Review: Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers (1935)
Say It Ain’t So, Jo, Say It Ain’t So!
My Dear Ms. Walton,
Though epistolary convention calls for declarations of true love to come in the valediction, I humbly beg your ladyship’s pardon for announcing it right here at the beginning: Jo, je t’aime! I love thee for conceiving of Tooth and Claw (2003), your take on “what a world would be like if … the axioms of the sentimental Victorian novel were inescapable laws of biology” (T&C, p. 5), for your two new neoplatonic novels of ideas (The Philosopher Kings and The Just City), and for Among Others, your memoir-fantasy- Bildungsroman-paean to classic sci-fi (2012). The collection of non-fiction reviews it led to, What Makes This Book So Great (2014) was also thoroughly engaging and I enjoyed several of the narratives you recommended. But alas, your piece “The mind, the heart, sex, class, feminism, true love, intrigue, not your everyday ho-hum detective story: Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night” seems way off the mark. It’s more like an appraisal of the book you dreamt Sayers had written than one of what she actually composed. I tackled it years ago, and though it’s l—o—n—g (about 500 pages) I re-read it to see if I’d missed something. I’m afraid not; it’s still pretty bad. (Caveat: plot spoilers below.)
GN forms part of a series featuring the intrepid Harriet Vane, a popular mystery novelist with a scandalous past, and her gallant suitor, Lord Peter Wimsey. It begins with Harriet returning to Shrewsbury, a fictional women’s college at Oxford University (Sayers’ own home turf—she attended Somerville College there), for the titular Gaudy Night homecoming dinner. While she’s there, an escalating series of mean pranks, poison-pen letters, and destruction of personal items of value lead the College higher-ups to invite her to reside on campus, under the pretext of conducting research for new work, and investigate these misdemeanors on the sly. The logistics of the malicious acts guarantee that they’re being perpetrated by an insider: a faculty member, one of the staff, or a student. Roughly halfway through, Wimsey shows up. He’s an amateur detective, a fellow Oxford alumnus of Balliol, obnoxiously decent, plus a high-level political fixer. He’s also very much the kind of eccentric, supercilious British aristocrat one encounters in fiction of the period. Harriet and Wimsey, proceeding in no great hurry, eventually uncover the culprit, who turns out to be a “scout” named Annie (a scout seems like a cross between a maid and a secretary). She holds an old grudge about her husband’s disgrace and fall from the Ivory Tower for shoddy scholarship, which drove him to suicide. Concurrently, they slowly crawl towards getting engaged. (Nota bene, two successful recommended treatments of these generic tropes are the film version of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, set at a remote medieval monastery with a renowned library and scriptorium; Bad Things Happen, Harry Dolan’s writerly neo-noir set in Ann Arbor, Michigan, my hometown; and The Secret Place by Tana French.)
George Orwell led the charge against GN, a squadron that grew to include W.H. Auden, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edmund Wilson, and J.R.R. Tolkien, and to which I humbly enlist. In his brief 1936 notice, he observed: “Her slickness in writing has blinded many readers to the fact that her stories, considered as detective stories, are very bad ones. They lack the minimum of probability that even a detective story ought to have, and the crime is always committed in a way that is incredibly tortuous and quite uninteresting.” There’s something ironical about making the main character a successful author of such stories, and then having her unable to untangle this sloppy situation. Whereas Lord Peter pretty much waltzes in, charms the ladies one evening, and identifies the perpetrator straight away, though page after page must be turned before he can prove it with a Big Reveal.
Moreover, Sayers’ University is populated by cardboard-thin characters costumed in academic robes, not fleshed-out people you seem to see and hear, with intellectual or other ambitions driving them to burn the midnight oil or make mischief. Likewise, her Oxford is constructed from canvas background screens, not Gothic architecture of sturdy stone. The assorted faculty (the administration, dons, and fellows of the S.C.R. or Senior Common Room) have various specializations and roles, and a handful of undergraduates (women from Shrewsbury, gents from other colleges) appear here and there to pad out the plot or go rowing on the river, but everything and everyone remains murky. Unlike one of David Lodge’s redbrick campuses or Sir Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University, it doesn’t feel like a populated place that’s actually there. (This is also one of those books that would benefit from a map of the campus, so we might grasp what sneaking into the library entailed.) GN is also interminable—it drags on and on and on, the exposition of some repressed, mannered, Victorian Lady Novelist.
