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Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers (1927)

‘Pardon my Stevensonian manner.’

‘Begin right at the beginning, if you will, please. I have a very trivial mind. Detail delights me. Ramifications enchant me. Distance no object. No reasonable offer refused…’
(Wimsey’s rambling manner)

‘I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness, don’t you see, which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an’ suicide. Very natural, healthy pursuit—not too strenuous, not too sedentary; trains and invigorates the mind.’ (Chapter 4)

‘You’re a noticing one, aren’t you?’ said Mrs Cropper. ‘Make a good waiter, you would—not meaning any offence, sir, that’s a real compliment from one who knows.’
(Chapter 10)

Plot summary

This is the third Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L. Sayers. It is a very long, convoluted story about a will which involves understanding a complex family tree which goes back to the late eighteenth century.

It opens with Wimsey and his good friend, Detective Charles Parker, having a meal in a cheap Soho restaurant and arguing about the behaviour of a doctor in a murder case. Their argument prompts a chap dining alone at the next table to introduce himself as a doctor who has had a similar experience and Wimsey promptly asks him to tell his story.

He was physician to an elderly lady dying of cancer who’d had several operations. She was attended by a nurse who he fell in love with and he thought the old girl had months left to live. But then the woman’s great-niece dismissed the nurse, and two servants, replaced her with a new nurse and took over full-time care of her herself. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the old lady died, leaving everything to her great-niece.

The physician was, understandably, suspicious and insisted on a post-mortem and full inquest. However, both found no evidence of foul play and his conscientiousness rebounded on him as the small village community closed ranks to defend the great-niece and accuse him of meddling, throwing in the idea that he had neglected caring for the lady because of his affair with her first nurse. His clients started to drop him and eventually he was forced to sell the practice altogether which is why he finds himself unemployed in a cheap restaurant in Soho.

Wimsey is immediately grabbed by this (to be frank) boring and banal story and won’t let it go. The unnamed physician finishes his story and leaves without introducing himself or giving the names of any of the people in his tale.

So Wimsey gets in touch with a new character, a spinster lady named Miss Alexandra Katharine Climpson, to investigate, by going to Somerset House and searching for deaths which match these circumstances. (It is typical of Wimsey, and Sayers’ sense of humour, that Wimsey pranks his friend Detective Parker by inviting him to come and meet old Miss Climpson in phrases which make it seem as if he has taken a mistress and set her up in a swanky flat, which Parker believes until the door to the flat in question is opened by a sweet little old lady, and he turns to see Wimsey’s face beaming at him.

After a lot of sifting Miss C identifies the participants as follows: the old lady who died was Miss Agatha Dawson; her great-niece is Mary Whittaker; the doctor who talked to them in the restaurant is Dr Edward Carr; the nurse he fell in love with and who was then dismissed is a Miss Philliter; the two servants who were dismissed are Bertha and Evelyn Gotobed. The small town where this all took place is Leahampton in Hampshire.

Wimsey then instructs Miss C to go down to Leahampton, take a room somewhere and make enquiries among the old gossips of the town about the Agatha Dawson affair – which she promptly does, taking a room with Mrs Budge of ‘Fairview’, and attending tea parties with the vicar, Mr Tredgold and his charming wife, and meeting such village luminaries as Miss Murgatroyd, Mrs Peasgood and so on. ‘Gossip’ is the word the characters themselves use.

‘It really is terrible, living in a little town like this,’ went on Miss Findlater, ‘so full of aspidistras, you know, and small gossip. You’ve no idea what a dreadfully gossipy place Leahampton is, Miss Climpson.’ (Chapter 5)

Miss C writes back to Wimsey that there’s no sense of foul play or no more than circulates in any circle of gossipy old ladies. At the same tea party she meets Miss Whittaker and is immediately impressed:

The first impression which Miss Climpson got of Mary Whittaker was that she was totally out of place among the tea-tables of S. Onesimus. With her handsome, strongly-marked features and quiet air of authority, she was of the type that ‘does well’ in City offices. She had a pleasant and self-possessed manner, and was beautifully tailored—not mannishly, and yet with a severe fineness of outline that negatived the appeal of a beautiful figure. (Chapter 5)

Miss C discovers that clever Miss Whittaker has a fan, an acolyte, the devoted Miss Findley who is encouraging her plan to quit Leahampton and set up a chicken farm where they can both live close to the soil (!)

Despite Parker pointing out that there is no evidence of any crime being committed, Wimsey is intrigued and decides to put a ‘fishing’ advert in the press to see what happens. It reads:

Bertha and Evelyn Gotobed, formerly in the service of Miss Agatha Dawson, of ‘The Grove,’ Wellington Avenue, Leahampton, are requested to communicate with J. Murbles, solicitor, of Staple Inn, when they will hear of SOMETHING TO THEIR ADVANTAGE.’

What happens is that a few days later the dead body of Bertha Gotobed turns up in undergrowth in Epping Forest. The local cops think she died of a heart attack since there are no marks on the body, no sign of foul play. But Wimsey is galvanised. He is now convinced that someone murdered Miss Dawson and is now covering their tracks by bumping off any witnesses.

Bertha’s landlady is called in to identify the body and confirms that the other Gotobed sister, Evelyn, got married and moved to Canada with her husband.

In a tree nearby Wimsey finds a very posh ham sandwich wrapped in paper, posher than Bertha’s class, alongside a bottle of Bass beer. And in her handbag a £5 note, again much above her station. In those days you could trace notes and the cops identify this one as one of a series paid out to a Mrs Forrest, living in South Audley Street.

So off Wimsey and Parker go to question her, Wimsey frivolously posing under the pseudonym Mr Templeton. Mrs Forrest is rich and self-possessed and explains that she is in the process of divorcing her husband and has an active lover. Wimsey makes a fuss about fixing drinks for them (behind a fashionable screen) and takes the opportunity of secreting a glass she’s handled out the window in order to retrieve it later and get her fingerprints and see if there are any fingerprints on the beer bottle: there aren’t…

Parker is still puzzled why Wimsey cares so much about the case and Wimsey explains that he has an entire library of books about murders and murderers, but they are only about the ones we know about. What about the thousands and thousands who get away with it because no crime is even suspected? This may be one of those. He is interested in it:

‘Because I believe this is the case I have always been looking for. The case of cases. The murder without discernible means, or motive or clue.’ (Chapter 8)

The plot is long and convoluted and long before the end I was wondering why I was bothering. Suffice to say it is about the old girl’s money, about the will she left, and involves her very extended family in so convoluted a manner that the book requires an extensive and confusing family tree of the Dawson family to help you understand…

