restoration of a pre-murder innocence, or even some sense of justice imperfectly done, they’re not getting any of that from this novel.

Things are a little more complicated in The Nine Tailors (1934), because the great revelation in this case is that, while there is a dead man who gives every appearance of having been murdered, in fact he has not been. It is just possible that another man could have been accused of manslaughter in the case, or some other crime less serious than murder; but that man dies and therefore there’s nowhere for the story to go for resolution, at least the kind of resolution that Auden finds necessary. We are left with a feeling that the wheels of Justice have turned, that Nemesis has acted, and that the image or form of Nemesis is the bells of Fenchurch St. Paul; but all such matters are left to the imagination and the meditation of the reader. So we do, in a way, have the thing that Auden asked for, which is a restoration of of the moral order of the community. But it turns out that the moral order of this particular community was never actually disrupted in the way that it is when a member of a community is murdered by another member of the community.

And then in Gaudy Night (1935), once again, there is no murder. What we have at the end is the exposure of the person who is responsible for a good deal of illegal activity: vandalism, destruction of property, and at one point an attempted murder. (Also poison-pen letters, but while destructive of people’e peace of mind those may not be illegal — I’m not sure what British law was at that time.) When exposed, this person, far from regretting the attempted murder, declares that she wishes she could have murdered many people. But once more, Peter and Harriet at the end of a novel turn to their own personal interests, resolve the conflict that has kept them apart from each other. And what happens to the criminal is unknown: we are only told in the last chapter that “the problem is being medically dealt with,” which is frustratingly vague.

It’s frustrating primarily because, again, this person tried to commit murder and is only sorry that she failed. (The person she strangled was not the person she planned to strangle, but is among those she wishes to see dead.) So why is Sayers so reticent, or even evasive, on this key point?

One reason, I think is that the criminal is the mother of two young children, and it’s not at all clear what would become of those children if their mother were arrested and convicted of attempted murder. Saying that “the problem is being medically dealt with” is a way of preventing us from worrying too much about the kids. Sayers has other things she’s like for us to be thinking about, primarily the resolution of the complicated relationship between Peter and Harriet.

All this points to what I think is a serious problem with the construction of the plot. The criminal is obsessively concerned with the upbringing of her children — she thinks and talks constantly about them — but acts in ways that threaten to separate her from those children. She doesn’t think she’s going to be caught — criminals never think they’re going to be caught — but she knows that she could be caught, and if that happens then there’s a very good chance that she’ll never see her children again. She is to some extent irrational, but she’s not that irrational: for instance, she takes great pains to avoid being captured or identified. But she never ceases her campaign of hatred and violence; indeed she regularly escalates that campaign. Sayers never attempts to explain this radical incongruity. As I say, she’s interested in other things.

Sayers in her detective fiction is always interested in things other than the solution of the mystery. She often commented that her goal was to reconnect the tale of detection with the social novel, as she felt some of her 19th-century predecessors (especially Wilkie Colins) had done. In her novels she demonstrates a serious interest in the aftereffects of the Great War on returning soldiers, in the moral disorders of the aesthetic avant-garde, in the plight of the Superfluous Woman, in the sociology of women’s colleges, in the nature of good work, in the social consequences of modern advertising, in campanology and cryptography and cricket. And, of course, she was also interested in whether a highly intelligent and thoroughly independent woman can find happiness in marriage, and, if so, what a successful union might feel like, to both parties. The range of her curiosity is truly remarkable.

Now, those wide interests do not prevent her from working out her plots with great care. Except for The Five Red Herrings she didn’t do puzzle-novels in the vein of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Dickson Carr, but the details could be intricate, and she took pride in following, seriously if not always meticulously, the rules of the Detection Club, of which she was a founding member. It was just that her accountability to her fictional world ended, she thought, when she had provided a satisfactory solution to an appropriately challenging mystery. In writing Have His Carcase Sayers thought it necessary to have Lord Peter figure out whodunnit — who and how and why. But that’s where her responsibilities as a writer of mysteries ended.

It’s interesting, I believe, that this was also Harriet Vane’s view. In Busman’s Honeymoon we’re told that Harriet’s detective novels proceed thus:

Miss Harriet Vane, in those admirable detective novels with which she was accustomed to delight the hearts of murder-fans, usually made a point of finishing off on the top-note. Mr. Robert Templeton, that famous though eccentric sleuth, would unmask his murderer with a flourish of panache in the last chapter and retire promptly from the stage amid a thunder of applause, leaving somebody else to cope with the trivial details of putting the case together.

That very novel, Busman’s Honeymoon, though, carries the story right to the end of the total action: the execution of the murderer — as though to compensate for the abrupt conclusions of the other late novels. But if the community itself is in any way healed, we don’t learn about it. In its different way, this novel is as irresolute as its predecessors.

Sayers did not seem to think that she owed it to the society imagined her her books to provide the kind of restoration of moral order that Auden felt necessary. As her career as a novelist went on, she was less and less concerned to provide comfort and reassurance, and more and more eager to see the incursion of crime into a community as a kind of apocalypse, that is, an unveiling or revelation of the conflicts — social, psychological, moral, spiritual — that we generally do a good job of not seeing. Auden did not think that this was the kind of thing the true detective novel does well, or should even attempt to do, which is probably why he did not like her books. Your mileage, however, may vary. Mine certainly does.

April 4, 2025

handwritten moods

One of things I most enjoy about doing archival research on writers is the discovery of their handwriting. C. S. Lewis wrote beautifully when he wanted to, though sometimes he was rushed and that affected legibility. But the Wade Center has Lewis’s copy of George Herbert’s collected poems, and in the back pages he has very carefully prepared a thematic index to the poems. It’s lovely to look at; perhaps Lewis felt that Herbert deserved his best. (And if you want to see how Lewis’s handwriting changed over the years, see this PDF.)

Auden’s hand is at best difficult to read, at worst — in his poetic notebooks — absolutely illegible. Edward Mendelson, who knows that hand better than anyone alive, has told me that he thinks Auden sometimes wasn’t trying to be legible, even to himself: he was merely using the action of writing to clarify certain choices of word and phrase and rhythm.

I’ve looked through hundreds of letters written by Dorothy L. Sayers, and it’s been fascinating to note the ways her handwriting develops. When she was an adolescent schoolgirl at the Godolphin School in Salisbury, she had a somewhat cramped and upright way of writing; almost as soon as she got to Somerville College, Oxford that changed: she adopted a looser, more freely flowing style, one with a certain horizontal energy.

Most of the surviving letters are to her parents, and she’s often apologizing for delay in answering their letters to her, and emphasizing her busyness. (She almost always addresses them collectively as “Dearest people,” and calls her mother simply “Mother”; her father, however, that dignified parish pastor in the Church of England, is to his only child “Tootles.” It’s interesting that when she writes only to her mother she is almost always more sober and serious than when she writes to the two of them, or to Tootles alone. I find it difficult to avoid the feeling that she is very much Papa’s girl.)

Perhaps the rush of her life helps to explain the look of her letters to them, but one thing seems quite clear to me: the loose, flowing hand is associated not just with hurry but also with happiness. Vera Brittain, who knew her at Somerville, referred to her as a “bouncing exuberant female,” and that comes across in her handwriting when she’s happy. When she is going through harder times, through romantic disappointments or vocational uncertainties or just plain poverty, her handwriting is neater, more uniform, more under control. I wouldn’t be surprised if her parents could tell her frame of mind just from looking at a page of one of her letters, before they had read even a word of it.

Sometimes she signs off simply with a huge sweeping “D.”

As she gets older her handwriting becomes much more consistent, no longer vacillating according to her mood. It is more like the “unhappy” hand of her youth than the “happy” hand, but I don’t think she was less happy as she aged. She just became slightly less exuberant, slightly more settled. Or that’s how I read it anyway.

These are my interpretations, not the facts. They are based on more than feelings, though: one of those unhappy letters is signed “Yours in disgust, Dorothy” — and then, written below the signature, “What a cross letter!”

And I can’t help thinking … Almost all of my correspondence — sent and received — has been typed. It is therefore informationally poor, lacking in richness and density, in comparison to the correspondence of the writers I work on. (Though it should be said that letters typed on a typewriter have more character than those printed from a modern printer or having a digital existence only.) I suspect that if I had big folders of letters from friends I’d look through them fairly often; searching Gmail does not promise the same reward.

March 26, 2025

a correspondence

Here at the Wade Center, I’ve been working through some of Dorothy L. Sayers’s correspondence, for which “voluminous” is not adequate as a description. “Torrential” maybe.

In midlife one of her closest friends was Helen Simpson, who, had she not died in 1940 at age 42, probably of cancer, would surely have remained a major figure in Sayers’s life. There’s an interesting period in the mid-Thirties when Sayers sends to Simpson some letters she has been receiving from a gentleman in Rapallo, Italy — she’s not sure quite how to respond to them.

The gentleman was Ezra Pound.

Ezra Pound’s letterhead when he lived in Rapallo

Pound had just read one of Sayers’s detective novels and had concluded that “you are manifestly NOT a complete idiot” (high praise indeed!) and now thinks that she should turn her talents to More Important Things. So he addresses her with exquisite politeness: “Dear Miss Sayers or Lady Peter W. or whoever you now are” — and goes on to suggest that she should think less of murder and more of mass murder, the mass murder inflicted on us by our economic system, and especially the practice of USURY (as he usually capitalizes it in his Cantos). “MONEY … is the root of so much Krrrrime.” And if any one individual is going to be murdered, he thinks it should be the British Prime Minister. (“OR how to kill off all the god Damn Nevils Chamberlains.”) He signs off — he’s writing on 27 December 1934 — “With the seezunz greetinz.”

Sayers politely demurs at his suggestion: “Poor Neville Chamberlain!! Indeed I will not have him murdered. If carefully cherished, he may some day take another sixpence off my income-tax.”

Pound will not be deterred. Sayers writes to Helen Simpson, “A mild and brief reply addressed to Mr. Ezra Pound has now elicited a tremendous epistle. Three sheets long & full of Quaint Devices, & accompanied by a (very badly) printed questionnaire about Volitionist Economics, whatever they are.”

He reads a second Lord Peter novel: “I hav bin readin anuther ov ’em and it WONT DO.” Also: “We are under a secret and damngerous REAL gov’t.” And: “Nobody understands ANY history, without econ/ there is a lot in my cantos/(condensed ).” When Sayers apparently — only one of her letters to him seems to have survived — declines to accept his view of things, he replies, “Thet m’eh de’h ge’l ( as yr/ grandfather wd/ ? have pronounced it ) is because you have not read my estimable writings.” He is unfamiliar with the place in Essex where she lives (“Where is Witham.?”) and hints at a possible meeting: “I spose you get to London nown again?”

I think we may assume that Sayers did not acknowledge this hint. Rather, she says, “I will reserve my wrath for those who commit mayhem upon English spelling and syntax — a subject on which I feel strongly. Would you like something lingering, with boiling oil in it?”

A fascinating and strange non-meeting of the minds! I was at a loss to account for it until I did a quick Google search for “correspondence of Ezra Pound and Dorothy Sayers,” and got:

Mystery solved! And wow, do I need to revise my account of her adolescence.

March 20, 2025

spirits of discouragement

N.B.: Spoilers for Gaudy Night ahead.

As legal obstacles to women’s full participation in British society were gradually removed in the latter third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth — starting with the Married Women’s Property Act in 1870 (with subsequent revisions) and culminating in the Representation of the People Act in 1918 (with subsequent revisions) — certain forms of resistance remained, and primarily took the form of interruptions and discouragements.

So in the opening pages of A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf is thinking about her upcoming lectures on “women and fiction” while walking across the lawn of an ancient Cambridge college; her thinking is promising; she is drawing in a little fish of an idea; but then:

However small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind—put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help, he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding.

One may consider the Beadle as a kind of personification of Resistance to women’s full freedom to participate in society as they wish.

Another such personification is Charles Tansley in To the Lighthouse, whose insistance that “Women can’t write, women can’t paint” is often in the mind of Lily Briscoe when she picks up her paintbrush. And in Woolf’s essay “Professions for Women” we get a voice from the other side of the division between the sexes, the Angel in the House — via Coventry Patmore — who is always telling Woolf to subordinate her own interests and energies to the service of the men in her life:

I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it — in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all — I need not say it — she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty — her blushes, her great grace. In those days — the last of Queen Victoria — every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: ‘My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.’ And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money — shall we say five hundred pounds a year? — so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must — to put it bluntly — tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

These varying personifications of dark forces, these imps of interruption and discouragement, seem less like human beings than … well, than like demons, that is, concentrations of malign power into individual form. The Beadle, for instance, is not a simple human being but rather an apparition: “a man’s figure rose to intercept me” — like a zombie rising from an open grave. It is Charles Tansley’s disembodied voice that whispers to Lily as she paints. The Angel in the House is a “phantom.” These personifications of resistance are not just bad but also eerie, spooky, uncanny.

