Time to Be in Earnest (16 page)

To the making of dictionaries there is no end, particularly under the aegis of the Oxford University Press, and I for one make no complaint. Books of quotations, in particular, afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure. Oxford University Press have been wise in their choice of editor, Peter bringing to his task a wide knowledge and appreciation of literature both old and contemporary.

I can think of a number of quotations which I should like to have seen included, and no doubt Peter will be inundated with suggestions from friends. All the more reason for a supplement or for an enlarged paperback edition. One quotation I would most like to see in any revised edition are the words of Henry James, writing of Anthony Trollope, “We trust to novels to maintain us in the practice of great indignations and great generosities.” It is an elevated ideal of fiction but, thinking it over, I am not sure that it is any longer true. Dickens could write a novel which would move his readers to pity or outrage and act as a spur to action, but surely today it is television which, sometimes powerfully, sometimes superficially, examines for us the dilemmas and concerns of our age, reflects our lives and opens to us the lives of others. Men and women who in Victorian England would have read Dickens are now watching
EastEnders
and
Panorama
.

In particular the so-called literary novel too often seems removed from the day-to-day concerns of ordinary people. The very description “literary novel” is, for many readers, an indication that the work is not intended for them. With some notable exceptions—David Lodge is one—the worlds of industry and commerce, the very means by which society gains the wealth which supports our art and literature, are alien to the modern novelist, perhaps because they are worlds few of us have experienced. Have we a responsibility to break free from our cabined preoccupations, our fascination with history and our literary exploitation of the evils of the past and address ourselves to more contemporary themes? Is there a novelist today who could write—or would try to write—
War and Peace
or Trollope’s
The Way We Live Now
with its brilliant portrayal of the financier Melmotte, the nineteenth-century Robert Maxwell?

Unless the novel, particularly the so-called literary novel, can reach
the hearts and minds of ordinary people, reading will increasingly become a minority interest. Novelists, too, surely have a duty to be intelligible if they are to address themselves to a wider audience than the educated middle class and the literary establishment. It would be futile, and indeed silly, to suggest that novelists today can recover the hierarchical and moral certainties of Victorian England. Some writers would argue that we can no longer comfortably write in the tradition of social realism because we no longer know what we mean by reality. I suppose the extremes of literary experimentation are some novelists’ way of explaining the arbitrariness and chaos of human existence, an attempt to express the inexpressible. Thomas Hardy wrote that the secret of fiction lies in the adjustment of things uneven to things eternal and universal. But what adjustment can a writer make if, in a world governed for him by chance and chaos, he is no longer able to believe in things eternal and universal?

Publication day for
A Certain Justice
is fast approaching. Faber sent a car to take me to the BBC, where I did an on-line interview from Manchester about the novel, to be used in the afternoon’s
Kaleidoscope
. Then to Camden Passage to meet Frances Fyfield and collect a dress for Monday’s launch together with a suit and a skirt and jacket. These should see me through most of the publicity.

In the evening Gavyn Arthur gave a dinner at the Carlton Club. I sat between two lawyers, both interesting, and one involved with mental health cases, and we had a long talk about psychopathy. I was glad that he thought my character Garry Ashe a believable portrait of a psychopath. He asked me whether I thought that Ashe would in the end feel any affection or love for Octavia or would begin to respond to her love for him, and I said I was sure not. He agreed. A psychopath who could feel love would not be a psychopath. Some, however, have felt strong affection for a dog. It occurs to me that I can’t remember ever reading about a murderer who gave houseroom to, or was fond of, a cat. The company at dinner was varied, the talk stimulating and interesting, and I met people I should be glad to meet again—which doesn’t always happen at the age of seventy-seven. The pity is that life is so busy that I know that I won’t.

A journalist from Australia arrived in the afternoon for an interview in connection with the publication of
A Certain Justice
. This is the beginning of the pre-publicity for my Australian tour next year.

In the evening to St. Anne’s Church in Soho for the launch of Volume 2 of
The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers
, edited by Dr. Barbara Reynolds, for which I have provided a preface. I can detect the influence of Dorothy L. Sayers in my own work together with that of three other writers: Jane Austen, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. I suppose few writers of Sayers’s generation have been more controversial. To her admirers she is the novelist who did more than any other of her age to lift the detective story from its status as an inferior puzzle to a respected craft with claims to be taken seriously as popular literature. Her detractors deplore what they see as the snobbery and élitism (she must be the only crime writer to include in her book a letter written in French which she does not deign to translate), focusing their dislike on her aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. She wrote her detective novels initially to make money and entertain, and neither is an ignoble aim. And the books do continue to entertain, not least as period popular literature giving us a lively picture of life in the 1920s and 1930s, that period which E. M. Forster described as “a long weekend between two wars.” The fact that, over forty years after her death, she can still provoke controversy and stimulate argument is a measure of the resilience of her talent and the vitality of her detective.