Cast

  • Lord Peter Wimsey
  • Mervyn Bunter – his faithful man servant (served under him in the Great War)
  • Detective-Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard – ‘He’s the one who really does the work’, a ‘restraining presence’ on Wimsey’s over-exuberant impetuosity – ‘When he worked with Wimsey on a case, it was an understood thing that anything lengthy, intricate, tedious and soul-destroying was done by Parker’
  • Dr Edward Carr – doctor to Miss Agatha Dawson
  • Agatha Dawson – old lady dying of cancer, had had several operations, was reckoned to last another 6 months or so, but her great-niece dismissed her nurse, and two carers, the Gotobed sisters, and then Miss D suddenly dies
  • Miss Whittaker – the niece
  • Miss Findlater – devoted fan of Miss Whittaker, ‘a slight, fair girl, with a rather sentimental look—plump and prettyish’ – a ‘very gushing and really silly young woman’
  • Nurse Philliter – original nurse and carer for Miss Dawson, fell in love with Dr Carr, became engaged, was then dismissed
  • Miss Katherine Climpson – ‘a thin, middle-aged woman, with a sharp, sallow face and very vivacious manner. She wore a neat, dark coat and skirt, a high-necked blouse and a long gold neck-chain with a variety of small ornaments dangling from it at intervals, and her iron-grey hair was dressed under a net, in the style fashionable in the reign of the late King Edward’
  • Sir Andrew Mackenzie – Chief of Scotland Yard
  • Mr John Murbles – solicitor and friend of Wimsey, featured in ‘Clouds of Witness’, resident at Staples Inn
  • Superintendent Walmsley – officer in charge of the scene of Bertha’s body
  • Dorcas Gulliver – landlady of the murdered Bertha Gotobed
  • John Ironsides – was to have married Miss Bertha, a clerk on the Southern Railway
  • Mrs Forrest, living in South Audley Street – classy lady one of whose five pound notes was found in Bertha’s purse, getting divorced and has a lover yet inexplicably tries to seduce Wimsey
  • Mrs Piggin – landlady of the Fox and Hounds in Crofton
  • Jim Piggin – husband and landlord
  • Ben Cobling – 87, Miss Clara Whittaker’s groom for forty years
  • Mrs Cobling – 85, ‘a delightful old lady, exactly like a dried-up pippin’
  • Mr Probyn – Miss Whittaker’s solicitor and managed all Miss Dawson’s business in Croftover Magna, now retired to the Villa Bianca, Fiesole
  • Bishop Lambert of the Orinoco Mission
  • the Rev. Hallelujah Dawson – ‘an elderly West Indian of… humble and inoffensive… appearance’
  • Esmeralda – Cockney street urchin who protects Wimsey’s parked car for half a crown
  • Mr Towkington of Gray’s Inn – expert on property law – ‘a large, square man with a florid face and a harsh voice’
  • J. F. Trigg – solicitor in Bedford Row
  • Mrs Marion Mead – false name Mary Whittaker gives to the lawyer Trigg when she invites him to the empty house in Hampstead
  • Sir James Lubbock – scientist consulted by Wimsey in the research for his book, ‘The Murderer’s Vade-Mecum, or 101 Ways of Causing Sudden Death’
  • Sir Charles Pillington – Chief Constable of Hampshire
  • Mr Andrews – local photographer roped in to take photos of the body of Vera Findlater
  • local doctor – a ‘tutster’ who examines the body of Vera Findlater
  • Dr Faulkner – sent by Scotland Yard to double check the local man’s verdict, ‘a lean, grey badger of a man, business-like and keen-eyed’
  • Mr Stanniforth – Sacristan of the church of Saint Onesimus
  • Dewsby – head of the fingerprint department at Scotland Yard

Wimsey trivia

Wimsey is 37 (Chapter 15).

In the first book Wimsey very much smoked a pipe. Now he smokes stylish cigarettes, Sobranes. And cigars. Parker smokes a well-worn briar pipe.

Lord Peter paused, in the very act of ringing the bell. His jaw slackened, giving his long, narrow face a faintly foolish and hesitant look, reminiscent of the heroes of Mr P.G. Wodehouse. (Chapter 6)

Wimsey has bought a new car:

‘The new Daimler Twin-Six,’ said Lord Peter, skimming dexterously round a lorry without appearing to look at it. ‘With a racing body.’

Wimsey’s blether

In a characteristically arcane literary reference, Wimsey nicknames his new car ‘Mrs Merdle’ because it is very quiet or ‘makes no row’, and Mrs Merdle, in Charles Dickens’ novel ‘Little Dorrit’, is an arriviste i.e. newly rich, and causes a minor scandal by very noisily taking his seat in the theatre and his wife tells him to stop making a row. To be honest, this reference is so obscure I don’t really understand it…

But that may be part of the point of Wimsey’s countless fleeting cultural references, part of the point is the speed with which he drops them and races on, leaving most of his interlocutors thinking he’s mad.

‘It’s quite all right,’ he said apologetically, ‘I haven’t come to sell you soap or gramophones, or to borrow money or enroll you in the Ancient Froth-blowers or anything charitable. I really am Lord Peter Wimsey—I mean, that really is my title, don’t you know, not a Christian name like Sanger’s Circus or Earl Derr Biggers. I’ve come to ask you some questions, and I’ve no real excuse, I’m afraid, for butting in on you—do you ever read the News of the World?’
Nurse Philliter decided that she was to be asked to go to a mental case, and that the patient had come to fetch her in person. (Chapter 4)

Or else talks in elliptical telegraphese as here when he summarises his theory about Bertha Gotobed’s demise:

Said Wimsey: ‘We suggested shock, you know. Amiable gentleman met at flat of friendly lady suddenly turns funny after dinner and makes undesirable overtures. Virtuous young woman is horribly shocked. Weak heart gives way. Collapse. Exit. Agitation of amiable gentleman and friendly lady, left with corpse on their hands. Happy thought motor-car; Epping Forest; exeunt omnes, singing and washing their hands. Where’s the difficulty?’ (chapter 8)

Or just general-purpose facetiousness, as here when he rings up Dr Carr:

‘Hullo! hullo—ullo! oh, operator, shall I call thee bird or but a wandering voice?… Not at all, I had no intention of being rude, my child, that was a quotation from the poetry of Mr Wordsworth… well, ring him again… thank you, is that Dr Carr?… Lord Peter Wimsey speaking… oh, yes… yes… aha!… not a bit of it… We are about to vindicate you and lead you home, decorated with triumphal wreaths of cinnamon and senna-pods…’

Presumably this is intended to be funny and endearing but well before I was halfway through this novel I’d concluded that Wimsey really is a tiresome berk and to give up reading any more.