Which brings us to Sayers’s Gaudy Night. Harriet Vane returns to her alma mater, Shrewsbury College, Oxford — an alternate-universe version of Sayers’ own college, Somerville — for a Gaudy, during which she reconnects with some old friends and former teachers. But something goes wrong.

Someone is pursuing an unpleasant campaign of insult, mockery, and threat — the threats being implicit at first, but later increasingly explicit. The overall message is this: Shrewsbury College is comprised of a bunch of dessicated old maids who hate men and (perhaps more to the point) are usurping the social place of men. Only the women who are married or engaged are spared the vitriol of the campaign, which escalates into vandalism and, eventually, attempted murder.

It is only at the novel’s end, of course, that we discover who’s behind the campaign of hate, and even though I noted above that there would be spoilers here, I am reluctant to say more. (Just go read the book, for heaven’s sake! It’s quite fascinating.) In any case, the point I want to emphasize here is that the women of the College come to call the perpetrator the Poltergeist. They don’t mean it literally, they know that it’s all being done by a person, but it’s noteworthy that they fall back on the language of supernatural agency — as though this is one more in a series of Interrupters and Discouragers who personify misogynistic forces. (“Poltergeist” is also a less threatening word than “Demon,” but that’s fitting in that it takes a very long time for the depth of the Poltergeist’s malice to be revealed.) In each case the enmity feels not like something human but rather something precipitated from the ambient hostility to women’s equality.

And I think that’s true in an especially uncanny way in Gaudy Night because the person responsible seems to know some odd things. For instance, the Poltergeist tears some pages out of a novel — this novel — and once we know the identity of the culprit … well, a knowledge of those pages in that book seems highly unlikely in this person. It’s as though the Poltergeist is absorbing and then emitting information from that ambient hostility. It’s a kind of ideological respiration perhaps.

It strikes me that this is a pretty accurate way of describing how feelings, especially hatreds, circulate in society. It was to try to describe that phenomenon that I wrote this essay.

March 13, 2025

green tea and mescaline

Here’s yet another post stemming from my reading for my biography-in-progress of Dorothy L. Sayers.

Harriet Vane is not a version of Sayers, though they do have some things in common. Both of them are writers of detective fiction with an interest in certain Victorian novelists who blended what now might be called genre fiction – tales of detection, ghost stories, other supernatural stories – with at least some of the concerns of the social novel. You see this in Dickens, of course, especially in Bleak House, where there are mysteries of identity, shocking revelations, one of the first fictional detectives, and death by spontaneous combustion; but when people talk about this kind of story, often called the sensation novel, the name most closely associated with it is Wilkie Collins, while another is Sheridan Le Fanu. Sayers wrote several chapters of a biography of Wilkie Collins — eventually abandoning it largely because Collins didn’t lead a very interesting life — while Harriet Vane, when she visits Oxford in Gaudy Night, officially does so in order to work on a book about Le Fanu.

I know Collins’s major novels, but I hadn’t until recently read much Le Fanu, and right now I’m immersed in his ghost stories or “weird tales.” (Le Fanu is often associated with the rise of “weird” fiction, as later dominated by H. P. Lovecraft, largely because two collections of his stories published after his death were titled The Watcher and Other Weird Stories [1895], and A Stable for Nightmares; or, Weird Tales [1896].)

A collection of Le Fanu’s stories called In a Glass Darkly links them to one another by presenting them as items from the collected papers of Dr. Martin Hesselius, a German physician who is interested in the convergence of certain forms of physical illness and encounters with the supernatural.  He calls his speciality “metaphysical medicine.”

I may remark, that when I here speak of medical science, I do so, as I hope some day to see it more generally understood, in a much more comprehensive sense than its generally material treatment would warrant. I believe the entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of that spiritual world from which, and in which alone, it has its life. I believe that the essential man is a spirit, that the spirit is an organised substance, but as different in point of material from what we ordinarily understand by matter, as light or electricity is; that the material body is, in the most literal sense, a vesture, and death consequently no interruption of the living man’s existence, but simply his extrication from the natural body — a process which commences at the moment of what we term death, and the completion of which, at furthest a few days later, is the resurrection “in power.”

I’m not sure what he means by “resurrection ‘in power’” (though I think I know what the apostle Paul means when he uses the phrase), but the key point I want to emphasize now is this: When people experience terrifying supernatural visitations, Dr. Hesselius often traces those visitations to what the sufferers eat and drink — for instance, the story “Green Tea” concerns a man whose nightmarish experiences began when he drank too much green tea. But Dr. Hesselius thinks that these experiences, while triggered by the consumption of certain substances, are actual encounters with the supernatural. He does not explain every occult experience thus — some happen because spirits of the dead are seeking vengeance upon those who injured or killed them — but he seems always to look first to see if there is a material catalyst for the person’s affliction. Should this be the case, then he pursues a course of treatment that, by eliminating the catalyst and therapeutically addressing its effects, gradually shrinks and eventually closes the window into the demonic realm. But Dr. Hesselius never doubts that the demonic realm is real.

So you get a story introduced by our unnamed editor thus:

The curious case which I am about to place before you, is referred to, very pointedly, and more than once, in the extraordinary essay upon the drugs of the Dark and the Middle Ages, from the pen of Doctor Hesselius.

This essay he entitles “Mortis Imago,” and he, therein, discusses the Vinum letiferum, the Beatifica, the Somnus Angelorum, the Hypnus Sagarum, the Aqua Thessalliæ, and about twenty other infusions and distillations, well known to the sages of eight hundred years ago, and two of which are still, he alleges, known to the fraternity of thieves, and, among them, as police-office inquiries sometimes disclose to this day, in practical use.

When I read all this I found myself remembering Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and its appendix, Heaven and Hell. Huxley records at great length his glorious experiences under the influence of LSD and mescaline, during which he feels that he has a direct encounter with Ultimate Reality, with the Ground of Being. This encounter poses some problems for him — for instance, ethical problems:

Now I knew contemplation at its height. At its height, but not yet in its fullness. For in its fullness the way of Mary includes the way of Martha and raises it, so to speak, to its own higher power. Mescalin opens up the way of Mary, but shuts the door on that of Martha. It gives access to contemplation — but to a contemplation that is incompatible with action and even with the will to action, the very thought of action.

But despite such reservations he never questions that what he experiences is (a) real, (b) ultimate, and (c) wonderful.

That said, he cannot help knowing that some people have bad trips — nightmarish trips, trips in which they feel that they have been exposed to something demonic, just like those characters in Le Fanu’s stories. In such matters I’m of Dr. Hesselius’s mind: as I wrote some years ago, “the porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic.” But Huxley is deeply reluctant to take that path, and so … well, basically he blames the victims:

Most takers of mescalin experience only the heavenly part of schizophrenia. The drug brings hell and purgatory only to those who have had a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer from periodical depressions or a chronic anxiety. If, like the other drugs of remotely comparable power, mescalin were notoriously toxic, the taking of it would be enough, of itself, to cause anxiety. But the reasonably healthy person knows in advance that, so far as he is concerned, mescalin is completely innocuous, that its effects will pass off after eight or ten hours, leaving no hangover and consequently no craving for a renewal of the dose. Fortified by this knowledge, he embarks upon the experiment without fear — in other words, without any disposition to convert an unprecedentedly strange and other than human experience into something appalling, something actually diabolical.

Huxley’s advice to those who would encounter the Ground of Being resembles Aragorn’s advice to those who would enter Lothlorien: that land is “perilous indeed, fair and perilous; but only evil need fear it, or those who bring some evil with them.” If you experience terror when contemplating the Ultimate Reality, that can only be the manifestation on a cosmic canvas of your own internal demons.

Still, having said that, Huxley continues to worry about bad trips, and returns to the subject in Heaven and Hell, in the last paragraph of which he writes,

There is a posthumous state of the kind described in Sir Oliver Lodge’s book Raymond; but there is also a heaven of blissful visionary experience; there is also a hell of the same kind of appalling visionary experience as is suffered here by schizophrenics and some of those who take mescalin; and there is also an experience, beyond time, of union with the divine Ground.

The book he refers to is an account by Lodge of how he and his wife visited a medium and made contact, they believed, with their son, who had been killed in the Great War. Having read the book, I see that it describes several different kinds of “posthumous state,” so I have no idea what Huxley is talking about. Perhaps — this is only a guess — he’s referring to the matter-of-fact ordinariness of Raymond’s reports from the Other Side. Huxley’s point seems to be that it takes all kinds to make an afterlife.

But I noticed in Raymond something that intrigues me, something that reminds me very much of Huxley’s own views on what Lewis’s Screwtape calls the Miserific Vision. Late in the book Lodge summarizes what several spiritualist writers have said about the world to which the dead go, and one of them, whom he quotes at length, says this:

“Cease to be anxious about the minute questions which are of minor moment. Dwell much on the great, the overwhelming necessity for a clearer revealing of the Supreme; on the blank and cheerless ignorance of God and of us which has crept over the world: on the noble creed we teach, on the bright future we reveal. Cease to be perplexed by thoughts of an imagined Devil. For the honest, pure, and truthful soul there is no Devil nor Prince of Evil such as theology has feigned…. The clouds of sorrow and anguish of soul may gather round [such a man] and his spirit may be saddened with the burden of sin — weighed down with consciousness of surrounding misery and guilt, but no fabled Devil can gain dominion over him, or prevail to drag down his soul to hell. All the sadness of spirit, the acquaintance with grief, the intermingling with guilt, is part of the experience, in virtue of which his soul shall rise hereafter. The guardians are training and fitting it by those means to progress, and jealously protect it from the dominion of the foe.”

Isn’t it pretty to think so?

P.S. Adam Roberts writes to remind me that in A Christmas Carol Scrooge first attributes his vision to food he has eaten:

“Why do you doubt your senses?”

“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

But this of course is the reverse of Dr. Hesselius’s view, which is that food and drink can open what Blake (and then Huxley) called “the doors of perception” to a dimension of spiritual reality that is always really there but usually hidden from us.

There’s a good deal in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy about how food and drink can cause melancholy, while dreams and visions are symptoms of melancholy. Much more to explore here.

February 25, 2025

the author’s views and ours

There’s a very uncomfortable moment in Sayers’s novel Unnatural Death (1927), in a chapter in which Lord Peter receives a field report from his able investigator Miss Climpson. In what follows I’ll add the usual blanks to one word, though Sayers of course does not.

One Miss Timmins, a cook for a local lady, at a tea party that Miss Climpson attends: “You recollect, Mrs. Budge, that I felt obliged to leave after the appearance of that most EXTRAORDINARY person who announced himself as Miss Dawson’s cousin.” Miss Climpson picks up the narration in her usual style:

Naturally, I asked who this might be, not having heard of any other relations! She said that this person, whom she described as a nasty, dirty N*****R(!!!) arrived one morning, dressed up as a CLERGYMAN!!! — and sent her — Miss Timmins — to announce him to Miss Dawson as her COUSIN HALLELUJAH!!! Miss Timmins showed him up, much against her will, she said, into the nice, CLEAN, drawing-room! Miss Dawson, she said, actually came down to see this ‘creature’ instead of sending him about his ‘black business’(!), and as a crowning scandal, asked him to stay to lunch! — ‘with her niece there, too,’ Miss Timmins said, ‘and this horrible blackamoor ROLLING his dreadful eyes at her.’ Miss Timmins said that it ‘regularly turned her stomach’ — that was her phrase, and I trust you will excuse it — I understand that these parts of the body are frequently referred to in polite(!) society nowadays. In fact, it appears she refused to cook the lunch for the poor black man — (after all, even blacks are God’s creatures and we might all be black OURSELVES if He had not in His infinite kindness seen fit to favour us with white skins!!) — and walked straight out of the house!!! So that unfortunately she cannot tell us anything further about this remarkable incident! She is certain, however, that the ’n*****r’ had a visiting-card, with the name ‘Rev. H. Dawson’ upon it, and an address in foreign parts. It does seem strange, does it not, but I believe many of these native preachers are called to do spendid work among their own people, and no doubt a MINISTER is entitled to have a visiting-card, even when black!!!

