Tag Archives: writer: dorothy l. sayers

J.R.R. Tolkien and Dorothy L. Sayers

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Bumping this up from a social media post I made a couple of weeks ago: I came across a fascinating article, “Tolkien, Sayers, Sex and Gender”, by David Doughan, which looks at the possible reasons why Tolkien disliked the work of Dorothy L. Sayers. He says in a letter of 31 May 1944 to his son Christopher:

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 . . .

Doughan says, in the abstract of his paper:

Tolkien’s expressed “loathing” for Dorothy Sayers and her novels Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon is remarkable considering that Sayers is generally considered to belong to the same milieu as the Inklings. Possible reasons for this are the contrast between the orthodox Catholic Tolkien’s view of male sexuality as inherently sinful, requiring “great mortification”, and Sayers’s frankly hedonistic approach. Another reason may be Sayers’s depiction of an independent Oxford women’s college getting by successfully without men, and her representation of marriage as a source of intellectual frustration for creative women.

Indeed, Sayers was very friendly with Tolkien’s friends C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, and is sometimes seen as an honorary member of the Inklings. But there is no evidence that she and Tolkien ever met, even though they graduated from Oxford in the same year (1915) and were both first published in the same volume of Oxford Poetry (also 1915).

In fairness to Tolkien, he doesn’t say that he hates all of the Lord Peter Wimsey books; he says that he particularly hated Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon, the last two books of the thirteen, but that the series had “attractive beginnings”. People who are bigger Wimsey fans than me tell me that they also hate Busman’s Honeymoon, so it’s a point of view which reasonable people can take. (For a counter perspective, Busman’s Honeymoon has the highest reader approval rating of any of the individual Wimsey novels on Goodreads, with Gaudy Night second.)

Doughan speculates that Tolkien’s dislike of Gaudy Night is because it showed a successful Oxford college run by women, and that Tolkien felt uncomfortable about such a scenario. Personally, without having gone into the details, I think this argument fails on two grounds. I have not read Gaudy Night myself, but again people who are bigger Wimsey fans than me tell me that it’s very much about internal rivalries and poisonous academic politics, rather than portraying the women’s college as a feminist utopia. I think it’s more likely that Sayers’ satire of the collegiate snakepit hit too close to home for Tolkien, and made him uncomfortable.

A very stupid person told me on social media (in a comment now deleted) that Tolkien simply hated and feared women. This is just rubbish. On women’s education, Tolkien’s record is actually rather good. A few years back, I came across this fascinating snippet in John D. Rateliffe’s essay, “The Missing Women: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lifelong Support for Women’s Higher Education”:

A vivid glimpse into Tolkien as a teacher of women can be found in the biography of Mary Challans, better known by her pen name, Mary Renault. Renault’s biographer notes that Tolkien had tutored women from St. Hugh’s while working at the OED and describes the impact of Tolkien’s return from Leeds on Renault and her fellow students at St. Hugh’s in these terms:

the women at St. Hugh’s […] had every reason to be grateful for his return. He was a conscientious lecturer, offering al-most double the statutory hours in order to ensure that his students, female as well as male, covered the entire subject. Indeed, he was unusual in being notably sympathetic to women undergraduates.

We don’t have any contemporary references by Challans to Tolkien during her undergraduate days (1925–28), although we know she was obsessed with all things medieval at the time and that long afterward her letters exchanged with her old college roommate, Kasia Abbott, make “frequent references to their old teacher Tolkien”. And that, when asked about him more than sixty years later, Kasia described him to Renault’s biographer as “darling Tolkien”. We don’t have any correspondence between Tolkien and Renault, unfortunately, but we know that Tolkien and Renault admired each other’s fiction; he singles out The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea for special praise and mentions receiving “a card of appreciation” from Renault, describing it as the piece of fan mail that had pleased him the most.

Considering just how much reader correspondence Tolkien received, to single out the postcard from Mary Renault / Challans as “perhaps the piece of ‘Fan-mail’ that gives me most pleasure” is a very strong statement indeed.