‘Be thou as chaste as ice and have a license as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. I am not a dangerous driver. Buck up and get your leave. The snow-white horsepower foams and frets and the blue bonnet—black in this case—is already, in a manner of speaking, over the border.’ (Chapter 11)

‘Sorrow vanquished, labour ended, Jordan passed. Buzz off, my lad. No, Charles, I will not wait while you put on a Burberry. Back and side go bare, go bare, hand and foot go cold, so belly-god send us good ale enough, whether it be new or old.’

He often sounds a bit like the Fool in King Lear i.e. so arcane and scatter-brained as to sound mad.

‘Well, well—we’ll have a spot of lunch and write a letter to Mr Probyn and another to my good friend Bishop Lambert of the Orinoco Mission to get a line on Cousin Hallelujah, Smile, smile, smile. As Ingoldsby says: ‘The breezes are blowing a race, a race! The breezes are blowing—we near the chase!’ Do ye ken John Peel? Likewise, know’st thou the land where blooms the citron-flower? Well, never mind if you don’t—you can always look forward to going there for your honeymoon.’ (Chapter 12).

Or:

‘Well now, as to the medical problem—the means. I must say that up to now that appears completely insoluble. I am baffled, Watson (said he, his hawk-like eyes gleaming angrily from under the half-closed lids). Even I am baffled. But not for long! (he cried, with a magnificent burst of self-confidence). My Honour (capital H) is concerned to track this Human Fiend (capitals) to its hidden source, and nail the whited sepulchre to the mast even though it crush me in the attempt! Loud applause. His chin sank broodingly upon his dressing-gown, and he breathed a few guttural notes into the bass saxophone which was the cherished companion of his solitary hours in the bathroom.’
Parker ostentatiously took up the book which he had laid aside on Wimsey’s entrance.
‘Tell me when you’ve finished,’ he said, caustically.

It’s almost as if he’s brain damaged.

Wimsy’s flippancy

Sayers loses no opportunity to make Wimsey frivolous and flippant. He is given to extended comic fantasias, satirically quoting poems, adverts, newspapers headlines, in youthful high spirits, while his interlocutors have to wait until he’s quite finished before they can get a word in. And the reader, also, has to wait before he gets to the point.

This can get tiresome. Take this reply to Parker who says there’s nothing to the death of this old lady, to which Wimsey is saying that, on the contrary, he suspects there is. But this is how he puts it

‘You’ve got an official mind, Charles,’ replied his friend. ‘Your official passion for evidence is gradually sapping your brilliant intellect and smothering your instincts. You’re over-civilised, that’s your trouble. Compared with you, I am a child of nature. I dwell among the untrodden ways beside the springs of Dove, a maid whom there are (I am shocked to say) few to praise, likewise very few to love, which is perhaps just as well.’ (Chapter 6)

All of which is a humorous misapplication of a famous poem by William Wordsworth, She dwelt among the untrodden ways if, humorous, that is, you find this kind of long-winded, literary byplay humorous. In the same way that the following quote is a humorous reference to Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, ‘The Raven’.

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep on saying the same thing, Charles. It bores me so. It’s like the Raven never flitting which, as the poet observes, still is sitting, still is sitting, inviting one to heave the pallid bust of Pallas at him and have done with it.’ (Chapter 14)

Bookishness

Like Agatha Christie, Sayers has her characters repeatedly make references to books, crime stories, murder mysteries and so on, thus emphasising the artificiality of the entire story.

‘Oh, by one of those native poisons which slay in a split second and defy the skill of the analyst. They are familiar to the meanest writer of mystery stories.’

‘Outlet,’ said Wimsey, energetically, ‘hi! taxi!… outlet—everybody needs an outlet—97A, St. George’s Square—and after all, one can’t really blame people if it’s just that they need an outlet. I mean, why be bitter? They can’t help it. I think it’s much kinder to give them an outlet than to make fun of them in books—and, after all, it isn’t really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.’ (Chapter 3)

‘That’s so. Well, there’s only one thing that could prevent that happening, and that’s—oh, lord! old son. Do you know what it works out at? The old, old story, beloved of novelists—the missing heir!’ (Chapter 11)

‘[She] gets the said minions to polish her off before she can do any mischief.’
‘Yes, but how?’
‘Oh, by one of those native poisons which slay in a split second and defy the skill of the analyst. They are familiar to the meanest writer of mystery stories.’ (Chapter 11)

Or references to specific books:

At intervals the patient Bunter unpacked himself from the back seat and climbed one of these uncommunicative guides to peer at its blank surface with a torch—a process which reminded Parker of Alan Quartermain trying to trace the features of the departed Kings of the Kukuanas under their calcareous shrouds of stalactite. (Chapter 12)

Epigraphs

Of course the most bookish thing about this novel is the epigraphs. Each of the 23 chapters is prefaced by epigraphs from a deliberate and show-off range of sources, including half a dozen or more from Shakespeare, George Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Don Quixote, Samuel Butler, Tennyson, Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, as well as outliers such as Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the popular novelists Gilbert Frankau and Edmund Pearson, the 17th century jurist Sir Edward Coke, the statesman Edmund Burke, 18th century playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

As you can see, this is an ostentatiously eclectic and showy selection.

Sherlock

This bookish referentiality is epitomised by repeated references to Sherlock Holmes, as if invoking his name somehow lays his ghost, whereas it tends to do the opposite and trigger comparisons of the present novel with Conan Doyle’s masterpieces, against which it mightily suffers.

‘Good gracious!’ cried Charles, ‘it’s perfectly obvious—’
‘Shut up, Sherlock,’ said his friend,

‘Anyhow, curious cases are rather a hobby of mine. In fact, I’m not just being the perfect listener. I have deceived you. I have an ulterior motive, said he, throwing off his side-whiskers and disclosing the well-known hollow jaws of Mr Sherlock Holmes.’ (Chapter 2)

‘I told you I’d be turnin’ up again before long,’ said Lord Peter, cheerfully. ‘Sherlock is my name and Holmes is my nature.’ (Chapter 4)

‘I must say that up to now that appears completely insoluble. I am baffled, Watson (said he, his hawk-like eyes gleaming angrily from under the half-closed lids).’
(Chapter 19)

Lesbians?

Delving deeper into the Dawson family, Wimsey and Parker discover that old Agatha lived for many years with Clara Whittaker, a fierce, mannish rider to hounds. Is there any hint that they were lesbians? Or was two unmarried women living together for many years taken at face value a hundred years ago?