This passage is sometimes pointed to as evidence that Sayers herself shared and even celebrated its racism. This seems to be profoundly unlikely, given that

(a) the statement is made by an obviously unpleasant character,

(b) whose language and attitudes are explicitly reprobated by Miss Climpson, a character we are strongly encouraged to like and respect,

(c) and then plainly mocked by the hero of all the novels, Lord Peter: “’N*****r,’ to a Miss Timmins, may mean anything from a high-caste Brahmin to Sambo and Rastus at the Coliseum [minstrel-show characters] — it may even, at a pinch, be an Argentine or an Esquimaux.” That is, anyone who isn’t northern European.

And when we meet the Rev. H. Dawson we discover that he is a mixed-race man with dark skin — but not so dark that one cannot see him blush — who is also clean, articulate, gentle, polite, and very poor. It is rather difficult to account for this portrayal if we assume that Sayers shared Miss Timmins’s view of things.

But of course matters are not always that straightforward. Miss Climpson may be a positive character, but she is also an old-fashioned lady clearly presented as a relic of an earlier age. It seems to me obvious that Sayers is gently satirizing Miss C’s enthusiastic gratitude that God “in his infinite kindness” has made her white — shades of Flannery O’Connor’s Mrs. Turpin — and the bemusement with which she acknowledges that God can make use of Black ministers, “among their own people” of course.

Miss Climpson is, I think, a useful character for exploring such matters. When she cheers on the independent female “PIONEER” of an earlier generation — in a letter discussed in my previous post — we smile and nod, confident that she’s on the side of both Sayers and the angels. But she says other things about women that today’s readers will question. Of the letter I began this post by quoting, Eric Sandberg — author of an outstandingly useful companion to Sayers’s fiction — says, in a passage responding to critics who think that Sayers’s views are indistinguishable from those of Miss Timmins,

Miss Climpson’s own view, that “we might all be black OURSELVES if He [God] had not in His infinite kindness seen fit to favour us with white skins!!” is rather astoundingly backward — and very much in line with her dated views on sexuality — so much so that it should probably be read as a satirical attack on racist thinking rather than an example of it.

To this I would say that if by “backward” Sandberg means “wrong,” then yes, though I don’t see anything “astounding” about it. But what does he mean by “her dated views on sexuality”? Here’s another passage from Unnatural Death that might shed light on the subject, one in which Miss Climpson is thinking about a young woman named Miss Findlater who has grown attached to a somewhat older woman named Mary Whittaker:

As a matter of fact, Miss Climpson had become genuinely interested in the girl. Silly affectation and gush, and a parrot-repetition of the shibboleths of the modern school were symptoms that the experienced spinster well understood. They indicated, she thought, a real unhappiness, a real dissatisfaction with the narrowness of life in a country town. And besides this, Miss Climpson felt sure that Vera Findlater was being “preyed upon,” as she expressed it to herself, by the handsome Mary Whittaker. “It would be a mercy for the girl,” thought Miss Climpson, “if she could form a genuine attachment to a young man. It is natural for a schoolgirl to be schwärmerisch [enthusiastic] — in a young woman of twenty-two it is thoroughly undesirable. That Whittaker woman encourages it — she would, of course. She likes to have someone to admire her and run her errands. And she prefers it to be a stupid person, who will not compete with her. If Mary Whittaker were to marry, she would marry a rabbit.”

Simply within the context of the novel this is a complicated passage. Let us count the ways:

The woman that Miss Climpson earlier celebrated as a “PIONEER” — a woman who refused to marry and set herself up as a trainer of and dealer in horses — had formed just this kind of relationship with another woman, though she was a dominant rather than a deferential partner.
That woman, Clara Whittaker, was the great-aunt of Mary Whittaker, whose selfishness Miss C deplores.
Yet the good country people of the area who knew Clara Whittaker seem to have admired her unreservedly, and had no sense that her relationship with her friend was unhealthy or even especially remarkable.
It is never said that that relationship, or the relationship between Mary Whittaker and Vera Findlater, is sexual. The distinction between homosexual and homosocial relationships is too often elided; moreover, there are multiple forms of homosociality: for instance, it’s not uncommon to meet women who are sexually attracted to men but prefer the long-term companionship of a woman.
Presumably Miss Climpson and the good country people think that lesbianism is sinful and, well, unnatural.
Miss Climpson’s disapproval of the Whittaker/Findlater relationship may not be of universal application; that is, she may not reprobate all strong, exclusive homosocial bonds, but ony those in which the power differential is as pronounced as in this case, or (even more specifically) in which the dominant partner is a morally suspect person.
That said, Miss C more than once in the novels laments her “woman-ridden life,” and does clearly believe that the ideal permanent relationship is between a man and a woman.

As I say: complicated. Just sorting what Miss Climpson thinks and why she thinks it is difficult, but that difficulty is multiplied greatly if we try to factor in what Sayers thinks about such matters. Even if we agree that Miss Climpson holds “dated views on sexuality,” there is no obvious reason to think that Sayers’s views are substantially different than Miss C’s. After all, the world of the Modern Woman, the Bright Young Things, the Brideshead Generation, is subjected to relentless satire throughout the Wimsey novels. Moreover, Sayers herself was prone in her adolescence to the romantic “pash” for older women — especially one of her teachers at the Godolphin School — but seems to have grown out of that by the time she got to Oxford. And then there’s something noteworthy in the parenthetical continuation of the paragraph I was just quoting:

(Miss Climpson’s active mind quickly conjured up a picture of the rabbit — fair-haired and a little paunchy, with a habit of saying, “I’ll ask the wife.” Miss Climpson wondered why Providence saw fit to create such men. For Miss Climpson, men were intended to be masterful, even though wicked or foolish. She was a spinster made and not born — a perfectly womanly woman.)

All of this up to the final sentence is done within Miss Climpson’s voice-zone (as Bakhtin calls it) — but then comes what looks to me like Sayers’s own commentary. But maybe I’m wrong about that; maybe we’re continuing to see Miss C as Miss C sees herself. The whole business of moving in and out of a character’s voice-zone is very complex and requires great skill to manage: the greatest master of it is Dostoevsky, and Bakhtin coined the term “voice-zone” simply to account for this strange thing that Dostoevsky habitually does. (Note to other literary critics: the employment of the voice-zone is related to but distinct from the employment of “free indirect discourse.” Novelists can use the latter without using the former.)

But if this is direct commentary by Sayers … how does the final sentence relate to the one before it? Saying that Miss C is “a spinster made and not born” is simply to say that she is attracted to men and would have been glad to marry if the right opportunity had arisen, but to claim that on this account she is “a perfectly womanly woman” seems a token of approbation. If so, does this mean that Sayers also shares the belief that “men were intended to be masterful”?

I could spend a lot more time exploring that question, but having gone a good ways down this trail I want to stop and ask: Why are we here? Why do these questions matter?

The situation I’ve outlined here is of a kind that makes a great many people nervous these days — these days in which ideological hyperpartisanship demands that we know what people’s politics (including their sexual politics) are before we know whether we are allowed to like or sympathize with them. Thus Richard Brody’s inability to deal with Perfect Days: the movie never tells us what the movie’s protagonist thinks about politics, or indeed, if he thinks about it at all. How, then, do we know whether we need to denounce him? People today seem to prefer their movies and fiction to come with moral warning labels, like the danger alerts on packs of cigarettes.

But here’s the key thing: Often it’s impossible to be sure how Sayers might evaluate the statements of her characters. Maybe she agrees with a given statement; maybe she disagrees; maybe she’s not certain what she believes; and maybe – this is the possibility almost no one considers – she isn’t thinking about her own beliefs at all, because her purpose in writing is to convey what that particular character would say or believe, not to present her own views. As noted, this could be true even of the “womanly woman” statement.

It never seems to occur to many people that fiction is an unideal vehicle for the direct propositional expression of personal convictions on specific points of public controversy – unless, as in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Jungle, the work of fiction is explicitly written to address some matter of public controversy. (I would argue that fiction is rarely the ideal vehicle, but those two novels, among few others, make it work.) When a novel has no such plain purpose, then the attempt to discover through hermeneutical calibration the precise distance between a character’s views and those of the author strikes me as a pointless endeavor, and one utterly irreconcilable with the activity we call reading.

Does Sayers agree with Miss Climpson’s views on sexuality, or on race? Does she agree 91% or 73% or 27%? These I think are bad questions, and it would be good for us to break our habit of asking them. They assume that a discernible relationship between author-belief and character-belief exists, that it’s stable, and that we can measure it. Also that it matters. I would deny, or at least seriously question, all of these assumptions.

On such points of public controversy, I think we would do better to reflect on what we believe and why we believe it — which, after all, are not such simple projects. Readers of fiction have better (and more enjoyable) things to do that to spend all their time squinting at their moral calipers.

February 17, 2025

Miss Climpson

One of the more interesting secondary characters in the Wimsey novels of Dorothy L. Sayers is Miss Climpson — more fully, Alexandra Katherine Climpson, as she is called when we first meet her in Unnatural Death (1927). By Strong Poison (1930) she is known as Katharine Climpson (note the altered spelling as well as the absence of Alexandra). The change is a mystery I cannot solve, but Sayers — who wrote a whole essay explaining why Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories is usually called John but sometimes James — would probably like to see me try.

Back to Unnatural Death: we meet Miss Climpson when Lord Peter brings his policeman friend Charles Parker to her apartment, slyly encouraging Charles to think that he’s paying a visit to a kept woman of his:

The door was opened by a thin, middle-aged woman, with a sharp, sallow face and very vivacious manner. She wore a neat, dark coat and skirt, a high-necked blouse and a long gold neck-chain with a variety of small ornaments dangling from it at intervals, and her iron-grey hair was dressed under a net, in the style fashionable in the reign of the late King Edward.

Let’s pause for a moment to organize time. The novel’s setting is contemporary: we can be certain of this because it ends with a glimpse of the total solar eclipse of 29 June 1927. We know from other books in the series that Lord Peter was born in 1890, so that makes him 37. The “reign of the late King Edward” was 1901–1910. People who stop updating their style of dress usually do so (in my experience) when they’re around thirty, so while the adjective “middle-aged” is a vague one, I think with this hint about clothing and the presence of the “iron-grey hair” we can safely place Miss Climpson in her mid-fifties. (No younger, I think: in Strong Poison she’s referred to as “elderly.”)

Let us also add — this information will soon be useful — that when this novel was published Sayers herself was 34, and Harriet Vane — her most important female character, whom we will not meet for a while — is 24, and fairly recently graduated from Oxford University.

Now, back to Miss Climpson. After Lord Peter enjoys his joke on Inspector Parker and they depart, Parker wants a proper explanation and gets one:

“Miss Climpson,” said Lord Peter, “is a manifestation of the wasteful way in which this country is run. Look at electricity. Look at water-power. Look at the tides. Look at the sun. Millions of power units being given off into space every minute. Thousands of old maids, simply bursting with useful energy, forced by our stupid social system into hydros and hotels and communities and hostels and posts as companions, where their magnificent gossip-powers and units of inquisitiveness are allowed to dissipate themselves or even become harmful to the community, while the ratepayers’ money is spent on getting work for which these women are providentially fitted, inefficiently carried out by ill-equipped policemen like you….

“She is my ears and tongue,” said Lord Peter, dramatically, “and especially my nose. She asks questions which a young man could not put without a blush. She is the angel that rushes in where fools get a clump on the head. She can smell a rat in the dark. In fact, she is the cat’s whiskers…. People want questions asked. Whom do they send? A man with large flat feet and a note-book — the sort of man whose private life is conducted in a series of inarticulate grunts. I send a lady with a long, woolly jumper on knitting-needles and jingly things round her neck. Of course she asks questions — everyone expects it. Nobody is surprised. Nobody is alarmed.

Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple — many readers will already have her in mind — makes much the same point in A Murder Is Announced (1951):

“We old women always do snoop. It would be very odd and much more noticeable if I didn’t. Questions about mutual friends in different parts of the world and whether they remember so and so, and do they remember who it was that Lady Somebody’s daughter married? All that helps, doesn’t it?”

“Helps?” said the Inspector, rather stupidly.

“Helps to find out if people are who they say they are,” said Miss Marple.

