the strong poison of existential doubt: autobiography, indefatigable love, and the holy fool
The autobiographical background of Dorothy Sayers’s fifth mystery novel makes an interesting background to the novel’s interrogation of proof and belief.
By T. Wyatt Reynolds
In my favorite of Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels, her protagonist finds himself in a quandary: he is observing a murder trial and falling in love. The woman he discovers he loves, Harriet Vane, has either been caught red-handed as a murderer or effectively framed for the same crime. Lord Peter refuses to countenance the former as a possibility. He insists that she must be innocent. They are not paramours—they have no official relationship—but his love for her (whether we classify this love as nascent romance or simply friendship seems to me immaterial) requires her innocence.
I won’t ruin too much of the plot here—rather, I want to interrogate the attitude Wimsey exhibits. His behavior cries out against our enlightened sensibilities. Sherlock Holmes famously follows an inductive method of detecting—beginning with the evidence, he eventually arrives at a theory. Wimsey follows the polar opposite method. He decides his hypothesis and determines to find the evidence needed to support it. The interaction of fear, friendship, and love in the story will perhaps help us draw increasingly smaller circles around what I will call existential doubt until we can begin to understand it and why, following Lord Peter, we must reject it.
Harriet Vane is a thinly veiled version of Sayers in her 20s—a writer of detective stories who lives with a bohemian writer, accepting his free-love, Bloomsberian ways against her better judgment. And yet, she breaks up with him when he proposes marriage—she could somehow manage his vice, but his hypocrisy was a bridge too far. While Sayers, unlike Vane, was not accused of murder, she did have a child out of wedlock. She never told her parents or any of her well-known Christian friends. When Vane initially rejects Peter Wimsey’s proffered love, she employs many of the arguments one could imagine Sayers using to reject the hope that her friends would bear with her indiscretion. “You wouldn’t want a wife who writes books though would you?” Vane sarcastically suggests she could add Wimsey’s offer to the pile of 46 proposals of marriage she has received via mail since being accused of murder—all from men who want to “marry into notoriety.” In a line taken almost directly from a letter Sayers wrote to a friend about one of her own romantic forays, Vane explains to Wimsey that her now deceased lover “wanted devotion; he couldn’t be friends with a woman.”
Wimsey’s flair is not due to some innate skill, unless it be the skill of subconscious virtue’s intuition. He makes no choice. He has no choice.
I want to distinguish here between two types of doubt. The first is a factual doubt. This is not what I am interested in interrogating, nor is it the form Lord Peter Wimsey refuses to countenance. Rather I want to call the acidic substance which so repels Wimsey “existential doubt.” (If I were a philosopher, I might differentiate these as epistemological and ontological doubt, but since I am merely a poet and historian, we shall stick with factual and existential.)
Before we continue, I think a brief foray into Sayers’s personal life is appropriate. I mentioned she gave birth to an illegitimate child, but to truly make sense of that moment we require a bit more context. In 1920, Sayers had experienced a love affair with the writer John Couronos (a version of whom came to be Vane’s alleged murder victim in Strong Poison). After almost two years, the affair ended, largely because Sayers refused to participate in free-love or sleep with him. Cournos went on to marry a different crime novelist, which disgusted Sayers and left her depressed. Amidst this depression and through a string of choices, she found herself pregnant. This “crime” is the analogue to Vane’s supposed murder. The child was born in 1924 and named John Anthony. Sayers managed to prevent anyone outside her immediate family from knowing about him, instead living as the boy’s aunt. His father, after all, was a married man. Perhaps this scenario and watching her son grow up away from her were factors in why Sayers felt distant from the Inklings, even as she was friends with several of them. She wrote of Lewis that, “I do admit that he is apt to write shocking nonsense about women and marriage. (That, however, is not because he is a bad theologian but because he is a rather frightened bachelor.)”