Lord Peter and Parker looked with considerable interest at the rather grim old woman sitting so uncompromisingly upright with the reins in her hand. A dour, weather-beaten old face, but certainly handsome still, with its large nose and straight, heavy eyebrows. And beside her, smaller, plumper and more feminine, was the Agatha Dawson whose curious death had led them to this quiet country place. She had a sweet, smiling face—less dominating than that of her redoubtable friend, but full of spirit and character. Without doubt they had been a remarkable pair of old ladies. (Chapter 11)

And here’s her devoted old groom remembering her:

‘Straight as a switch, with a fine, high colour in her cheeks and shiny black hair—just like a beautiful two-year-old filly she was. And very sperrited. Wonnerful sperrited. There was a many gentlemen as would have been glad to hitch up with her, but she was never broke to harness. Like dirt, she treated ’em. Wouldn’t look at ’em, except it might be the grooms and stablehands in a matter of ’osses. And in the way of business, of course. Well, there is some creatures like that…. The Lord makes a few on ’em that way to suit ’Is own purposes, I suppose. There ain’t no arguin’ with females.’

And his wife’s view:

‘Often she used to say to me, ‘Betty,’ she said, ‘I mean to be an old maid and so does Miss Clara, and we’re going to live together and be ever so happy, without any stupid, tiresome gentlemen.’ And so it turned out, sir, as you know…’

And the Chief Constable’s:

He put his hand down behind the cushions of the car and pulled out an American magazine—that monthly collection of mystery and sensational fiction published under the name of The Black Mask.
‘Light reading for the masses,’ said Parker.
‘Brought by the gentleman in the yellow boots, perhaps,’ suggested the Chief Constable.
‘More likely by Miss Findlater,’ said Wimsey.
‘Hardly a lady’s choice,’ said Sir Charles, in a pained tone.
‘Oh, I dunno. From all I hear, Miss Whittaker was dead against sentimentality and roses round the porch, and the other poor girl copied her in everything. They might have a boyish taste in fiction.’

The female perspective

Old spinster Mrs Climpson is given a number of insights or perceptions about the female experience. Early on she has a sad piece of autobiography about the severe limitations placed on women of her generation, which reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s powerful feminist polemic, Three Guineas.

‘A dear old friend of mine used to say that I should have made a very good lawyer,’ said Miss Climpson, complacently, ‘but of course, when I was young, girls didn’t have the education or the opportunities they get nowadays, Mr Parker. I should have liked a good education, but my dear father didn’t believe in it for women. Very old-fashioned, you young people would think him…

‘My dear father would be surprised to find his daughter so business-like. He always said a woman should never need to know anything about money matters, but times have changed so greatly, have they not?’ (Chapter 3)

And other miscellaneous insights from an ageing spinster’s point of view:

With her long and melancholy experience of frustrated womanhood, observed in a dreary succession of cheap boarding-houses, Miss Climpson was able to dismiss one theory which had vaguely formed itself in her mind. This was no passionate nature, cramped by association with an old woman and eager to be free to mate before youth should depart. That look she knew well—she could diagnose it with dreadful accuracy at the first glance, in the tone of a voice saying, ‘How do you do?’ (Chapter 5)

And:

Miss Findlater has evidently quite a ‘pash’ (as we used to call it at school) for Miss Whittaker, and I am afraid none of us are being flattered by such outspoken admiration. I must say, I think it rather unhealthy—you may remember Miss Clemence Dane’s very clever book on the subject?—I have seen so much of that kind of thing in my rather WOMAN-RIDDEN existence! It has such a bad effect, as a rule, upon the weaker character of the two… (Chapter 8)

And:

‘If Mary Whittaker were to marry, she would marry a rabbit.’ (Miss Climpson’s active mind quickly conjured up a picture of the rabbit—fair-haired and a little paunchy, with a habit of saying, ‘I’ll ask the wife.’ Miss Climpson wondered why Providence saw fit to create such men. For Miss Climpson, men were intended to be masterful, even though wicked or foolish. She was a spinster made and not born—a perfectly womanly woman.)

Miss Climpson had little difficulty in reconstructing one of those hateful and passionate “scenes” of slighted jealousy with which a woman-ridden life had made her only too familiar. “I do everything for you—you don’t care a bit for me—you treat me cruelly—you’re simply sick of me, that’s what it is!” And “Don’t be so ridiculous. Really, I can’t stand this. Oh, stop it, Vera! I hate being slobbered over.” Humiliating, degrading, exhausting, beastly scenes. Girls’ school, boarding-house, Bloomsbury-flat scenes. Damnable selfishness wearying of its victim. Silly schwärmerei swamping all decent self-respect. Barren quarrels ending in shame and hatred.

Miss Findlater the feminist

She talks to Miss Findlater who is a feminist:

‘If you only knew what a stupid lot they are! Anyway, I’ve no use for men!’ Miss Findlater tossed her head. ‘They haven’t got any ideas. And they always look on women as sort of pets or playthings. As if a woman like Mary wasn’t worth fifty of them! You should have heard that Markham man the other day—talking politics to Mr Tredgold, so that nobody could get a word in edgeways, and then saying, ‘I’m afraid this is a very dull subject of conversation for you, Miss Whittaker,’ in his condescending way. Mary said in that quiet way of hers, ‘Oh, I think the subject is anything but dull, Mr Markham.’ But he was so stupid, he couldn’t even grasp that and said, ‘One doesn’t expect ladies to be interested in politics, you know. But perhaps you are one of the modern young ladies who want the flapper’s vote.’ Ladies, indeed! Why are men so insufferable when they talk about ladies?’

‘I mean to be an old maid, anyhow,’ retorted Miss Findlater. ‘Mary and I have quite decided that. We’re interested in things, not in men.’

‘Men’s friendships—oh yes! I know one hears a lot about them. But half the time, I don’t believe they’re real friendships at all. Men can go off for years and forget all about their friends. And they don’t really confide in one another. Mary and I tell each other all our thoughts and feelings. Men seem just content to think each other good sorts without ever bothering about their inmost selves.”
Probably that’s why their friendships last so well,’ replied Miss Climpson. ‘They don’t make such demands on one another.’

‘I cannot help feeling that it is more natural—more proper, in a sense—for a man and woman to be all in all to one another than for two persons of the same sex. Er—after all, it is a—a fruitful affection,’ said Miss Climpson, boggling a trifle at this idea, ‘and—and all that, you know, and I am sure that when the right MAN comes along for you—’

‘Bother the right man!’ cried Miss Findlater, crossly. ‘I do hate that kind of talk. It makes one feel dreadful—like a prize cow or something. Surely, we have got beyond that point of view in these days.’