People have often assumed that Miss Climpson is a Marple knock-off, but she isn’t: Unnatural Death appeared in October 1927, and Miss Marple first appeared in December of that year, in a story called “The Tuesday Night Club.” The first Marple novel is The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. Neither writer copied the other, I am sure. But I don’t think that the appearance of the two characters at the same time is an accident. The emergence of the Modern Girl in the 1920s (successor to the New Woman) must have set people of Christie’s and Sayers’ generation — Christie was three years older than Sayers — thinking about how dramatically the potential roles for women had changed in their lifetime. They were too old to be Modern Girls, though they had been in some sense New Women, and as such had had opportunities that were unthinkable for women of the generation before them — except in the rare cases of heroic trailblazers like Jane Harrison and Mildred Pope, who simply created opportunities that had previously been nonexistent and thereby changed the world for the generations of women to come after them.

Moreover, the horrific death-toll of the Great War left several European societies with more marriageable women than men to marry them — thus creating the phenomenon of the “Superfluous Woman,” about whom Vera Brittain — someone I think of as a kind of double or mirror image of Sayers — wrote a moving poem. (Brittain did end up marrying and having children, one of whom was Shirley Williams, a co-founder of the Social Democratic Party.)

You get the sense that Miss Climpson — who is, generally speaking, of Mildred Pope’s generation — did not have that scholar’s great gifts, including the gift of an almost supernatural determination. Writing about a woman who had been born in the 1850s, around the time of Jane Harrison, Miss Climpson is full of admiration. (I pause here to note that Miss Climpson’s writing style is modeled on that of Queen Victoria, with so many underlinings and other instruments of emphasis that, as Lord Peter says, it looks like musical notation.)

It seems that, until five years ago, Miss Dawson lived in Warwickshire with her cousin, a Miss Clara Whittaker, Mary Whittaker’s great-aunt on the father’s side. This Miss Clara was evidently rather a ’character,’ as my dear father used to call it. In her day she was considered very ‘advanced’ and not quite nice(!) because she refused several good offers, cut her hair SHORT(!!) and set up in business for herself as a HORSE-BREEDER!!! Of course, nowadays, nobody would think anything of it, but then the old lady — or young lady as she was when she embarked on this revolutionary proceeding, was quite a PIONEER.

Miss Clara refuses to marry and instead lives with her closest friend, perhaps because she is a lesbian — “Lesbianism in Sayers” is a topic for another post — but it’s equally possible, I think, that her romantic feelings simply are not as strong as her desire for independence. When Miss Clara (born in 1850) was a young woman the first Married Women’s Property Act had been passed, but that would not have been enough to protect her from a husband who insisted on domination and control. And though Miss Climpson does not share this strong independent streak, and would herself have wanted to marry — Sayers says of her that she is “a spinster made and not born” — she nevertheless clearly admires the willpower and resourcefulness of Miss Clara.

It seems likely to me that Sayers in creating Miss Climpson and Christie in creating Miss Marple were, among many other things, thinking about what they might have been had they been born fifteen or twenty years earlier. Sayers in particular might not have been a “pioneer,” but was quick to claim the benefits that her academic pioneers had been able to secure for her. Perhaps, though, I shouldn’t say “secure”: because of the pioneers, Sayers was able to attend Somerville College, but Oxford was yet to grant degrees to Somervillians. She finished her studies in 1915 — with a First of course: she was quite a brilliant scholar, something too often forgotten — but could not receive her degree until five years later, when Oxford finally began recognizing the validity of its female students’ academic work. Harriet Vane, Sayers’s second-most-famous fictional creation, ten years younger than the author, would have finished at Shrewsbury College (a thinly fictionalized version of Somerville) around 1925 and taken her B.A. as a matter of course.

She would not, however, have been eligible to vote, nor would Sayers, though Miss Climpson and Mildred Pope would have had that right. Not until 1928 would all of them have had the franchise.

Had Sayers been the age of Miss Climpson, she almost certainly would not have attended university, would not have become a scholar and writer; had she been the age of Harriet Vane, she would have been faced with the opportunity to become a Modern Girl — something Harriet definitely isn’t, by the way. (Lord Peter’s um-friend Marjorie Phelps, whom we also see in multiple novels, is much closer to that type — which I think is why Lord Peter doesn’t marry her.) Decade by decade the status of women in British society was changing, and changing in multiple ways; the experience had to have been dizzying. We can see Sayers constantly reckoning with it in her fiction, and Christie too, though (I think) in less forthright and dramatic ways. Christie usually keeps the social commentary well in the background, except in her Mary Westmacott novels — Sayers firmly plants it front and center.

February 13, 2025

true crime

In a recent post, I offered one reason why the detective story exploded into prominence when it did. But there are others.

Let’s set the stage first. In their witty, sardonic, and often insightful history of the years between the wars, The Long Week-End, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge say that when the Great War ended “Sherlock Holmes stood alone,” that is, there were no other prominent detective series — an exaggeration, but a pardonable one. Sexton Blake stories were being cranked out at a fearsome rate; Austin Freeman was making a name for himself; and Chesterton’s Father Brown was loved by a significant subset of readers. (One could add the shockingly prolific Edgar Wallace to this list, but most of his novels were thrillers of one kind or another rather than tales of detection as such.) But no detective commanded the universal public attention like Holmes, and there was no sign of the Boom that was quickly to come.

A decade later, Graves and Hodge note, popular reading was utterly dominated by the detective story. The addictiveness of the genre was widely noted, never more wittily than in Wodehouse’s 1931 story “Strychnine in the Soup,” which introduces us to such famous novels as Gore By the Gallon, Blood on the Banisters, and Severed Throats. Not only did it seem that everyone was reading detective stories, everyone was writing them. Poets like C. Day-Lewis (writing as Nicholas Blake) and academics like J. I. M. Stewart (writing as Michael Innes) got in on the game, and T. S. Eliot regularly reviewed detective stories in the Criterion. When Graves started work on I, Claudius he reflected that the British public loved “reading about murders, so I was careful not to leave out any of the six or seven I could tell about.”

Things moved quickly: Agatha Christie had written The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1916, but it was not published until 1920, the date usually fixed for the beginning of the Boom. In the same year Freeman Wills Crofts published The Cask; then came A. A. Milne’s The Red House (1922), Dorothy L. Sayers’s Whose Body (written in 1921, published in 1923), and an ever-growing host of others.

How, and why, did this happen? In that recent post I described what I thought was one essential precondition, but the precondition was in place long before the boom occurred. It’s impossible to prove this point, but it seems to me likely that in the aftermath of the bloodiest war in human history, it was psychologically useful to make violent death ordinary again: to reduce its scope to the comprehensible. Killing could not be denied, but perhaps it could be to some extent controlled, or anyway retributed, through the workings of a generally honest and occasionally competent system of criminal investigation and punishment.

So we have in place a general social precondition for the rising popularity of the genre of detective fiction, and a widely shared psychological need that it fulfilled. But there was, I think, one more factor. If the British public liked reading about murders, as Graves said, that didn’t necessarily mean fictional murders. And I don’t think that the great Golden Age writers of detective fiction got their inspiration primarily from Conan Doyle or Chesterton, but rather from true crime stories they read about in the newspapers.

In her fine book The Invention of Murder, Judith Flanders writes about how modern police procedures arose in tandem with a series of highly-publicized Victorian murderers: Jack the Ripper of course, but also Dr. Pritchard, Henry Wainwright, and, early in the century but famous throughout it, Burke and Hare. It’s hard to overstate how compelling these criminals and their foul deeds continued to be well into the twentieth century: in Dorothy L. Sayers’s first novel, Whose Body? (1923), there’s a significant mention of the Adolf Beck case, and her third, Unnatural Death (1927), begins with Lord Peter Wimsey offering his opinion on why Pritchard got caught.

And of course these cases continued past the Victorian era: at the time that the Boom began, the most talked-about case for the previous decade had been that of Dr. Crippen. But a new one would come to dominate the news just as the Boom was really getting under way: the Thompson-Bywaters case of 1922 — the execution of Edith Thompson in January 1923 being perhaps the most controversial event in the history of British murders. And as the genre grew, the murders kept coming: in 1931 the murder of Julia Wallace, in 1934 the Brighton Trunk Murders. The Wallace killing alone has prompted dozens of fictional retellings and even more attempts at guessing the identity of the murderer, and there has never been a more brilliantly written true-crime story than Sayers’s essay on the many puzzles surrounding that murder — it should be much more widely read than it is, but it’s not easy to find.

Indeed, as Martin Edwards has pointed out, Sayers is the Golden Age writer most openly influenced by real-life murder cases — but then, she was always one to show her work, that is, to wear her influences proudly on her sleeve. Many other stories of detection, or crime novels more generally, are strongly based on real cases — one of the most famous, and effective, of these being Ernest Raymond’s revisiting of the Crippen case from the perspective of the murderer(s), We, the Accused (1935).

These famous crimes kept getting re-described by novelists quite closely, or more loosely, because people just couldn’t commit interesting and puzzling murders fast enough to sate the public’s appetite for tales of violence; and that, I think, is the single most important cause of the Boom in tales of detection.

N.B. Just after posting this I realized that I have already done a version of it. Duh. But I’m working through these issues now in more detail.

February 10, 2025

the integrity of the system

Dorothy L. Sayers, once she had established herself as a writer of detection, was asked to edit an anthology of, roughly, her kind of fiction. In the end she edited several such volumes, but the first, largest, and best of them was published in 1928 as Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. (The following year it was published in the U.S. with the much less accurate title The Omnibus of Crime.)

In her highly illuminating introduction to the anthology, Sayers argues that in one form or another tales of detection and tales of horror are quite ancient. The latter point might seem more obviously true, but Sayers makes a strong case that we see the essential lineaments of the tale of detection in, for example, the addition to the biblical book of Daniel in which the young prophet-to-be conducts a shrewd examination of the old men who have accused beautiful Susannah of illicit sex, revealing that their testimonies are inconsistent with each other and utterly false. (Daniel does what later became standard police procedure: he interviews the two likely conspirators separately, so neither can know what the other says.) Similarly, about Aesop’s fable in which the fox refuses to enter the lion’s cave to pay respects to the King of the Beasts because he sees many hoof-prints going into the cave but none coming back out, Sayers says: “Sherlock Holmes could not have reasoned more lucidly from the premises.”

People often use the terms “detective” story and “mystery” interchangeably, but Sayers prefers to distinguish the two; and the kind of story she calls a “mystery” is one that fuses horror and detection. This fusion, she claims, begins with Poe, most obviously in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” She finds especially appealing stories that begin in an atmosphere of supernatural horror but end with that horror dispelled by the light of reason: e.g. Conan Dolye’s “Adventure of the Specked Band” or Chesterton’s “The Hammer of God.” (N.B.: Full enjoyment of the latter story might be available only to those whose ignorance of the laws of physics equals that of GKC.) She herself wrote no novels that fit this description, though The Nine Tailors verges on it: we are left with a completely material, this-worldly solution to the key mystery, but the possibility remains that there were other forces at work. “Bells are like cats and mirrors,” Lord Peter says, “ — they’re always queer, and it doesn’t do to think too much about them.”

Concerning the tale of detection proper, Sayers muses on a curious fact: Why, if there are such ancient examples of such tales, did the genre not really take root and grow expansively until the second half of the nineteenth century? Drawing on the work of what she rightly calls “a brilliant little study” by a scholar rejoicing in the name of E. M. Wrong, she makes a fascinating suggestion: that while stories about crime always have flourished and always will flourish, stories of detection depend on the reader’s confidence in the basic integrity of the forces of law and order. That is, detective stories depend on the reader’s essential sympathy with the Law rather than the criminal — the reader must want the criminal to be caught.

This does not mean that the reader is expected to have any real confidence in the competence of the police — unless, of course, the protagonist is himself or herself a police officer, in which case we typically see an honest and skillful investigator thwarted or at least impeded by corruption or incompetence in the higher ranks. (This is a problem often faced by Maigret and Morse, and sometimes Dalgleish.) When the detective-protagonist is not a police officer, most famously in the case of Sherlock Holmes, we expect that the police will be none too intelligent and, whether they realize it or not, in desperate need of Holmes’s help. But we never for a moment imagine that Lestrade or Athelney Jones is corrupt. The police often make mistakes: they obsess over meaningless clues, overlook essential clues, misinterpret all the clues, grow irrationally stubborn, and arrest the wrong people (Harriet Vane, for instance, in Sayers’s Strong Poison) — but their mistakes are typically honest mistakes and we do not feel that, in Sayers’s words, “the law is arbitrary, oppressive, and brutally administered.” Otherwise we might prefer that a criminal, even a serious criminal, get away with it.