Having perhaps a better understanding of Sayers’ personal baggage connected with Strong Poison, let us return to the question of existential doubt. Alasdair MacIntyre writes in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? that we can never choose a tradition. Instead, as all good students of Hogwarts know, the wand chooses the wizard. Relatedly, Marilynne Robinson has written that we should:
Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.
These passages may help us shed some light on Peter Wimsey’s existential certainty that Harriet Vane is innocent. Lord Peter’s need to prove Harriet’s innocence transmogrifies into his flair for finding the requisite evidence. Only here, the desire Robinson describes becomes more than mere desire: it blossoms into belief. Like a mother lifting a car to rescue her child, Wimsey’s love propels him into superhuman performance. Perhaps, in a counter-intuitive way, Wimsey does follow Sherlock Holmes here. During a case, Holmes remarks that, “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” Wimsey sniffs out the true murderer because his preconceptions drive him beyond the seemingly obvious facts, which are ultimately red herrings. Wimsey rushes from the courtroom to speak with Vane’s solicitor, and the following dialogue ensues:
Parker looked distressed. He had confidence in Wimsey’s judgment, and, in spite of his own interior certainty, he felt shaken.
‘My dear man, where’s the flaw in [this case]?’
‘There isn’t one… There’s nothing wrong about it at all, except that the girl’s innocent.’
It seems important to note then that what I am calling Wimsey’s flair is not due to some innate skill, unless it be the skill of subconscious virtue’s intuition. He makes no choice. He has no choice. Not because he is constrained, but because it is his nature. Wimsey’s very name tells us that he is a holy fool. He is a man who can live up to the standard of charity that Sayers needed but could not find among her Oxford don and literati friends. Sayers spent her life as an outsider. She was one of the first women to graduate from Oxford. She passed as a comet through the solar system that was the Inklings, but never belonged amongst them. She was after all a married woman and one who lived by her pen at that. The loneliness that necessarily accompanied these endeavors reminds me of a statement from Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko: “a woman’s life is endless work and suffering. There is suffering and then more suffering. It’s better to expect it, you know… No one will take care of a poor woman—just ourselves.” These lines could easily have been spoken by Harriet Vane or by Sayers in response to her own situation.
In Wimsey’s role as a holy fool he can know—in an undeniably real, if unempirical manner—that Vane is innocent.
In Wimsey’s role as a holy fool (which I think Sayers most accurately describes when Wimsey calls himself a “king beaver”) he can know—in an undeniably real, if unempirical manner—that Vane is innocent. Wimsey can side-step enlightenment skepticism because of a form of mystical knowledge inadmissible in court, but which drives him to unearth the evidence finally needed to rescue the woman he loves. In a certain sense, he here performs both Tolkien and Chesterton. Wimsey has not sinned and grown older than God; instead, he knows Vane must be innocent because he loves her. And likewise, he knows that what is sad must be made untrue. This is folly. One might even dare to call it the folly of the Cross.
Peter tells Harriet that the only reason innocents have been convicted before is because he was not there to know their innocence and rescue them as he intends to rescue her. This does nothing to crack her armor. Even after she is exonerated, she continues to refuse his offers of marriage. Much like Sayers herself (and, perhaps necessarily, like us, her modern audience), she found this type of love personified in Wimsey’s holy foolishness to be truly unbelievable. Vane’s post-enlightenment skepticism and doubt overcome her credulity, despite this lover’s ability to rescue her from murder charges. Thankfully, Strong Poison is the end neither of Vane’s nor Wimsey’s stories. They both return in many of Sayers’s detective stories. And Sayers herself did eventually find a man with whom she could be happy. She may have only lived as her son’s aunt, but she carved out a niche for herself and her own holy folly in spite of the world that could not make sense of her.
T. Wyatt Reynolds is a Southern expat who is currently a doctoral student in history at Columbia University. Prior to the doctorate, he received his bachelor’s in history from Washington University in St. Louis and an MAR concentrated in the History of Christianity from Yale Divinity School.