A couple of people suggested to me that perhaps Tolkien and Sayers had had an unsuccessful romantic encounter as students at Oxford, which then poisoned his perception of her forever. I think this is unlikely for several reasons. First of all, Tolkien actually says that he liked the earlier Wimsey books, and that his aversion to both books and writer developed later, possibly even as late as Gaudy Night; so he was not carrying an old grudge over three decades. Second, it’s totally plausible that Tolkien and Sayers, at different colleges and studying different subjects, would simply never have had occasion to meet as undergraduates.

Third, Tolkien was (as far as we know) obsessed with Edith Bratt throughout his Oxford years, and Dorothy L. Sayers’ not entirely successful love life as an undergraduate is also well chronicled in her own records. Of course, that doesn’t exclude some unrecorded disastrous attempted flirtation – or even a non-romantic yet enduringly bitter exchange of very different intellectual and/or political views – but Sayers in particular was pretty open about her past life, and doesn’t ever seem to have mentioned Tolkien in correspondence, even when he became famous (which was long after she did).

Sometimes people just don’t get on with each other, even if they have friends and interests in common, and sometimes later analysts can learn from the interaction, and sometimes there is not much there there; and I tend to feel this is one of the latter cases.

The Five Red Herrings, by Dorothy L. Sayers

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Second paragraph of third chapter, with the list that it introduces:

At the end of the meal, the list stood as follows:
Living in Kirkcudbright:

  1. Michael Waters – 28 – 5 foot 10 inches – unmarried – living in lodgings with private latch-key – landscape painter – boasts of being able to counterfeit Campbell’s style – quarrelled with Campbell previous night and threatened to break his neck.
  2. Hugh Farren – 35 – 5 foot 9 inches – figure and landscape painter – particularly broad in the shoulder – married – known to be jealous of Campbell – lives alone with a wife who is apparently much attached to him.
  3. Matthew Gowan – 46 – 6 foot 1 inch – figure and landscape painter, also etcher – unmarried – house with servants – wealthy – known to have been publicly insulted by Campbell – refuses to speak to him.
    Living in Gatehouse-of-Fleet:
  4. Jock Graham – 36 – 5 foot 11 inches – unmarried – staying at Anwoth Hotel – portrait painter – keen fisherman – reckless – known to be carrying on a feud with Campbell and to have ducked him in the Fleet after being assaulted by him.
  5. Henry Strachan – 38 – 6 foot 2 inches – married – one child, one servant – portrait painter and illustrator – secretary of golf-club – known to have quarrelled with Campbell and turned him off the golf-course.

I remember the TV version of this story broadcast in 1975 when I was eight, starring Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey and scripted by Antony Steven, infamous in Doctor Who lore as the writer of The Twin Dilemma. It was enjoyable but rather above my head, so I got the original novel out of the library soon after, at a point when I was really way too young to understand why Mrs Smith-Lemesurier wanted to be coy about her night-time visitors, and then read it again when I was about thirteen and more into the mystery genre.

So I have a sneaking nostalgic affection for this book. I first read it at about the same time as I first read The Lord of the Rings, and the attractive point that jumped out at me then was the map of Galloway inside the front cover, not so very different from Tolkien’s maps of Middle-Earth. Ever since, Galloway has had slight resonances of JRRT for me. Family holidays did sometimes take us that way driving south to London from Stranraer, but we would tend to zoom quickly through Newton Stewart, Castle Douglas and Dumfries before hitting the M6 at Carlisle, without time to explore excitingly-named places like Kirkcudbright or Gatehouse of Fleet, where much of The Five Red Herrings is set. I don’t think I have been to or through Galloway in the last thirty years.

Incidentally, although Tolkien and Sayers were almost the same age (he was born in 1892, she in 1893) and graduated from Oxford in the same year (1915) there is no evidence that they ever met, though both were very friendly with C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. Tolkien hated her Wimsey novels Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon.