A basic trust in the integrity of the legal system arises, it seems to me, in Great Britain before it arises anywhere else. Again: integrity, not competence. I think George Orwell made a shrewd point when he wrote, in 1941, during the Blitz,

In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

There are many powerful critiques to be made of the British political and legal system, and at one time or another Orwell makes most of them, but his own scrupulous honesty prevents him from making the cheapest ones. (The process by which those cheapest critiques could eventually prove to be correct is, of course, the great theme of both Animal Farm and 1984.)

This point leads us back to Sayers, who writes: “The detective-story had to wait for its full development for the establishment of an effective police organisation in the Anglo-Saxon countries.” This is generally true, but American detective fiction does not always fit the bill: the melancholy mood that often dominates Raymond Chandler’s stories — Farewell, My Lovely is perhaps the best example — arises from Philip Marlowe’s determination to be an honest private investigator when the police are commonly, if not universally, corrupt. (And the ones who are honest have to turn a blind eye to their colleagues’ behavior if they want to keep their jobs. In Farewell, My Lovely we see two cops who go along to get along and one who confronts corruption and gets himself fired. Chandler probably thought that the actual proportion was closer to ten-to-one than two-to-one, but you can only introduce so many character in one novel.) This is a theme in Ross Macdonald’s novels as well, and we all know the sentence that best encapsulates the defeated acknowledgement of How Things Are: “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

So if the detective story depended on the readers’ confidence in the integrity of the System, what happens when that confidence evaporates? Obviously a return to crime fiction: from the uprightness of Poirot and Lord Peter and even Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, we move to the morally sloppy, thoroughly compromised, just barely more-slimed-than-sliming porotagonists of Elmore Leonard’s novels; or Danny Ocean and his crew. Perhaps that’s why the most popular detective stories are those of the Golden Age, which provide an opportunity for us to enter a more innocent time than ours, more innocent in multiple respects, one in which we’re not openly rooting for thieves and murderers.

December 20, 2024

the work itself

Robin Sloan recommends a post by Kyle Chayka on “the new rules of media.” But my immediate question, upon reading it, is: “Rules” for what or for whom? And the answer, when you think for a moment, is clear: Rules for people who want to cut a certain figure in the world, people who want to be independent media creators — people, in short, who want to be influencers. People who don’t really care what they’re influencing others to do or to be as long as they themselves are the ones doing the influencing, and (of course) getting paid for it.

Perhaps because I’ve been reading and thinking about Dorothy Sayers, for whom the nature and value of work is the essential obsession, I have come to be hyper-aware of the chasm that separates (a) those who desire a certain visible and acknowledged place in the world and (b) those whose desire is to do good work. There’s not one word in Chayka’s post on the quality of what you do; every word is, instead, about commanding an audience. It’s a post full of good advice (probably?) for people who simply and uncomplicatedly crave attention.

(Some of those people crave attention because attention leads to money, but I have a suspicion that more of them are interested in money only as a substantial token of attention. Almost everyone seeking a media career could make more dough in jobs that no one notices.)

Sayers originally expresses her convictions about the intrinsic value of good work in her detective novels, through the character of Harriet Vane. But the first writing of hers wholly devoted to this question is the play The Zeal of Thy House, which concerns an architect — a real one, William of Sens — who has to learn through great suffering that he does not matter as much as his work: the choir of Canterbury Cathedral.

2880px-Canterbury Cathedral Choir (40805457492).

(Ginormous version of that photo here.)

I would submit that it’s not even possible nowadays to think of a media career in terms of the work itself, the value of what one does. And maybe that’s what Robin Sloan is suggesting when, after citing Chayka, he continues:

Sometimes I think that, even amidst all these ruptures and renovations, the biggest divide in media exists simply between those who finish things, and those who don’t. The divide exists also, therefore, between the platforms and institutions that support the finishing of things, and those that don’t.

Finishing only means: the work remains after you relent, as you must, somehow, eventually. When you step off the treadmill. When you rest.

Finishing only means: the work is whole, comprehensible, enjoyable. Its invitation is persistent; permanent. (Again, think of the Green Knight, waiting on the shelf for four hundred years.) Posterity is not guaranteed; it’s not even likely; but with a completed book, a coherent album, a season of TV: at least you are TRYING.

Robin doesn’t present this as a refutation of Chayka, but it clearly represents an alternative point of view, one focused not on the public status of the maker but on the work itself. The maker recedes as the completed thing draws attention to itself. And then the completed thing makes its way into the world, and reshapes the world according to its virtue and power.

My favorite moment in The Zeal of Thy House comes in an Interlude between the first and second acts. It’s a kind of psalm, and it contains words worthy of remembrance:

Every carpenter and workmaster that laboureth night and day, and they that give themselves to counterfeit imagery, and watch to finish a work;

The smith also sitting by the anvil, and considering the iron work, he setteth his mind to finish his work, and watcheth to polish it perfectly.

So doth the potter sitting at his work, and turning the wheel about with his feet, who is always carefully set at his work, and maketh all his work by number.

All these trust to their hands, and every one is wise in his work.

Without these cannot a city be inhabited, and they shall not dwell where they will nor go up and down;

They shall not be sought for in public council, nor sit high in the congregation;

But they will maintain the state of the world, and all their desire is in the work of their craft.

August 24, 2024

a horrid region

A fabulous extended metaphor from Dorothy L. Sayers’s essay on how she learned Latin:

The mighty forest of syntax opened up its glades to exploration, adorned with its three monumental trees — the sturdy accusative and infinitive, the graceful ablative absolute, and the banyan-like and proliferating ut and the subjunctive. Beneath their roots lurked a horrid scrubby tangle of words beginning with u, q and n, and a nasty rabbit-warren of prepositions. There was also a horrid region, beset with pitfalls and mantraps, called Oratio Obliqua, into which one never entered without a shudder, and where, starting off from a simple accusative and infinitive, one tripped over sprawling dependent clauses and bogged one’s self down in the consecution of tenses, till one fell over a steep precipice into a Pluperfect Subjunctive, and was seen no more.

August 21, 2024

Mildred Pope

OU SMV 16-001.

That’s a portrait of Mildred Katherine Pope (1872-1956).

There are periods of history in which, for certain people, all the doors they would most want to pass through are closed, locked, and barred, and nothing can be done about that. Then there are periods when all those doors are wide open. But there are also the periods in between, when the doors are locked but can, just maybe, be unlocked; closed but capable of being opened by those who are bold and resourceful, patient and determined. Indeed, those specially gifted people are the ones who ensure that the doors will be open for those who come after them.

I’ve been reading about Mildred Pope — who was one such person, and to an exceptional degree — because she was Dorothy Sayers’s tutor at Oxford, and the model for the character of Miss Lydgate in Gaudy Night.

Miss Lydgate’s manner was exactly what it had always been. To the innocent and candid eyes of that great scholar, no moral problem seemed ever to present itself. Of a scrupulous personal integrity, she embraced the irregularities of other people in a wide, unquestioning charity. As any student of literature must, she knew all the sins of the world by name, but it was doubtful whether she recognized them when she met them in real life. It was as though a misdemeanor committed by a person she knew was disarmed and disinfected by the contact. So many young people had passed through her hands, and she had found so much good in all of them; it was impossible to think that they could be deliberately wicked, like Richard III or Iago. Unhappy, yes; misguided, yes; exposed to difficult and complicated temptations which Miss Lydgate herself had been mercifully spared, yes. If she heard of a theft, a divorce, even worse things, she would knit puzzled brows and think how utterly wretched the offenders must have been before they could do so dreadful a thing. Only once had Harriet ever heard her speak with unqualified disapproval of anyone she knew, and that was of a former pupil of her own who had written a popular book about Carlyle. “No research at all,” had been Miss Lydgate’s verdict, “and no effort at critical judgment. She has reproduced all the old gossip without troubling to verify anything. Slipshod, showy, and catchpenny. I am really ashamed of her.” And even then she had added: “But I believe, poor thing, she is very hard up.”

This is a wonderful tribute, but the back story, as it were, of Mildred Pope is a truly remarkable one. Her DNB entry is brief but eye-opening, and much of what I know comes from it.

She came up to Oxford to study at Somerville in 1891 and stayed for most of her life, first as a librarian, then as a tutor. But though her undergraduate experience had many high points — especially in her performances in field hockey and disputation: she was “renowned for her pace on the wing … and her level-headedness in debate” — her academic career was somewhat rockier, because there was not one scholar at Oxford who could instruct her in the subject she loved: Old French philology. Essentially, her education in the field which she would make her own was achieved through an extended exchange of letters with Paget Toynbee of Cambridge — whose intellectual roots were in Old French but who had become, by the time he knew Mildred Pope, England’s finest scholar of Dante.

Miss Pope (as her students later called her) seems to have been deterred by nothing, taking her First and then going on to study philology at Heidelberg before returning to Somerville. Later she was awarded some sabbatical time to pursue her doctorate at the University of Paris under the guidance of the legendary medievalist and philologist Gaston Paris. She received her doctorate in 1903, though Oxford did not see fit to award her a B.A. until 1920, when other female graduates were so acknowledged — she would receive hers alongside Sayers.

No matter. When she died the Times of London reported that the establishment and development of the teaching of medieval French at Oxford was almost wholly her doing. Further, “It would be fair to say that Pope effectively invented the discipline of Anglo-Norman studies.” Her recruitment of other dons to the cause of women’s suffrage in the 1910s was severely frowned upon by the university authorities; she was impervious to intimidation. Throughout the Great War she devoted her summers to intense and demanding relief work among refugees and displaced persons in France and Belgium. In 1928 she became the first woman to be appointed Reader at Oxford.

She was, a historian reported, “the most beloved of all Somerville’s tutors,” and when she left the College in 1934 — to accept a professorship at the University of Manchester — a Gaudy in her honor was held. Sayers was asked to offer a tribute, and she did, calling particular attention to Pope’s “integrity of judgement” and “humility in the face of facts.” Above all, Sayers said, Mildred Pope exemplified “the generosity of a great mind … that will not be contented with the second-hand or second-best.”

Here’s to the great Mildred Pope.

August 14, 2024

courting sickness

Tolkien, letter to his son Christopher, 31 May 1944:

I could not stand Gaudy Night. I followed P. Wimsey from his attractive beginnings so far, by which time I conceived a loathing for him (and his creatrix) not surpassed by any other character in literature known to me, unless by his Harriet. The honeymoon one (Busman’s H.?) was worse. I was sick.

The strange thing to me is that Tolkien, having by the time of reading Sayers’s Gaudy Night developed this unparalleled hatred and disgust not just for the book but also for its characters and author, then decided to read the next book in the series. This seems strangely self-punitive, does it not?

(I also find myself wondering when the sickness set in: the Tolkien says that he followed the adventures of Lord Peter “so far” as Gaudy Night, which is the tenth novel devoted to him. Should we assume that Lord Peter remained “attractive” to Tolkien through the first nine novels? He’s rather vague on this point, but the “by which time” suggests that the loss of attractiveness and increase in loathsomeness was a gradual thing.)

July 19, 2024

the rise of detective fiction

In The Long Week-End, their entertaining, sardonic, and often insightful social history of England between the two world wars, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge assert that in the years immediately following the Great War, “Detective-novel writing was not yet an industry; Sherlock Holmes stood alone.” (That comment, like this post, refers only to the British situation; the American situation was quite different.)

This is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration. Historians like Graves and Hodge tend to ignore the Sexton Blake stories, presumably on the grounds that they were mass-produced, by multiple authors who worked from simplistic templates, and were aimed primarily at younger audiences. But they were extraordinarily popular and it seems that almost everyone read at least some of them. (When Dorothy L. Sayers was ill at school — the Godolphin School in Salisbury — she wrote to her parents to ask them to send her some Sexton Blakes.) And then, on what one presumes G&H would have thought a higher level of literary ambition, there were the Father Brown stories — but Chesterton, having written a pile of them between 1910 and 1914, did not write another until 1923.

Meanwhile, the Sherlock Holmes wagon continued to roll, though with a pause (as many things paused) in the war years, during which Conan Doyle published only one Holmes story, “His Last Bow,” which was an exercise in patriotism and, moreover, a spy story rather than a tale of detection. But Conan Doyle would, with great reluctance and annoyance, resume Dr. Watson’s accounts of Holmes’s adventures in 1921.

