No End to Lord Peter
My favorite scene in Gaudy Night and what Dorothy Sayers teaches us about writing honestly
Quick note: for National Poetry Month, I’ve been recording nature poems and adding them to this post, pinned at the top left of my home page. Check in every few days for a new reading.
In my “About” section, I promise deep dives into special interests, namely The Indigo Girls and Dorothy Sayers. Today, I deliver on the latter (while listening to the former)! In this essay, I put on my academic hat and get analytical about the ways Sayers unfolds her writing process within the plot of my favorite novel, Gaudy Night. I also mention the fact that she might have fallen in love with her detective creation, Lord Peter Wimsey. I do not mention the fact that I probably have, too.
“Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?” Harriet Vane asks Peter Wimsey as they punt up the river in the Oxford mystery novel Gaudy Night.
This is the scene I love best, the mid-book convergence of a number of threads–forward movement on the central mystery, forward movement in the book Harriet is wrestling with writing, and a crashing dose of 1930’s Oxford culture–not to mention the moment Harriet finally admits to herself that she is attracted to the man she has been holding at arms’ length for more than half a decade.
“So easy,” Lord Peter answers, “that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.”
Seven years before publishing Gaudy Night, the penultimate novel in the twelve-book Peter Wimsey series, Dorothy Sayers wrote to a friend that she is “looking forward to getting a rest” from her charmingly loquacious detective, “because his everlasting breeziness does become a bit of a tax at times!” Harriet Vane agrees. By the time we get to that punting scene, Wimsey has been proposing marriage to her at regular intervals for six years, ever since rescuing her from a murder verdict in Strong Poison. Vane believes this flighty aristocrat only wants her as a trophy of his detection success, but on the river in Gaudy Night, Peter begins to prove her wrong. How? By taking her fiction writing seriously.
Harriet has been crafting her latest detective novel (if you think she might be a fictionalized version of Sayers herself, you think correctly), and she has been struggling with a character of her own creation called Wilfred. Whatever she tries to make Wilfred do on the page feels forced, unbelievable. On the river, Peter suggests giving the character a backstory, real feelings. But he also points out that if she puts some flesh on Wilfred’s bones, she “would have to abandon the jigsaw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change.”
Now Sayers is showing her hand. In a 1937 essay entitled “Gaudy Night,” published two years after the book, she gives herself the exact same directive that Peter gives Harriet: after all these books with Peter as the socially silly, word-drunk lead detective, in order to make the Harriet-Peter relationship believable, she had to “take Peter away and perform a major operation on him. If the story was to go on,” she explains, “Peter had got to become a complete human being, with a past and a future.”
“I knew it was useless to try and write with a view to what the public might like: the only thing one can do is to write what one wants to write and hope for the best.”
-Dorothy L. Sayers
The result is Gaudy Night, a story unlike any other in the series–more like a psychological novel than a mystery book, which is what makes the book my favorite–favorite in the series, favorite of all novels. In exactly the center of the story (54% on my Kindle), Sayers shows us through Harriet’s writing struggles what she herself has done in crafting Gaudy Night. She has given Peter depth and consistency. Now he is believable. His relationship with Harriet can move forward and we will believe it.
Not surprisingly, her readers were ambivalent. “One of the first results of the operation [of humanizing Peter] was an indignant letter from a female reader of Gaudy Night asking, What had happened to Peter? He had lost all his elfin charm” [sic]. (Hilariously, Sayers writes back that “any man who retained elfin charm at the age of forty-five should be in a lethal chamber.”) J.R.R. Tolkien is more direct in a letter to his son Christopher: “I could not stand Gaudy Night.” [sic] He goes on,
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 Harriet. . . . I was sick.”
Well, then.
How did Sayers respond to this criticism? With advice any writer can take to heart:
“…I knew it was useless to try and write with a view to what the public might like: the only thing one can do is to write what one wants to write and hope for the best.” When Harriet considers doing the same thing, she is afraid. “It would hurt like hell” to write a more honest story, she says. “What would that matter,” Peter asks, “If it makes a good book?”
The central theme of Gaudy Night is intellectual honesty, and Sayers models that for us; she is, indeed, a writer’s writer. But writer beware! There was a personal cost to performing this “delicate and dangerous operation” on her beloved character. Years before making Peter real, Sayers told that friend that she needed a rest from her flighty detective. Nearly a decade later, after publishing Gaudy Night, a number of readers suggested that Sayers had fallen in love with her own creation. Sayers denies the fact, but also cries,
“Alas! I can now see no end to Peter this side of the grave. . . . Formerly a periodic visitation, he has become a permanent resident in the house of my mind. His affairs are more real to me than my own; his domestic responsibilities haunt my waking hours, and I find myself bringing all my actions and opinions to the bar of his silent criticism.”
Writer, take heed: if you do what you must do to honor the craft of your book, your creation may take on a life of its own and never cease to wander through the rooms of your mind. But if you create a character so delightful and downright good as Lord Peter Wimsey, is that such a bad thing? And if you craft a scene in the center of your book that unfolds the very thing you’re doing in the whole, let me know: this English teacher will award you extra credit with abundant gold stars.
I love this post, A reminder to write with integrity. Thank you!
Gaudy Night is now on my TBR list, and right at the top.