It is only in recent years, and thanks to her friend Barbara Reynolds, that we have come to respect her as a remarkable letter-writer. This correspondence covers the years 1937–43, the years of the Second World War, of air raids, the threat of invasion, difficult and congested travel, the blackout and inadequate or nonexistent domestic help. Nevertheless,
they were years of high creativity. She wrote plays, two religious dramas including the notorious radio drama
The Man Born to Be King
(the first time an actor had impersonated Christ on the radio), and two theological works as well as articles and hundreds of letters, most in her own hand. The expense of time and effort must have been considerable, deflecting energy from her creative work. But perhaps for Dorothy L. Sayers, as for others, letter-writing was a form of creativity. For someone like myself who has an almost pathological dislike of initiating or replying to correspondence, and does it badly, this is difficult to understand.

And prolific letter-writers, if they achieve fame or notoriety, leave treacherous hostages to fortune. A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence. And we adapt our style to our correspondent. Philip Larkin does not write in the same terms to Kingsley Amis as he does to Charles Monteith, his editor at Faber, or to Barbara Pym. Jane Austen could write with perfect confidence and candour only to Cassandra and the shafts of asperity, cynicism, even of malice, could not have been openly expressed in any other way. In that society, dependent on family and neighbours for entertainment and a social life, discretion and more than a little hypocrisy were necessary if life were to go smoothly, let alone agreeably. Jane Austen may write, “I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow me,” but she would not have wrinkled her nose when they met. “Her sweetness of temper never failed,” wrote her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh. On the contrary, it failed frequently, and if it hadn’t we would not have had the six great novels.

As a result of editing Dorothy L. Sayers’s letters, Barbara Reynolds was able to solve three of the mysteries which have always surrounded her: Who exactly was the William White who was the father of her illegitimate son John Anthony? Why was it not possible for them to marry? Why did she choose Southbourne in Hampshire as the place of birth when, as far as we know, she had no contact with that town?

William White was not the rough, ill-educated motor mechanic he has sometimes been made out to be, but he does appear to have been something of an irresponsible cad. Dorothy and he became lovers on the rebound from her disastrous and unconsummated affair with John
Courtos, and in the spring of 1923 she found that she was pregnant. Barbara Reynolds suggests that it may have been only then that she discovered that White was already married and had, in fact, a daughter. He asked his wife to come to London to celebrate the anniversary of their wedding—they seem to have lived apart for much of the time while remaining on good terms—and he then confided in her about Dorothy’s pregnancy and asked her to help. This, with surprising generosity, she agreed to do. Mrs. White invited Dorothy to come to Southbourne for the last stages of her pregnancy, took a room for her at a guest house and arranged for her brother, who was a doctor, to attend the birth, which took place in a nursing home. It was not revealed to him that he had been engaged to deliver his brother-in-law’s child and Mrs. White pledged to keep the baby’s existence a secret, and did so until after Dorothy’s death in December 1957. It was only then that she wrote to her daughter, revealing to her that she had a half-brother. In 1991 that daughter, now Mrs. Napier, decided to write to Anthony. But the letter, which was sent care of the publishers, Victor Gollancz, was returned unopened. John Anthony had then been dead for seven years.

This must have been a traumatic and utterly miserable part of Dorothy’s life. She was both egotistical and proud, and now found herself in the humiliating position of any woman who had loved unwisely and been careless or unlucky enough to become pregnant. But I doubt whether, in Sayers’s case, it was love; Courtos had cured her of that debilitating waste of spirit.

To have to rely on her lover’s wife must have been particularly galling. No wonder, in the novels, Sayers’s alter ego Harriet Vane makes a number of caustic comments about the humiliating burden of gratitude. It is difficult to know whether Dorothy really got to like Mrs. White—in many ways a companion in fortune since they had both been victims of the same feckless, irresponsible man—or whether she accepted her kindness always with a deep if unacknowledged resentment. There is a surprisingly ungracious reference to her benefactress in a letter to Ivy Shrimpton when she had returned to London after leaving Anthony in Ivy’s care. “I was a bit weary yesterday, because I came home to find that the fool I’d let my flat to had locked up the keys inside the flat.” Mrs. White had in fact been living there to send on letters to Dorothy and to post her letters from London, notably to her parents. Both of them died without ever knowing that they had a grandson. Mrs. White’s daughter Valerie was with her mother in London and Barbara Reynolds records
that she remembered the flat clearly, in particular a cat called Agag, whose name, Dorothy told her, means “he who treads lightly,” and that there was a large supply of children’s books in the flat. If Dorothy provided those it shows a sympathetic understanding of a child’s needs.

Some mysteries remain, principally why Dorothy waited until she was returning to work to leave her son in the care of her cousin Ivy Shrimpton. Had she been pressed to have him adopted—then the easiest way out—and later relented? If so, one would like to think that the relationship gave her greater pleasure in her later life than in fact proved the case. She received neither disinterested affection nor support from any of the men important to her, including her husband and her son. Small wonder that in Lord Peter Wimsey she created a fantasy figure with whom she could safely fall in love. She moved on from him in later life but she never repudiated him. Unlike the other men in her life, he never let her down.