Two other data points should be introduced here. First, the publication in 1913 of what would become one of the most influential novels of detection ever written, E. C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case. And second, the 1910 trial and conviction of Dr. Crippen, which renewed interest in what we now call True Crime.

If you look at these matters from the perspective of the year 1914, here’s what I think you see:

the Sexton Blake stories rolling ever onward, but according to a fixed formula;
the Holmes stories continuing but more slowly, and at a far lower standard than Conan Doyle had established in the 1880s and 1890s;
an interesting experiment in a type of detective radically different than Holmes (Father Brown), which appeared to be complete;
another interesting experiment, this one a playful questioning of the plot conventions of the tale of detection (Trent’s Last Case);
a renewal of interest in True Crime.

So the future of tales of detection did not appear to be bright, and there was no reason to think that it would become a central genre of fiction.

Then the War came, and such topics were placed, not on the back burner but off the stove altogether. It was difficult, or embarrassing, or just plain shameful to think about a domestic murder or a crime of passion or a killing for money when the greatest slaughter in the history of humanity was ongoing. One could easily imagine that period marking the end of the detective story as a popular genre of fiction.

When the War ended, though, it became possible and indeed desirable to think about such matters again. It was presumably a kind of relief to be able, once more, to consider malice and death on a human scale — death as a tragedy and a misery but not an unimaginably vast horror. So Conan Doyle resumed his Holmes stories with “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” in 1921, and Chesterton his tales of Father Brown with (I think) “The Resurrection of Father Brown” in 1923. But even more to the point:

Agatha Christie published her first mystery novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920;
Freeman Wills Crofts published his first, and by far most influential, mystery novel, The Cask, also in 1920;
Dorothy L. Sayers wrote her first detective novel, Whose Body?, in 1921, though it was not published until 1923;
The Thompson-Bywaters trial was held in 1922, and after the execution of the convicted murderers in January of 1923, their story became a matter of extravagant public fascination for a very long time.

And so we were off to the races. The Golden Age of detective fiction — influenced at least as much by True Crime as by previous stories and novels — had begun. And I cannot help thinking that it was shaped, then and later, by the great shadow of Death hanging over Europe in the aftermath of the Great War.

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May 8, 2024

back to the brows

After reading various writings about the brows — including, first of all, this unsent letter by Virginia Woolf and this 1949 essay by Russell Lyne, I find myself impatient and wanting to cut to the chase. I’ll come back to these matters later when I’ve had more time to think them over, but in the meantime, some Theses:

A work of art can largely confirm the expectations of those who encounter it, largely thwart those expectations, or touch any point between those extremes. This is true of all the arts, but for present purposes I will speak only of fiction.
These expectations can be of many kinds, but the most commonly invoked expectation involves difficulty: How hard-to-track, hard-to-comprehend do we expect and want a book to be?
The reader who demands that all of his or her expectations be met is often called a lowbrow reader; the writer whose work habitually meets such readers’ expectations is often called a lowbrow writer.
The reader who craves surprise, excess, extremity, who is impatient with work that confirms typical expectations, is often called a highbrow reader; the writer whose work consistently violates norms and transgresses standards is often called a highbrow writer.
N.B.: Higher-browed readers often want to have their aesthetic expectations challenged, but not their moral ones. Almost no one wants that. (But they get it sometimes, from some writers. George Eliot and Vladimir Nabokov are good examples — I’ll write about them, in this regard, one day.)
“Highbrow,” “middlebrow,” and “lowbrow” are all characteristically pejorative terms, meant to insult, though in some cases (e.g. the piece by Woolf above) a writer will claim and even treasure the insult. See for comparison the history of such words as “Quaker” and “Methodist.” If Virginia Woolf does not think that your novel sufficiently resists your readers’ expectations, she will call you and your readers middlebrows; Graves and Hodges in the same circumstance will call you and your readers lowbrows. (They don’t mention C. P. Snow in their book, but if they had they’d probably have called him a lowbrow writer, but something like The Search is clearly meant for the educated reader.)
The three brow-terms are most commonly used by people who are or believe themselves to be highbrows, though they may dislike that language and (implicitly or explicitly) put ironic scare-quotes around it.
Even the most challenging writer will not always want to read works that constantly challenge or repudiate his or her expectations. Auden used to say that great masterpieces demand so much of their readers that you simply can’t take one on every day, not without either trivializing the experience or exhausting yourself.
It is characteristic of highbrows’ use of these distinctions — see the Woolf letter quoted above and T. S. Eliot’s encomium to the music-hall entertainer Marie Lloyd, which employs the related socio-economic terms “aristocrat,” “middle-class,” and “worker” — that they articulate some alliance of themselves and the lowbrows against the middlebrow.
Lowbrow readers do not know, and if they knew would not care, about this supposed alliance.
Middlebrow readers and writers alike are often aware of the disdain of them felt by highbrows, and may respond either by defensiveness or mockery. (Think of Liberace’s famous response to his critics’ scorn for his music: “I cried all the way to the bank.” Funny to think of that line having a known origin, but it does.)
For a long time now there has been no genuine lowbrow reading. Those who insist on all their expectations being fulfilled can get that hit much more efficiently through movies, TV, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
The brow-discourse is conceptually distinct from, but overlaps considerably with, genre-discourse. For instance, detective novels that adhere strictly to the conventions of the genre — the Ellery Queen stories, for instance — will often be called lowbrow, while those that frequently deviate from the conventions — the later novels of P. D. James, for instance, or Sayers’s Gaudy Night — may get called “highbrow” or, more likely, “literary fiction.”
The tripartite brow-discourse is much less useful than a more nuanced and more detailed account of readerly expectations, one which is sensitive to the ways different genres can generate different sets of expectations, and respond to those expectations in diverse ways.

UPDATE 2024–05–27: It suddenly occurs to me that I have been confusing two quite different things: the three-brow distinction as a way of talking specifically about reading books and as a way of talking about culture as a whole. If you’re talking about reading, then of course there are lowbrow readers, lowbrow books, etc. But if you’re talking broadly about culture, then in an age when the popularity of movies, TV, and social media is at least an order of magnitude — I use that term with care; most people use it to mean “a whole lot” — I repeat, at least an order of magnitude greater than the popularity of reading, then anyone who reads books at all is ipso facto a middlebrow.

UPDATE 2024-06-05: I have received a salutary word of criticism from my friend Francis Spufford:

It is slightly nerve-wracking saying this, Professor Jacobs, but you are uncharacteristically misreading the Woolf. Yes, she’s a vile old snob in literary as much as in social terms. But I don’t think you can adduce what she says here about the ‘common reader’ as proof of that. To my ear, she’s being ironic throughout. She says, with stagey astonishment, that the common reader fails to measure up to proper critical standards, insisting on reading for such low satisfactions as pleasure, amusement, and a sense of meeting real human beings. She observes, as if baffled, that the survival or otherwise of literature over the long term is determined by the reputation of a work among these amateurs, and not among professors or theoreticians at all. How ghastly! Just for once, I’m sure the irony here means that Woolf is putting herself on the side of what’s common. There is a hole on her snobbery, a subject on which she feels like an insurgent rather than a possessor, and it’s to do with her lack of a university education. Unlike Sayers at Somerville, Virginia Stephen did all her reading at home, devising her own critical standards based on her own reactions. She is a common reader, by her own lights. Indeed she publishes two books of critical essays called The Common Reader and The Common Reader 2. She’s claiming the right to read Cervantes for fun, rather than the right to borrow three romances a week from the Boots Circulating Library, but it’s still a claim to centre pleasure. Virginia on the barricades! Virginia ‘Che’ Woolf!

I think Francis is almost wholly right here, though I do believe Woolf’s irony is not united with snobbery. Anyway, criticism taken gratefully on board, to be deployed later.

May 6, 2024

the integrity of science

I haven’t forgotten about middlebrow matters, but right now my mind is on something else. Something related, though.

Readers of Gaudy Night (1935) will recall — stop reading if you haven’t read Gaudy Night and don’t want any spoilers — that the plot hinges on an event that occurred some years before the book’s present-day: a (male) historian fudged some evidence and a (female) historian caught him at it and reported the malfeasance, which led to his losing his job. Late in the book, but before the full relevance of this event to the plot has been revealed, there’s a conversation about scholarly integrity, which I will now drop into the middle of:

“So long,” said Wimsey, “as it doesn’t falsify the facts. But it might be a different kind of thing. To take a concrete instance — somebody wrote a novel called The Search — “

“C. P. Snow,” said Miss Burrows. “It’s funny you should mention that. It was the book that the — ”

“I know,” said Peter. “That’s possibly why it was in my mind.”

A person has been vandalizing Shrewsbury College and a copy of that novel, with certain pages torn out, has been found. The novel, by the way, appeared in 1934, around the time that Sayers began writing Gaudy Night. It would be interesting to know whether it was the direct inspiration for her story, or whether she read it after some elements were already in place. I hope to find out more about that.

And by the way, I am going to be spoiling that novel far more thoroughly than I will spoil Gaudy Night — but it’s not one that many people read, these days.

“I never read the book,” said the Warden.

“Oh, I did,” said the Dean. “It’s about a man who starts out to be a scientist and gets on very well till, just as he’s going to be appointed to an important executive post, he finds he’s made a careless error in a scientific paper. He didn’t check his assistant’s results, or something. Somebody finds out, and he doesn’t get the job. So he decides he doesn’t really care about science after all.”

“Obviously not,” said Miss Edwards. “He only cared about the post.”

Neither the Dean, who has read the book, nor Miss Edwards, who hasn’t, is quite accurate. The scholar, whose name is Arthur Miles, probably would have gotten the post even without the paper; but it’s perfectly possible that he rushed the paper, failed to be appropriately self-critical, because he knew that the vote for the Director of a new scientific institute would be coming soon. Miles doesn’t know; he can’t be sure; maybe he would’ve made the mistake anyway. But in any case, as soon as he is told that there’s a problem with his paper, he runs the numbers again, sees the error, and immediately admits that he was wrong.

Let me pause for two digressions:

Sayers specifies what pages were torn from the book — but I don’t have access to the edition that Sayers had read, which I assume was the first hardcover edition, so I don’t know what exactly was excised, but I suspect that it was the part where Miles admits his mistake. (The whole business is a flaw in Sayers’s plot, because it’s impossible to imagine the Responsible Party having read Snow’s book and known which pages to tear out; but DLS clearly was determined to get a discussion of The Search into her own novel, so she found a way.)
As it happens, this is Snow’s most autobiographical novel: what happened to Miles also happened to him. He began his career as a chemist, and wrote a paper (published in Nature) which was then discovered to contain an embarrassing mistake — upon which he abandoned his work as a scientist and became a novelist and bureaucrat.

Now, back to Gaudy Night:

“The point about it,” said Wimsey, “is what an elderly scientist says to him. He tells him: ‘The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.’ Words to that effect. I may not be quoting quite correctly.“

Wimsey’s summary is a good one. This is indeed what the “elderly scientist,” a man named Hulme, says to him. And Miles does not disagree. What’s more on his mind, though, is the picture of his future laid out for him by another senior scientist:

“You’ve got to work absolutely steadily, without another suspicion of a mistake. You’ve got to let yourself be patronised and regretted over. You’ve got to get out of the limelight. Then in three or four years, you’ll be back where you were; though it will be held up against you, one way and another, for longer than that. It will delay your getting into the Royal [Society], of course. That can’t be helped. You’ll have a lean time for a while; but you’re young enough to get over it.”

Faced with this prospect, Miles realizes that he could only manage all this (“Watching the dullards gloat. Working under Tremlin. Having every day a reminder of the old dreams”) if he had a genuine devotion to science. But: “It occurred to me I had no devotion to science.”

N.B.: the point is not that the event has taken away his devotion to science, but rather, “I am not devoted to science, I thought. And I have not been for years, and I have kept it from myself till now.” The revelation of his error leads to a revelation of what had been true about him all along: “There were so many signs going back so far, if I had let myself see, if it had been convenient to see.” Indeed, it now becomes clear to him that his desire to become the director of a scientific institute — an administrative position, not one that would involve him directly in research — precisely because on some unconscious level he didn’t want to be a scientist any more: “I had thrown myself into human beings — to escape the chill when my scientific devotion ended.”

It should be clear, then, that “he decides he doesn’t really care about science after all” is not an adequate explanation of what happens.