The male view

‘We talked for some time, Inspector, and I will not conceal from you that I found Miss Grant a very interesting personality. She had an almost masculine understanding. I may say I am not the sort of a man who prefers women to be brainless. No, I am rather modern in that respect. If ever I was to take a wife, Inspector, I should wish her to be an intelligent companion.’

Or our boys being more conventionally sexist:

‘When a woman is wicked and unscrupulous,’ said Parker, sententiously, ‘she is the most ruthless criminal in the world—fifty times worse than a man, because she is always so much more single-minded about it.’
‘They’re not troubled with sentimentality, that’s why,’ said Wimsey, ‘and we poor mutts of men stuff ourselves up with the idea that they’re romantic and emotional. All punk, my son. Damn that ’phone!’

Or Mrs Piggin, landlady of The Fox and Hounds in Crofton:

‘They don’t make them like that nowadays. Not but what these modern girls are good goers, many of them, and does a lot of things as would have been thought very fast in the old days,’

Newspapers

Christie mocks newspapers, giving her fictional newspapers satirical names. Mind you, so did lots of comic authors. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, William Boot works for the ‘The Daily Beast’. Anyway, in this story Detective Parker reads his news in the Daily Yell. Less humorous alternatives are the ‘Evening Views’ and the ‘Evening Banner’.

It girls

Never had he met a woman in whom ‘the great It’, eloquently hymned by Mrs Elinor Glyn, was so completely lacking.

Elinor Glyn was a bestselling author of popular romances which were often a trifle racy. She popularized the concept of the ‘It girl’, and had tremendous influence on early 20th-century popular culture ‘

Credit

‘Unnatural Death’ by Dorothy L. Sayers was published in 1927.

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Posted by Simon on October 31, 2025

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Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers (1926)

‘Lord Peter Wimsey in the witness-box—very distressin’ to feelin’s of a brother. Duke of Denver in the dock—worse still. Dear me! We’l, I suppose one must have breakfast.’

‘Wimsey would be one of the finest detectives in England if he wasn’t lazy.’
(The opinion of his friend, Detective Parker, Chapter 2)

‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘there’s no accounting for a man like Cathcart, no accounting at all. Brought up in France, you know. Not at all like a straight-forward Englishman.’
(Colonel Marchbanks on damn foreigners!)

‘If only I’d been at Riddlesdale none of this would have happened. Of course, we all know that he wasn’t doing any harm, but we can’t expect the jurymen to understand that. The lower orders are so prejudiced.’
(The Dowager Duchess’s attitude)

Lord Peter was awake, and looked rather fagged, as though he had been sleuthing in his sleep.

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ said Parker. ‘Can’t think why I said that—rotten bad form—beg pardon, old man.’
(Comedy posh boys)

‘The Sherlock Holmes of the West End’
(Popular newspaper’s description of Wimsey)]

‘…a series of unheard-of coincidences…’
(Sir Impey aptly describes the plot)

‘In the majority of cases of this kind the evidence is confused, contradictory; here, however, the course of events is so clear, so coherent, that had we ourselves been present to see the drama unrolled before us, as before the all-seeing eye of God, we could hardly have a more vivid or a more accurate vision of that night’s adventures.’

Introduction

‘Clouds of Witness’ is the second Lord Peter Wimsey novel. It is longer than the first and even more convoluted. It has a long subtitle which reads: ‘The solution of the Riddlesdale mystery with a report of the trial of the Duke of Denver before the House of Lords for murder’ and it is just that.

Right at the start, there is a really long verbatim account of the inquest held on the death of one Captain Denis Cathcart which sets the whole story in motion. And right at the end of the narrative, the trial of Peter Wimsey’s brother, the sixteenth Duke of Denver, in the House of Lords (a duke can only be tried by a jury of his peers i.e. other lords) stretches over several chapters.

In this and other ways the Wimsey stories feel verbose and windy, littered with set pieces which are described at some length. Compare and contrast with her rival, Agatha Christie, whose works and prose style got steadily more pithy and focused.

Setup

Wimsey is 33. After the tribulations of the case described in book one, about the body in the bath, he went for a three month holiday on Corsica, living the simple life. He’s en route back to Blighty and has only just checked into a hotel in Paris, when his man servant, Bunter, reads the paper and discovers that his brother, Gerald, the 16th Duke of Denver, has been arrested for murder! Bunter books them onto the first flight leaving Paris for London.

On the flight they read a detailed account of the inquest, which allows Sayers to insert a detailed account of the events surrounding the alleged murder.

It’s a country house murder and also a closed circle murder, in the classic style. Gerald had invited half a dozen friends to a shooting lodge he’d hired for the summer (Riddlesdale Lodge). In the inquest these guests are called one by one to give their version of events but a fairly clear narrative emerges: one of the guests was a Captain Denis Cathcart who had been engaged for eight months to Gerald and Peter’s sister, Lady Mary ‘Polly’ Denver (five years younger than Peter).

All went well with the normal round of breakfast, walks, spot of shooting, big dinner etc until the night in question (Wednesday 13 October into Thursday 14 October). Late on this night the other guests overheard Gerald and Cathcart having a flaring row, Cathcart stomping off through the house’s french windows into the night and the pouring rain, while Gerald went up to his bedroom and banged his door in a fury, ignoring the couple of other chaps who’d come out into the hallway to ask him what all the fuss was about.

At the inquest Gerald explains that that evening he’d received a letter from an old chum from Oxford who’s now working out in Egypt, Tommy Freeborn. This Freeborn had only just read about Lady Mary’s engagement to Cathcart (he’s working as an engineer far up the Nile) and was writing to say that once, on holiday in Paris, he’d met this Cathcart and from others in his circle learned that he was notorious for cheating at cards. Now this might not bother you or me very much (I assume all card games are a cheat of a sort) but this accusation, in this posh class, was the greatest insult a man could receive, at this time.

So Gerald goes straight up to Cathcart’s bedroom, knocks, and is struck straightaway by Cathcart’s own distracted attitude and filthy mood. Quite obviously something is bothering him as well (what the something is, we will only learn right at the end of the book). Anyway, Gerald’s accusations about cheating trigger a rant from Cathcart who says he won’t stay under this roof another minute etc etc and storms down the landing, down the stairs, across the living room, through the french windows and out into the pouring rain, with Gerald yelling after him before storming back into his own bedroom and slamming the door.

