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.