For better or ill, it is also surely one the most elitist books around:
Even idle and ignorant people who cannot distinguish Leptosiphon hybridus from Kaulfussia amelloides and would rather languish away in a wilderness than break their backs with dibbling and weeding may get a good deal of pleasant conversation out of it [a botanical garden], especially if they know the old-fashioned names of the commoner sorts of flowers and are both tolerably well acquainted with the minor Elizabethan lyrists. (404)
These are her idle and ignorant people?! How many bona fide Renaissance scholars would be able to enjoy such a spot? As you yourself, Ms. Walton, wonder in an aside:
Incidentally, who did Sayers imagine was the audience for this erudite detective story, that could read Latin subjunctives and know all about Religio Medici? It’s about Oxford dons, did she think they were the audience too? Or did she think, quite rightly, that the audience could look things up or let them go over their heads? (348)
Religio Medici, of course, is a late Renaissance work by Sir Thomas Browne, a medical doctor in the seventeenth century, in which he explains his non-denominational Christianity. Actually, looking things up would still be a major chore even in our Googolized Information Age, involving not just obscure literary or foreign quotations but also the peculiar protocols and jargon of a bygone, insular milieu. One could imagine a deluxe e-reader or hyptertext edition though, with terms glossed and images of Oxford locales and habits, and background on the dreary debates about philosophy, psychology, and politics the S.C.R. engages in during tea or at High Table. These might include “Proctor’s Bull-dogs” (campus security officers? p. 249), controversial regulations concerning female bathing garments, and what it meant that a coed, Miss Brodribb, “had a sort of G.P. for Miss Shaw” (query: Grand Passion? see p. 26). That would be an interesting scholarly project for some painstaking pedant. I am hardly opposed to smart, challenging fiction; the thing about GN is that the slang seems awfully localized and there isn’t the kind of witty pay-off or the kind of clever internal clarification from context or subsequent usage that certain texts, for instance Kevin Barry’s remarkable, futuristic City of Bohane, provide.
Contra Orwell, Ms. Walton, you claim that GN is not only an “astonishing” mystery but also an apposite exploration of class and feminism and the related issue of women scholars. Yeah, OK … it’s not that one can’t find those issues, given the setting, but there’s not much especially noteworthy about the treatment–like when academic culture critics now claim to have uncovered profound insights from some TV show or film that’s slightly better than mediocre just because it treats something cool. In fact, many of the discussions seem hopelessly dated, and Sayers’ outlook remains fairly traditional in most regards. (Also, you’re wrong about the academic scandal that sinks poor Clarke’s career and that precipitated the disruptions—it wasn’t “plagiarism” but overlooking a single, obscure MS housed in an out-of- the-way archive containing evidence counter to his thesis.) I did appreciate your remarks, though, on the “almost religious” attitude towards female learning in GN (p. 347).
Lastly, the novel contains an unmistakable thread of genteel Anti-Semitism. For example, the porter, definitely meant to be portrayed positively: “’Wot this country wants, said Padgett, ‘is a ‘Itler’” (120). And Harriet hears this from Wimsey’s nephew, Viscount Saint-George, an undergraduate at Christ Church College: “’He’s my uncle; and a dashed sight more accommodating than the Jewish kind,’ he added, as though struck by a melancholy association of ideas” (172). He goes on to refer several times to his gambling debts owed “to the children of Israel,” i.e. Jewish moneylenders à la Shylock (see pp. 186, 188, 207). In hindsight, this may not be a leitmotif most British authors in 1936 would have been proud to have threaded into their text.
Written this XXX th day of August, 2014,
by the hand of one who remains your ladyship’s most devoted fan &c.
Michael Winkelman
Sometime Tutor in Incendiary Texts and I.E.D.’s
St. Trinian’s Academy for Young Ladies
Barchester and Barset, England