So that’s part one of the scene. Next part is that in the wee small hours, about 3am, some people hear creaking of doors and footsteps and, at the inquest, Gerald admits, with huge implausibility, that he felt like going for a bit of a stroll, in the rain, at 3am.

This is important because the next thing the guests know there’s the sound of a gunshot and when several of them go downstairs, they find Gerald bending over a body just outside the french windows, a body which turns out to be Cathcart, shot through the lungs.

When the police arrive and do a search of the grounds they find a little way away, in a clearing, the revolver which shot Cathcart, a handkerchief and lots of blood. And it is Denver’s revolver which, he tells the cops, he usually keeps lying around in his desk drawer.

But here the inquest throws up contradictory information because the Lodge’s gamekeeper, John Hardraw, explicitly says he heard a shot about 10 to midnight, 3 hours before the one Lady Mary claims woke her up.

So did Wimsey’s angry brother shoot Colonel Cathcart dead? Why did the witnesses claim to have heard two different gunshots at widely separate times? And if Gerald didn’t do it, who did? And why?

Reading the detailed account of the inquest which conveys all these facts covers the time it takes Wimsey to fly from Paris to London, catch a train to wherever in the country this posh house is (Riddlesdale, nearest station Northallerton), get a taxi, and then make a dramatic entrance! Having read it all, Wimsey sums it up to the surprised house party guests in his best honking Bertie Wooster impersonation:

‘I say, Helen, old Gerald’s been an’ gone an’ done it this time, what?’

Developments

Evidence of a mystery man Parker and Wimsey thoroughly explore the grounds of the Lodge and come across evidence that a tall man broke into the grounds, probably shot Cathcart and for reasons unknown dragged his body up to the house before running back to the wall surrounding the estate, climbing up and over spiked railings where he cut himself and left half his belt snagged on the spike. In the shrubbery where the police found the gun, Wimsey notices a little cat-shaped piece of jewellery on the ground.

Motorcycle There are the tracks of a motorcycle and sidecar and, separately, a local vicar has reported to the police that his motorcycle plates have been stolen. Parker and Wimsey nickname this unknown man Number 10 on the basis of his large footprints.

Grider’s Hole and Mr Grimethorpe So Parker and Wimsey split up: Wimsey goes exploring the surrounding villages, in the course of which he visits a place called Grider’s Hole and comes across the extremely disagreeable Mr Grimethorpe who keeps bullies and dogs to guard his land and terrorises his (beautiful) wife and child. Why? What have they got to do with anything?

Paris Meanwhile, Parker travels to Paris to check out Cathcart’s flat – interviewing his concierge and neighbour in St. Honoré – interview his bank manager and review his accounts (which tell a familiar story of pre-war affluence which gradually declines during the war, until Cathcart reports generating income from unknown sources – gambling?).

But his breakthrough comes when he signs of sleuthing and goes to do some underwear shopping for his sad spinster sister and finds himself looking in the window of a jewellers shop and recognising the spitting image of the little cat jewellery they found in the ground of Riddlesdale Lodge.

He makes detailed enquiries within – Monsieur Briquet’s in the Rue de la Paix – and establishes that only 20 were made, and makes them go through their records till he establishes the one he’s interested in was bought in February, sold to an Englishman accompanied by a dazzling blonde. Now Parker knows from their background research on Cathcart that Lady Mary was in Paris at this exact time. Surely the Englishman who bought it for his girlfriend was Cathcart, and the girlfriend Lady Mary.

Back in London Wimsey and Parker are reunited, swap notes and generate new hypotheses for what might have happened on the fatal night. Then a) Wimsey goes off to see the Head of Scotland Yard while b) Parker waits for him. Two things happen:

Lady Mary confesses Parker’s wait stretches on and on and then the doorbell rings and he’s surprised at the arrival of Lady Mary arrives. For the past week or so she had taken to her bed at the Lodge claiming to be sick with a high temperature. So he’s very surprised to see her well and vehement. She gives a full confession to Parker leading up to the stunning revelation that she shot Cathcart – which he in fact refuses to believe, although she insists on it.

Wimsey is shot After his meeting with the Scotland Yard boss concludes, Peter is accosted by old friend Miss Tarrant, a loud Socialist, who hauls him off to the Soviet Club in Soho where, she says, there’s going to be a speech by Mr Coke, the Labour party leader, about converting the forces to communism. Over dinner there, there’s some light satire on contemporary literature, which namedrops Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, before Mary tells him all about a Mr Goyles, one of their leading young speakers, and goes on to make the revelation that this was the man Lady Mary was in a relationship with and all their friends expected them to get married. Wimsey is able to explain his side, which is he’d vaguely heard about all this while he was off at the war, but his family stepped in and broke up the match as completely unsuitable, which is why she became engaged to posh bounder Cathcart on the rebound.

At that moment Mr Goyles enters the club, Miss Tarrant spots him and goes over to introduce him. Wimsey notes that Goyles is tall and wearing a glove, maybe to hide an injured hand, so maybe he’s Number 10, the man whose traces in the grounds of Riddlesdale Lodge he and Parker detected.

As if to confirm his suspicions, Goyle takes a look in Wimsey’s direction, panics and bolts for the door of the club. Wimsey chases him out, and it turns into a chase through Soho alleyways, until Goyle turns and shoots Wimsey (in the shoulder). Wimsey is knocked sideways onto a nearby disused bedstead that’s outside a rag and bone shop and passes out.

Wimsey bounces back Next morning Wimsey is back in his Piccadilly apartment having spent the night in hospital (the Charing Cross Hospital) and been bandaged up and sedated. He’s feeling right as rain and holds court to Bunter, Parker, the Duchess (his rambling mother) and Lady Mary who now, finally, spills the beans. Mary (or Polly as Wimsey calls her) explains that 1) she had come to dislike Cathcart and had broken off the engagement; 2) on the night in question, she had made an arrangement to rendezvous with Goyle, elope and get married to him, she’d packed a bag and everything, which is why she was first on the scene of Gerald kneeling down over Cathcart’s body.

The gunshot she claimed she heard at 3am was pure fiction, made up on the spot to explain what she was doing out of bed, which was contradicted by everyone else at the inquest, her confusion and distress all explaining why she went back to bed and pretended to be ill (putting the thermometer in her hot water bottle when no-one was looking in order to fool the local doctor that she had a dangerous temperature, that kind of thing…)

Grimethorpe A big breakthrough in the story relates to the horrible domestic tyrant Grimethorpe. Wimsey had been puzzled why his wife emerged from the shadows of his dark kitchen when Grimethorpe went off to call his men and get his dogs set on Wimsey; his wife emerged terribly flustered and telling him to leave quickly, then changed her tune when she saw Wimsey in the lamplight, as if she initially mistook him for someone else. Now Wimsey speculates that Cathcart was having an affair with this lower class woman, that Grimethorpe had got wind of it – and broke into the grounds of Riddlesdale Lodge in order to kill Cathcart in revenge!!