But there’s also a twist in the tail of this story, which in Gaudy Night Sayers calls attention to:

“In the same novel,” said the Dean, “somebody deliberately falsifies a result — later on, I mean — in order to get a job. And the man who made the original mistake finds it out. But he says nothing, because the other man is very badly off and has a wife and family to keep.”

”These wives and families!“ said Peter.

”Does the author approve?“ inquired the Warden.

”Well,“ said the Dean, ”the book ends there, so I suppose he does.”

Or does he? And is that an accurate description of the case? Several facts here are relevant:

The man who has falsified the data, Sheriff, is one of Miles’s oldest friends.
Miles got Sheriff his current job and has been guiding his research, trying to keep him on the straight and narrow — he’s a feckless fellow, and a habitual liar, but Miles had hoped that he was ready to reform.
Sheriff had promised Miles, and also his own wife, that he was working on a safe project when he was in fact working on a high-risk, high-reward one — one he thought likely to lead to a prestigious position that, now that the paper has been published, he is indeed about to be offered.
Miles has a sense of responsibility for Sheriff because he had hoped to hire him for a position at the aforementioned Institute, but gave up on the idea when he realized that his own position was compromised. He thinks perhaps he should have pushed harder for Sheriff anyway.
Early in his career Miles had had the opportunity to consciously fudge data himself, and seriously considered it — he thought that he might eventually be found out, but only after achieving a brilliant career from which summit he could just say “Whoops, I made a mistake” — but instead abandoned the research project. He thought, though, that in the future he would have compassion for any scientist who succumbed to a similar temptation.
And most important of all, Sheriff is married to Audrey, Miles’s former lover, for whom, though he himself is now happily married, he cherishes a strong and lasting tendresse — despite the fact that Sheriff basically stole her affections while Miles was abroad.

The Search is not a great novel, but this is perhaps its best element: the faithful portrayal of Miles’s complex and ever-shifting and deeply human responses to Sheriff’s lying. (It reminds me a bit of the greatest scene of this kind I know, the moment in Middlemarch when Lydgate has to decide how to vote for the chaplaincy of a new hospital. I wrote about that thirty years ago [!!] near the end of this essay.)

On the one hand, he knows exactly what Sheriff did and why:

I had no doubts at all. It was a deliberate mistake. He had committed the major scientific crime (I could still hear Hulme’s voice trickling gently, firmly on).

Sheriff had given some false facts, suppressed some true ones. When I realised it, I was not particularly surprised. I could imagine his quick, ingenious, harassed mind thinking it over. For various reasons, he had chosen this problem; it would not take so much work, it would be more exciting, it might secure his niche straight away. … But I must not know, half because he was a little ashamed, half because I might interfere. So [his research assistant] and Audrey must, for safety’s sake, also be deceived.

All this he would do quite cheerfully. The problem began well. … Then he came to that stage where every result seemed to contradict the last, where there was no clear road ahead, where there seemed no road ahead at all. There he must have hesitated. On the one hand he had lost months, there would be no position for years, he would have to come to me and confess; on the other his mind flitted round the chance of a fraud.

There was a risk, but he might secure all the success still. I scarcely think the ethics of scientific deceit troubled him; but the risk must have done. For if he were found out, he was ruined. He might keep on as a minor lecturer, but there would be nothing ahead.

Miles does not excuse Sheriff at any point; he knows that the man’s dishonesty is habitual, perhaps pathological. But he also knows that Sheriff and Audrey have reached a certain accommodation in their marriage, that Audrey understands who her husband is but loves him and needs him anyway. Miles writes a letter that would expose and run Sheriff, and then, realizing that it would also ruin Audrey, …

I shall not send the letter, I was thinking. Let him win his gamble. Let him cheat his way to the respectable success he wants. He will delight in it, and become a figure in the scientific world; and give broadcast talks and views on immortality; all of which he will love. And Audrey will be there, amused but rather proud. Oh, let him have it.

For me, if I do not send the letter, what then? There was only one answer; I was breaking irrevocably from science. This was the end, for me. Ever since I left professionally, I had been keeping a retreat open in my mind; supervising Sheriff had meant to myself that I could go back at any time. If I did not write I should be depriving myself of the loophole. I should have proved, once for all, how little science mattered to me.

There were no ways between. I could have held my hand until he was elected, and then threatened that either he must correct the mistake, or I would; but that was a compromise in action and not in mind. No, he should have his triumph to the full. Audrey should not know, she had seen so many disillusions, I would spare her this.

The human wins out over the scientific. Maybe, Arthur thinks, it always does. But Gaudy Night shows that sometimes the scientific — in the sense of a strict commitment to the sacredness of honest research — can have its own victories. And Gaudy Night also suggests that the choices might not be as stark as Snow’s story suggests. More on that in another post.

May 2, 2024

brows illustrated

Russell Lynes’s 1949 essay for Harper’s, “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” — about which I’ll have more to say later — features this illustration by Saul Steinberg.

May 1, 2024

Sayers the middlebrow writer

Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, in The Lost Week-End (1940), their generally fascinating and informative social history of Great Britain between the world wars, make a great many Olympian pronouncements. They say, for instance, that Auden “perhaps never wrote an original line,” a claim that, to the person who has read even a handful of Auden poems, is instantly revealed as one of the most dim-witted statements in the history of literary criticism. (“Who stands, the crux left of the watershed” — oh goodness, that hoary old chestnut?) And they declare that by the 1930s “low-brow reading was now dominated by the detective novel.”

Well … if the detective novel is “low-brow reading,” then how to describe magazines devoted to movie stars or Mills & Boon romances? “Such things,” we can imagine Graves and Hodge saying in the plummiest of tones, “scarcely deserve the name of ‘reading.’” But people who read such books really are reading, and contra G&H, detective novels, in their literary ambitions and expectations, are an ideal example of middlebrow literature.

I tend to think of middlebrow writing as the kind of thing that highbrows would never write but still enjoy. Auden, for instance, whether an original poet or not, loved detective stories, as did T. S. Eliot (among many others).

Dorothy L. Sayers — my current biographical subject — strikes me as a paradigmatic middlebrow writer, possessing the intellectual equipment of the highbrow but believing implicitly in the capabilities of what Virginia Woolf condescendingly called “the common reader.” Woolf was highly aware of the deficiencies of the common reader:

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole — a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.

Not well educated, not generously gifted, instinctively (not consciously) moved to create a whole but capable of constructing only the “rickety and ramshackle,” the common reader can only form “insignificant” ideas and opinions. Lovely.

Sayers would agree with some of this. But she did not think the ideas and opinions of the common reader insignificant; indeed, she thought them typically superior to the opinions of highbrows. More important: while Woolf takes the shortcomings of “the common reader” as givens, almost as natural phenomena like mushrooms or cloudy days, Sayers, by contrast, sees any such deficiencies as remediable — and sees such remediation as part of her responsibility as an intellectual.

Let me just make a few pronouncements of my own:

Woolf is a truly great writer; Sayers is not.
Woolf is a highbrow; Sayers is not, and indeed frequently makes highbrows the butt of her satire.
Sayers in her fiction regularly shows an interest in a wide range of social classes, with their accompanying habits, inclinations, and modes of speech; Woolf is interested in none of these things: all of her characters are of the same social class.
Sayers is far better-educated than Woolf, more learned, and has a wider intellectual capacity: Woolf could not have managed cryptograms in a novel, or forced herself to learn the biochemistry of poisons, or translated Dante and and Song of Roland … but of course Sayers couldn’t have written Mrs. Dalloway either.

(Digression: I might add, in relation to that last point, that while Sayers was only eleven years younger than Woolf, a major transformation in the possibilities of education for women in England accelerated between Woolf’s adolescence and Sayers’s. Virginia Stephen was largely educated at home, though she did get to attend classes at King’s College London for a time; Sayers took a first-class degree at Somerville College, Oxford: when she completed her studies in 1915, women could not yet receive Oxford degrees, but she was awarded hers retroactively in 1920. The whole business of women’s education was immensely complicated in this era, with different universities changing their policies at different rates. For instance, Flora Hamilton, later to be Flora Lewis and the mother of C. S. Lewis, took a first-class degree in logic and a second in mathematics at Queen’s University Belfast in 1885. But by the time Sayers took that belated degree openness to both sexes was nearly universal, though of course informal bigotry would continue.)

I would further suggest that Sayers’s translations of Dante, and her sequence of radio plays The Man Born to be King, are classic middlebrow endeavors: attempts to render old, difficult texts and ideas comprehensible to a general audience. (A project in remediation.) I will also argue in my biography, though probably not in detail here on my blog, that her detective novels do some of the same work, as she tried in them to do what Wilkie Collins had done in the previous century: marry the story of detection with the social novel.

But wait: I haven’t defined my brows, have I? What do I mean — what should one mean — by highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow? As it happens, that was a central question of mid-twentieth-century intellectual life — and it gave us some categories that we still use today. So I’ll be exploring that in future posts.

April 5, 2024

bounce

J. R. Ackerley, author of that remarkable book My Dog Tulip, worked for the BBC for many years and in that capacity oversaw the production of The Scoop (1931), a detective story written by six authors, each of whom read his or her contribution on-air. Dorothy L. Sayers coordinated the project; she was probably the only person who could have gotten the shy and retiring Agatha Christie to participate. But she and Ackerley continually butted heads, as he wished to provide editorial oversight that Sayers flatly rejected.

Some years later Ackerley wrote in a BBC memo,

So far as I recall Agatha Christie, she was surprisingly good-looking and extremely tiresome. She was always late sending in her stuff, very difficult to pin down to any engagements and invariably late for them. I record these memories with pain, for she is my favourite detective story writer.

Her success as a broadcaster has made less impression upon me. I believe she was quite adequate but nothing more; a little on the feeble side, if I recollect aright, but then anyone in that series would have seemed feeble against the terrific vitality, bullying and bounce of that dreadful woman Dorothy L. Sayers.

Whether Sayers was indeed “bullying,” or simply a woman who refused to be dictated to by men who were accustomed to dictating to women, is a matter of dispute. Later, when she was writing the plays that would become The Man Born to be King, she responded to an interfering producer thus: “Oh no you don’t, my poppet!” That producer was removed from the project — and replaced by one of the greatest theatrical producers of the twentieth century, Val Gielgud (brother of the actor John). However “difficult” she might have been, she couldn’t be dispensed with; in the end, it was almost always her critics who had to give way.

But “vitality, bullying and bounce” is a great phrase, and many people found DLS similarly intimidating, and too energetic for comfort. But not everyone disliked the bounciness. On her death, C. S. Lewis wrote, “I liked her, originally, because she liked me; later, for the extraordinary zest and edge of her conversation — as I like a high wind.” And in a memoir Val Gielgud wrote, “Miss Sayers is professional of the professionals. She can tolerate anything but the shoddy or the slapdash. Of all the authors I have known she has the clearest, and the most justifiable, view of the proper respective spheres of author and producer, and of their respective limitations. She is authoritative, brisk, and positive.”

Vitality, bounce, zest, edge, authoritative, brisk — a high wind indeed. No wonder responses to her were so mixed. She’s gonna be so much fun to write about.

April 2, 2024

a letter from Karl Barth

On 7 September 1939, a week after the Wehrmacht invaded Poland and thus began the Second World War, the great theologian Karl Barth wrote, in German, from his home in Switzerland to a woman in England. “You too must be shocked by the events of our day,” he wrote. “But I am happy that this time England did not want to let another ‘Munich’ happen, and I hope also for the poor German people that now the end of its worst time (which I have witnessed intimately) has at least begun.” Tragically, war had returned to Europe — but the hapless policy of of appeasement was over, and now the end of Hitler, and of Nazism, could, however dimly, be foreseen.

But to acknowledge the war was not the purpose of Barth’s letter. Rather, he wanted to ask this woman for permission to translate two of her theological writings, and also to seek answers to a few questions about the texts. Barth did not make a habit of translating non-German texts — in fact, the only translation he had published was of a sermon by John Calvin — but in these contemporary writings he had found something that he thought his audience would particularly benefit from reading. Moreover, this woman’s fiction had helped him to learn English better; perhaps even more to the point, he had read her novels “with particular interest and admiration.”

The author to whom Barth wrote was Dorothy L. Sayers. Twenty years later he remarked that, in 1939, she had been “familiar to me as the author of a whole series of detective novels — at once thrilling, cultured, and thoughtful. The fascinating thing about these books for me was the visible connection in them between a humanism of the best Oxford tradition and a pronounced mastery in the technique which is essential to literary engagement in this genre.” But at that time he had no idea that she was a Christian, and when a Scottish friend suggested that he read some of her theological essays, he was surprised to learn of their existence — and even more surprised to find them stating most clearly and forcefully certain points about the beauty, power, and sheer drama of Christian doctrine that were dear to his own heart. (However, he did discern, and even in that introductory letter told her that he discerned, a strain of “semi-Pelagianism” in her theology, a comment that she found amusing and inaccurate.)