The story starts off very promisingly, with some lyrical description:

The artistic centre of Galloway is Kirkcudbright, where the painters form a scattered constellation, whose nucleus is in the High Street, and whose outer stars twinkle in remote hillside cottages, radiating brightness as far as Gatehouse-of-Fleet. There are large and stately studios, panelled and high, in strong stone houses filled with gleaming brass and polished oak. There are workaday studios – summer perching-places rather than settled homes – where a good north light and a litter of brushes and canvas form the whole of the artistic stock-in-trade. There are little homely studios, gay with blue and red and yellow curtains and odd scraps of pottery, tucked away down narrow closes and adorned with gardens, where old-fashioned flowers riot in the rich and friendly soil. There are studios that are simply and solely barns, made beautiful by ample proportions and high-pitched rafters, and habitable by the addition of a tortoise stove and a gas-ring. There are artists who have large families and keep domestics in cap and apron; artists who engage rooms, and are taken care of by landladies; artists who live in couples or alone, with a woman who comes in to clean; artists who live hermit-like and do their own charing. There are painters in oils, painters in water-colours, painters in pastel, etchers and illustrators, workers in metal; artists of every variety, having this one thing in common – that they take their work seriously and have no time for amateurs.

[…]

After a brief delay, bumping over the new-laid granite, he pushed on again, but instead of following the main road, turned off just before he reached the bridge into a third-class road running parallel to the main road through Minnigaff, and following the left bank of the Cree. It ran through a wood, and past the Cruives of Cree, through Longbaes and Borgan, and emerged into the lonely hill-country, swelling with green mound after green mound, round as the hill of the King of Elfland; then a sharp right-turn and he saw his goal before him – the bridge, the rusty iron gate and the steep granite wall that overhung the Minnoch.

At the same time, there is a perhaps unhealthy obsession with railway timetables as part of the solution to the murder:

The Sergeant replied, with a certain grim satisfaction, that the 9.51 only ran on Saturdays and the 9.56 only on Wednesdays, and that, this being a Thursday, they would have to meet him at 8.55 at Ayr.

[…]

He had not gone on to Glasgow by the 1.54, because it was certain that the bicycle could not have been re-labelled before the train left. There remained the 1.56 to Muirkirk, the 2.12 and the 2.23 to Glasgow, the 2.30 to Dalmellington, the 2.35 to Kilmarnock and the 2.45 to Stranraer, besides, of course, the 2.25 itself.

There is free but not frequent use of the n-word, and a really offensively stereotyped Jewish minor character. Some readers complain that the Scottish accents of all the local characters, including most of the police, go too far, but I did not find it distracting myself. And the mystery is fair enough, though I think it’s a bit mean of Sayers to keep the one crucial detail about the murder scene from the reader; I remembered that moment in the TV serial, where it is revealed quite fairly to the audience, and of course it gives necessary context to the vital clue when we get to it on page 173.

I got hold of this after reading Sir John Magill’s Last Journey, because my memory was that The Five Red Herrings is the better book. I still think that it is better, though not by quite as much as I remembered. Sayers does description of countryside and of people much more memorably than Crofts, and she also has visible women characters. Both books depend a bit too much on railway timetables, The Five Red Herrings slightly more so if anything. Amusingly, Sayers references Crofts’ book, which was published a year earlier.

I had a book – a very nice book, all about a murder committed in this part of the country. Sir John Magill’s Last Journey, by one Mr. Crofts. You should read it. The police in that book called in Scotland Yard to solve their problems for them.

The Five Red Herrings is a long way down most Sayers fans’ lists, but I still retain my eight-year-old affection for it. Here’s a lovely piece making the same point by A.J. Hall, aka Susan Hall, aka the late great @legionseagle. And I am pondering reviving my Sayers reading as a mini-project; there’s really quite a lot in this one, even with its drawbacks. You can get The Five Red Herrings here.

(Incidentally, I had always thought that the title was Five Red Herrings, without the definite article. That was certainly the name of the TV adaptation, but the original book is clearly articled.)

(Incidentally again, Lord Peter Wimsey was born in 1890, so would be 40 or 41 in the year that the book is set; Ian Carmichael was 55 in 1975.)

Top books of 1923, #2: Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers

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Continuing with my analysis of the best-remembered novels of 1923, we get to Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers. NB that this review includes MASSIVE SPOILERS for a detective novel published a hundred years ago.

Whose Body? was Dorothy L. Sayers’ first novel, and therefore also the first of the eleven Lord Peter Wimsey novels published in her lifetime. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

“That’s a wonderful instrument,” said Parker.