This fits some of the facts: it renders both Goyle and Lady Mary (and Gerald, still languishing in prison awaiting trial) innocent of Cathcart’s murder. But can you see how contrived and awkward it is? Why would a man like Grimethorpe break in anywhere, why not confront Cathcart in full daylight somewhere, in one of the local villages, or make an official visit to the Lodge and humiliate him in front of all the other guests?

George Goyle’s story After the police put out an alert, Goyles was captured at Folkestone trying to leave the country and brought back to London. Wimsey, Parker and Mary go to interview him. His story is simple: he and Mary planned to elope, he told her to be ready at 3am in the grounds with a suitcase; it had to be that time because he was making a speech at a local Labour club and it would take a few hours to drive over. He broke into the Lodge grounds and was tiptoeing towards the house when he tripped over a body, feeling it, realised it was cold and dead. This panicked him, he turned and ran through the undergrowth and hoisted himself over the palings, cutting his hand and leaving his belt caught in the spikes, as Parker and Wimsey found.

So that is a believable version of events, although it puts Mary off Goyle for being such a coward (and for being so sullen and aggressive towards Wimsey who has graciously agreed not to pursue an action against him for shooting him), so that she formally returns his engagement ring.

Parker, Mary and Wimsey go on to lunch at the solicitor, Mr Murbles, where we have an extended description of the clever and successful barrister, Sir Impey Biggs in action. But the next step is for Wimsey to return to Yorkshire and do some more investigating of the horrible man Grimethrope, who they are all now suspecting of murdering Cathcart. They need a full confession in order to get Gerald off the hook…

In Yorkshire Wimsey and Bunter trawl the pubs of the market town nearest to Riddlesdale Lodge, namely Stapley. This takes a while, and includes comic portraits of various local yokel characters. Their aim is to build up an account of the movements of the horrible Mr Grimethorpe on the night of the murder, and it certainly becomes suspicious with Grimethorpe coming into town to do some business but then disappearing from his pub late at night, only to reappear in the early hours covered in mud, compatible with him having travelled to Riddlesdale, broken in, killed Cathcart in a struggle, and straggled back to his Strapley pub.

Groot They also learn of a man named Groot who claimed to see a man wandering over the fell late that night, so they decide to go an interview him and get a carter to give them a lift out to the track leading to Groot’s cottage.

The fog and the bog Basically they don’t get much out of this Groot, and decide to walk the not great distance to Grider’s Hole to confront Grimethorpe himself. What they hadn’t counted on is that they are no longer in Piccadilly – they are on a high fell in Yorkshire late on a November day. A thick fog suddenly descends, they get hopelessly lost and blunder into a bog where Wimsey gets trapped and starts to be sucked down. Bunter manager to carefully slide forward on solid tufts of grass and hold Wimsey arms as they both yell for help. Eventually out of the fog emerge three men who rescue them.

At Grimethorpe’s They turn out to Be Grimethorpe’s men who take him to the angry man’s house, who tries to turn them away, but his men point out the cops will clobber him if the men (Bunter and Wimsey) come a cropper, so they’re forced to take them in, clean and feed and give them a bed for the night, in fact Grimethorpe’s own bed in the marital bedroom.

The letter In the morning, while Bunter gets hot water to shave in from the kitchen, Wimsey idly takes a wad of paper stuffed in the sash of the window to stop it rattling, and is astonished to discover it is the missing letter from Tommy Freeborn. It can only possibly have gotten here if Gerald himself brought it here and used it as a window stopper.

Gerald has been there himself!! Hang on. Suddenly Wimsey sees the light. His brother Gerald was having an affair with Grimethorpe’s beautiful wife!!! That’s where he slipped out to on the night of the murder, that’s why he was coming back to the Lodge at 3am very suspiciously, that’s why he refuses to account for his movements: he is chivalrously protecting Mrs Grimethorpe (whose husband would murder her if he found out) as well as his own and his family’s reputation (Gerald is married, to Lady Helen (who no-one seems to like)).

Wimsey feverishly tries to persuade Mrs Grimethorpe to give evidence in Gerald’s trial but she is absolutely terrified for her life and at that moment Grimethorpe comes into the room, angry and suspicious as always.

So I think the reader now knows what happened: on the night in question:

  1. Gerald slipped out of the Lodge and across the moors to Gride’s Hole (two and a half miles away) where he had sex with Grimethorpe’s wife (!) taking advantage of the fact that Grimethorpe is away from home, staying the night in Stapley. When he tries to slip quietly into the Lodge he is astonished to trip over a corpse.
  2. Grimethorpe, strongly suspecting Gerald was sleeping with his wife, leaves the pub in Stapley and travels cross country to Riddesdale Lodge, breaks in and somehow confronts Cathcart, presumably mistaking him for Wimsey, and shoots him, panics and foots it back across country.
  3. Meanwhile, in a completely different storyline, young Goyles has arranged to elope with Lady Mary and she indeed comes down to the french windows with her suitcase packed but instead finds her brother kneeling over a dead body and, for a moment, thinks Gerald has killed Goyles – before she recovers and realises the body is Cathcart’s.

OK, but there are still holes, like: how did a revolver belonging to Gerald end up being used to shoot Cathcart? Grimethorpe had no access to it. So, how?

Gerald’s trial Bunter and Wimsey return to London and we are treated to an extended account of Gerald’s trial in the House of Lords (during which we learn it is set in the year 1920). In fact before that kicks off Wimsey has a revelation based on some old blotting paper he found in Gerald’s room which makes him race off to Paris, obviously something to do with Cathcart, who lived there – before returning breathlessly, hassling the American ambassador for an emergency visa to the States, and then, with mad implausibility, takes ship from Liverpool to America!

So we get a day of trial proceedings with various witnesses being cross-examined them, on I think the third day, the defence barrister, Sir Impey, asks for an adjournment because Wimsey has cabled to say he is flying back across the Atlantic with vital evidence! The press was already covering the trial of a duke, a great rarity, but now they go bananas about the mercy dash across the Atlantic with headlines like ‘Peer’s Son Flies Atlantic’, ‘Brother’s Devotion’, ‘Will Wimsey Be in Time?’

What evidence? What took him to Paris, then to America?