The works he sought to translate had originally appeared in 1938 in the Times of London: “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged” and “The Triumph of Easter,” later published together in a short book. Barth, having had his questions answered by Sayers, duly produced his translation, but in the chaos that inevitably accompanies wartime set it aside and did not return to it until 1959, two years after Sayers’s death. At that time he wrote,

The special gift of the author, which is evident in her earlier work, certainly remained with her in this later phase of her writing as well — something to which the present little book bears witness. In the following pages, she has spiritedly and successfully come out against dogma’s reputation for “tediousness”; in her manner of taking it up and discussing it, its effect is certainly anything but tedious! … For having vigorously made the message of the gospel her own in breathless astonishment over its central content, and for having recounted it in a way that is open to the world, yet undaunted, quick-witted, and without any hint of apology — but above all, in a way that is joyful and that causes joy in turn — for all of this, regardless of how one might relate to the ins and outs of her thinking at particular points, one must be grateful to her.

“In a way that is joyful and that causes joy in turn” — what a lovely tribute. The source of that joy may be found described in that essay on Easter. Here’s an excerpt:

“Then Judas, which had betrayed Him, when he saw that He was condemned,… cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.” And thereby Judas committed the final, the fatal, the most pitiful error of all; for he despaired of God and himself and never waited to see the Resurrection. Had he done so, there would have been an encounter, and an opportunity, to leave invention bankrupt; but unhappily for himself, he did not. In this world, at any rate, he never saw the triumph of Christ fulfilled upon him, and through him, and despite of him. He saw the dreadful payment made, and never knew what victory had been purchased with the price.

All of us, perhaps, are too ready, when our behaviour turns out to have appalling consequences, to rush out and hang ourselves. Sometimes we do worse, and show an inclination to go and hang other people. Judas, at least, seems to have blamed nobody but himself, and St. Peter, who had a minor betrayal of his own to weep for, made his act of contrition and waited to see what came next. What came next for St. Peter and the other disciples was the sudden assurance of what God was, and with it the answer to all the riddles.

If Christ could take evil and suffering and do that sort of thing with them, then of course it was all worth while, and the triumph of Easter linked up with that strange, triumphant prayer in the Upper Room, which the events of Good Friday had seemed to make so puzzling. As for their own parts in the drama, nothing could now alter the fact that they had been stupid, cowardly, faithless, and in many ways singularly unhelpful; but they did not allow any morbid and egotistical remorse to inhibit their joyful activities in the future.

Now, indeed, they could go out and “do something” about the problem of sin and suffering. They had seen the strong hands of God twist the crown of thorns into a crown of glory, and in hands as strong as that they knew themselves safe. They had misunderstood practically everything Christ had ever said to them, but no matter: the thing made sense at last, and the meaning was far beyond anything they had dreamed. They had expected a walk-over, and they beheld a victory; they had expected an earthly Messiah, and they beheld the Soul of Eternity.

It had been said to them of old time, “No man shall look upon My face and live”; but for them a means had been found. They had seen the face of the living God turned upon them; and it was the face of a suffering and rejoicing Man.

The refusal to “allow any morbid and egotistical remorse to inhibit their joyful activities in the future” is a key point for Sayers, and something essential for understanding certain elements of her own life — but that’s a story for me to tell in my biography of her.

The story of this correspondence is well-told in an article by my former colleague David McNutt. In this post I have used David’s translation of Barth’s reflections on Sayers.

February 10, 2015

Another Note About Reading

In response to my posting of some rather directive thoughts on reading by Dorothy Sayers, a friend wrote: “Hey, I thought you were the ‘read at whim’ guy.” To which I respond, first, I am the “read at whim” guy. In that book I wrote, and I still believe,

For heaven’s sake, don’t turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or (shifting the metaphor slightly) some fearfully disciplined appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count words or pages the way some people fix their attention on the “calories burned” readout — some assiduous and taxing exercise that allows you to look back on your conquest of Middlemarch with grim satisfaction. How depressing. This kind of thing is not reading at all, but what C. S. Lewis once called “social and ethical hygiene.”

But what I was writing about there was recreational reading. I don’t tell students in my classes to read at whim; I don’t encourage people studying for an organic chemistry final exam or the LSAT to read at whim. And it seems to me that people don’t always keep the varying occasions of reading clearly distinguished in their minds when they talk about what others should or should not read — nor when they make their own decisions about reading.

When reading for fun, then, I’d recommend, read for fun. When reading in order to learn about something specific, for a definable purpose, then read, in a disciplined and attentive way, what helps you to achieve that purpose. This much seems clear to me. But I think what often happens to people is that they catch themselves in a vaguely intermediate condition, not really needing to read anything in particular but vaguely feeling that their reading somehow ought to be purposeful — even teleological in a way, leading towards some genuinely meaningful end.

What many of these people really want, it seems to me — and I base this on decades of talking with folks who are anxious about their reading — is not to read Henry James but to be the kind of person who, when left at loose ends, positively wants to read Henry James, wants to read Henry James so much that he or she will toss aside Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Fifty Shades of Grey without even noticing what they are in order to get to that precious copy of The Ambassadors that someone has inexplicably left at the bottom of a stack.

I think it’s okay not to be that person. I have read most of Henry James’s novels and I think he is a true master — though still more a master of the short story — but I am definitely not that person.

If you want to make a serious study of the novels of Henry James in order to develop a fuller understanding of his mastery, then do that. It’s a good thing to do. Develop a plan, develop a strategy for learning more about anything that you’d like to know more about. Self-education is a fantastic thing. But it’s not the same thing as reading for fun, for delight, at whim. And giving free rein to Whim from time to time is also a very healthy — I would say a necessary — thing to do.

February 10, 2015

Dorothy Sayers, “A Note on Creative Reading”

In 1940, when the Second World War was underway and the Battle of Britain had begun, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a little book for Gollancz called Begin Here: A War-Time Essay. (It was published in America the next year as Begin Here: A Statement of Faith.) It is a curious book, seeking to articulate in a casual and offhand way the conditions under which a society under siege might discover a non-economic means of unity. Like many writers of the time, Sayers was concerned with what war might do to the intellectual and educational life of her country, and therefore concluded the book with a list of recommended books and “A Note on Creative Reading.” I think her account of reading is interesting enough to reproduce in full.

Reading being one of our principal occupations on long, dark evenings, I should like to explain what I mean by saying that it ought to be done creatively. (Here, by the way, I am on my own special ground, and shall take leave to speak with authority.)

Do not, I implore you, continue in that indolent and soul-destroying habit of picking up a book “to distract your mind” (“distract” is the word for it) or “to knock down time” (there is only too little time already, and it will knock us down soon enough). The only respectable reason for reading a book is that you want to know what is in it. Do not choose your literature by the half-witted process of asking the young woman at the library for “a nice book” and enquiring anxiously of her, “Shall I like it?” Subscribe to a decently serious paper, read the reviews and order what you think will interest you. (Study the publishers’ lists too, by all means, bearing in mind that the “blurb” is written to sell the book and is therefore not an expression of free criticism. Do not be too much put off either; many a good book has a sickening blurb.)

If the book, when obtained, does not interest you, ask yourself why; and have the elementary politeness to give yourself a sensible answer. Does the subject displease you ? — and if so, is it by any chance one of those disquieting things that you “would rather not know about”, though you really ought not to shirk it? Does the author’s opinion conflict with some cherished opinion of your own ? — If so, can you give reasons for your own opinion? (Do try and avoid the criticism that begins: “We do not like to think” this, that or the other; it is often so painfully true that we do not like to think.) Or is it that the author is ignorant, illogical or superficial? (Are you sure? Have you taken the trouble to verify his references? Can you support your own view from your reading or experience?) Or is his style dull, obscure, or ugly? Does he write bad English? If you think so, justify yourself by examples and be sure you know why they are bad. (And don’t trust those horrid little manuals all about how to write correct English; they are nearly always wrong or hopelessly pedantic; consult the people who know real literature when they see it, like H. W. Fowler, Quiller-Couch or A. P. Herbert. Language is a live thing; you can’t confine it in little primers.)

If, on the other hand, the book does interest you, don’t leave it at that. Go on and read other books bearing on the subject, and collect illuminating experience of your own; go out and get the experience. See whether, in view of what the books say, you can’t and ought not to do something about it; make the books part of your life. And if the author’s style appeals to you, do make a point of enjoying it. Get the feel of balance in a beautiful sentence, rejoice in the lovely appropriateness of the exact right word and thank your gods that the author had the wit and industry to choose that word, out of a whole dictionaryful of less adequate words, for the express purpose of pleasing you. Entertain yourself by finding other words yourself and discovering why they sound so feeble by comparison.

Pray get rid of the idea that books are each a separate thing, divided from one another and from life. Read each in the light of all the others, especially in the light of books of another kind. Try and see — this is the most fascinating exercise of all — whether a statement in one book may not be a statement of the same experience which another book expresses in quite different terms. (I tried to make a “synthesis” of this kind about biological man and the theological doctrine of the Fall.) Try the experiment of putting a statement of one kind into the terms of another. Try especially putting statements made in old-fashioned language into modern terms. You will often find that things you have taken all your life for incomprehensible dogmas turn out to be perfectly intelligible observations of truth. Take, for instance, those dark pronouncements in the Athanasian Creed that God is uncreate, incomprehensible and eternal, and re-state them like this: “The standard of Absolute Value is not limited by matter, not limited by space, not limited by time.” It may seem more acceptable that way….

Or if you read somewhere a reference to “Aristotle’s three Dramatic Unities — unity of time, unity of place and unity of action”, do not (as some writers do who should know better) dismiss Aristotle as a tedious old classic of two thousand years ago who tried to tie up dramatic form in red-tape of his own manufacture. What he said was a statement of fact about the plays he had observed to be successful, and he meant exactly what your favourite dramatic critic means when he says: “The interest in this play is too much scattered, and confused with side-issues. There are far too many scenes, and the story drags on over a period of three generations, so that we have to be continually consulting the programme to know what year we have got to.”

Which reminds me: please burn all your book-markers — even the pretty one Aunt Mabel sent you last Christmas (or at least put that one away and only bring it out when she comes to call). You cannot possibly be so bird-witted as to be unable to discover which page you got to by looking at it. If the author mentions some other book in terms which make it seem important, whether he approves or refutes it, don’t take his word for it: get the other book and read it, and judge for yourself. If he refers to something, or uses some word, which you don’t understand, get a dictionary or work of reference and look it up. (Don’t write and ask the author to explain; he is not required to be an Encyclopedia, and you will only give him a poor idea of your industry and intelligence.) Especially, examine the sources of what he writes; to read Mr. Somebody’s critical valuation of Milton’s prose or his examination of the economic effects of the Peace-Treaty is quite valueless if you have never read any Milton and do not know what the Peace-Treaty actually said. Discuss the books you read. If your husband or your wife is bored with your opinions (they very often are), persuade some friend to read the same books and talk them over. By discussion I mean discussion: not just saying, “Oh, I thought it was frightfully interesting, didn’t you?” Nor do I mean exchanging gossip about the author’s personality and private life and saying he must be a delightful (interesting, unpleasant, dangerous, irritating, fascinating, entertaining) person to know. (It is well to remember that the best of a writer’s energies goes into his writing; he may not have much charm or virtue left over for private use. This does not invalidate his opinions; it merely means that he is liable to be disappointing when encountered in person.)

And do please realise that words are not just “talky-talk” — they are real and vital; they can change the face of the world. They are a form of action — “in the beginning was the Word by Whom all things were made”. Even the spate of futile words that pours out from the ephemeral press and the commercial-fiction-mongers has a real and terrible power; it can become a dope as dangerous as drugs or drink; it can rot the mind, sap the reason, send the will to sleep; it can pull down empires and set the neck of the people under the heel of tyranny. “For every idle word that ye speak ye shall render account at the day of judgment.” I do not think that means that we shall have to pay a fine in a few million years’ time for every occasion on which we said “dash it all” or indulged in a bit of harmless frivolity; but I do think it was meant as an urgent warning against abusing or under-rating the power of words, and that the judgment is eternal — that is, it is here and now.