Whose Body? is a better book than The Murder on the Links. Christie’s Poirot (and the other French characters) are already slipping into caricature; Sayers is engaging in wicked social observation of her own people. The characters are more memorable; I was smiling in recognition of particular lines that I first read thirty-five years ago. It established Wimsey as a realistic, complicated man, who likes to pretend that he is much stupider than he really is.

A naked body is discovered in the bath of a respectable London architect; meanwhile a well-known Jewish financier has gone missing. (A deleted line would have made it clear that the body int he bath is not Jewish.) The central mystery is very complicated, but not quite as unbelievably so as in Agatha Christie, and the clues are scattered through the text to the point that the careful reader will have an inkling of the answer at the same time as Wimsey works it all out. The common thread turns out to be…

MASSIVE SPOILERS

…a distinguished surgeon who killed the financier after decades of resentment about his marriage, and swapped his body for one from the teaching hospital which he runs. He explains himself in a detailed written confession at the end.

Again, the recent war looms behind everything. Wimsey has an awful attack of shell shock just as he works out the answer to the mystery:

Mr. Bunter, sleeping the sleep of the true and faithful servant, was aroused in the small hours by a hoarse whisper, “Bunter!”

“Yes, my lord,” said Bunter, sitting up and switching on the light.

“Put that light out, damn you!” said the voice. “Listen—over there—listen—can’t you hear it?”

“It’s nothing, my lord,” said Mr. Bunter, hastily getting out of bed and catching hold of his master; “it’s all right, you get to bed quick and I’ll fetch you a drop of bromide. Why, you’re all shivering—you’ve been sitting up too late.”

“Hush! no, no—it’s the water,” said Lord Peter with chattering teeth; “it’s up to their waists down there, poor devils. But listen! can’t you hear it? Tap, tap, tap—they’re mining us—but I don’t know where—I can’t hear—I can’t. Listen, you! There it is again—we must find it—we must stop it…. Listen! Oh, my God! I can’t hear—I can’t hear anything for the noise of the guns. Can’t they stop the guns?”

“Oh, dear!” said Mr. Bunter to himself. “No, no—it’s all right, Major—don’t you worry.”

Sayers’ England is still picking itself up after catastrophe, more tangibly so than Christie’s France. Notable that The Murder on the Links and Whose Body? share a particular plot twist: in both stories, there is an unsuccessful attempt to substitute the body of a vagrant for the actual murder victim. It suggests rather grimly that in 1923, there was no shortage of anonymous vagrants dying in England and northern France who could be called in post-mortem to support the nefarious plans of aspiring criminals.

Sayer also surprised me by introducing a theological discussion between Wimsey and his police detective friend Parker.

Lord Peter spent the afternoon in a vain hunt for Mr. Parker. He ran him down eventually after dinner in Great Ormond Street.

Parker was sitting in an elderly but affectionate armchair, with his feet on the mantelpiece, relaxing his mind with a modern commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. He received Lord Peter with quiet pleasure, though without rapturous enthusiasm, and mixed him a whisky-and-soda. Peter took up the book his friend had laid down and glanced over the pages.

“All these men work with a bias in their minds, one way or other,” he said; “they find what they are looking for.”

“Oh, they do,” agreed the detective; “but one learns to discount that almost automatically, you know. When I was at college, I was all on the other side—Conybeare and Robertson and Drews and those people, you know, till I found they were all so busy looking for a burglar whom nobody had ever seen, that they couldn’t recognise the footprints of the household, so to speak. Then I spent two years learning to be cautious.”

“Hum,” said Lord Peter, “theology must be good exercise for the brain then, for you’re easily the most cautious devil I know. But I say, do go on reading—it’s a shame for me to come and root you up in your off-time like this.”

I have attempted in vain to locate a credible British commentary on Galatians published in the early 1920s, though there are a couple of American candidates. Sayers of course was well known for her theological writing, but it’s startling to see that in the hands of a policeman character. It is a good set-up for the exposure of the amoral character of the villain.

Anyway, it’s a great start to a good run of Wimsey stories. You can get it here.