But while Wimsey is off gallivanting in New York, there’s a radical new development when Grimethorpe’s wife turns up, arriving at midnight at the London apartment of Mr Murbles, the defence solicitor, and when being admitted, saying she is ready to testify to save Gerald’s life, that he was with her for the crucial early hours of the fateful October night – even though she knows her husband may track her down and kill her for it.

A conference of Murbles, Parker and Lady Mary are torn because they want her evidence but are horrified at the danger she’s placed herself in. In the event, the next day she is kept in a separate room at the court (which is being held in the old hall in Parliament) to be held in reserve in case needed.

Later that morning Wimsey makes a dramatic entrance into the great hall, before the serried ranks of British aristocracy, marches up to the bar and presents his Big Piece of Evidence. This is a love letter Cathcart wrote to the Great Love of His Life bidding her adieu and saying that, since she dumped him for an American millionaire, life has no meaning and so he is going to commit suicide!

(This lover was the woman Wimsey realised was the statuesque blonde who the Paris jewellers sold the little cat mascot which Lady Mary swore she’d never seen before, the blonde accompanying Cathcart when he bought it. In Paris he managed to establish her name – Mademoiselle Simone Vonderaa – and then discovered that she had taken up with American millionaire – a Mr Cornelius Van Humperdinck – and that they’d both returned to New York. Which is where Wimsey tracked her down and, after much pleading, persuaded her to surrender Cathcart’s last letter, in effect a suicide note, which is now read out with dramatic impact to the audience of assembled peers of the realm.

Now you might have thought (or hoped) that this would be the end of the trial and the story, but you would be very much mistaken indeed. There are three more chunky chapters still to go and the trial itself barely falters.

I’m quite shagged out writing this much, so I won’t give away the end of the story and the final revelations. The whole thing is available online (see link below).

Cast

  • Lord Peter Wimsey
    • Bunter – his valet
  • Gerald ‘Jerry’ Denver, 16th Duke of Denver
    • James Fleming – his man
  • Helen, Duchess of Denver – wife of Gerald Wimsey, and so Lady Mary Wimsey’s sister-in-law and Lord Peter Wimsey’s sister-in-law – ‘whose misfortune it was to become disagreeable when she was unhappy’
  • Lady Mary Wimsey – sister of the Duke, ‘a very objectionable specimen of the modern independent young woman’
    • Ellen – her maid
  • The Dowager Duchess of Denver – ‘She was a long-necked, long-backed woman, who disciplined her hair and her children. She was never embarrassed, and her anger, though never permitted to be visible, made itself felt the more’
  • Captain Denis Cathcart – fiancé of Lady Mary, found shot dead after a furious row with Gerald
  • Miss Lydia Cathcart – the captain’s aunt, disapproved of him and his Parisian ways
  • Colonel Marchbanks
  • Mrs Marchbanks
  • Mr Theodore Pettigrew-Robinson – a county magistrate
  • Mrs Pettigrew-Robinson
  • Riddlesdale Lodge – a roomy, two-storied house, built in a plain style, and leased to Lord Denver for the season by its owner, Mr Montague, who has gone to the States
    • Ellen – the housemaid
  • The Honourable Freddy Arbuthnot – posh and dim
  • John Hardraw – the gamekeeper
  • Dr Thorpe
  • Inspector Craikes from Stapley
  • Detective-Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard, lives in a flat in Great Ormond Street
  • Mr Murbles – the solicitor
    • Simpson – his man-servant
  • Mr Foulis – local parson
  • Sir Impey Biggs – barrister, ‘the handsomest man in England, and no woman will ever care twopence for him’ – 38 and a bachelor
  • Dr Lubbock – the ‘analytical gentleman’ i.e. forensics
  • Monsieur Briquet – owner of jewellers shop in Paris
  • His shop assistant who sold the jewelled cat
  • Sir Andrew Mackenzie – the Chief of Scotland Yard who Wimsey goes to visit about his brother, before bumping into…
  • Miss Tarrant – ‘a good Socialist’ – ‘a cheerful young woman with bobbed red hair, dressed in a short checked skirt, brilliant jumper, corduroy jacket, and a rakish green velvet tam-o’-shanter’ – takes Wimsey to the Soviet Club
  • George Goyles – tall fair revolutionary who Wimsey chases through Soho before he turns and shoots him – turns out to have planned to elope with Lady Mary
  • Wilkes – under-gardener at Riddlesdown
  • Grimethorpe – surly, angry, violent owner of Grider’s Hole farmhouse
  • Mrs Grimethorpe – his stunningly beautiful wife who, it turns out, was having an affair with Gerald Denver
  • Greg Smith – landlord of the Bridge and Bottle
  • Mr Timothy Watchett – landlord of the Rose and Crown – ‘a small, spare, sharp-eyed man of about fifty-five, with so twinkling and humorous an eye and so alert a cock of the head that Lord Peter summed up his origin the moment he set eyes on him’ i.e. he’s a Londoner
  • Bet – barmaid at the Rose and Crown
  • Jem – ostler at the Rose and Crown
  • Sir Wigmore Wrinching – the Attorney-General
  • the Lord High Steward
  • Mr. Glibbery – assistant lawyer to Sir Impey Biggs
  • Grant – the pilot who flies Wimsey across the Atlantic
  • Mr Cornelius van Humperdinck – very rich and stout and suspicious
  • Mademoiselle Simone Vonderaa
    • Adèle – her maid, ‘thin-lipped and wary-eyed, denying everything’

Biographical trivia

Peter Wimsey was a Major in the army and had a breakdown before the end of the Great War. He has occasional flashbacks, PTSD.

Wimsey is five foot nine tall, Parker is 6 foot. Parker attended Barrow-in-Furness Grammar School (quite a contrast from Eton).

  • ‘Narrow grey eyes’
  • ‘Wimsey’s long, flexible mouth and nervous hands…’

Wimsey’s motivation:

Although he had taken to detecting as he might, with another conscience or constitution, have taken to Indian hemp—for its exhilarating properties—at a moment when life seemed dust and ashes, he had not primarily the detective temperament. (Chapter 4)

Achievements:

He was a respectable scholar in five or six languages, a musician of some skill and more understanding, something of an expert in toxicology, a collector of rare editions, an entertaining man-about-town, and a common sensationalist. (Chapter 4)

Cane:

His favourite stick—a handsome malacca, marked off in inches for detective convenience, and concealing a sword in its belly and a compass in its head. (Chapter 11)

Sir Impey

Charismatic leading barrister, Sayers gives him some satirical observation about lawyers.

‘I am doing my very best to persuade him, Duchess,’ said Sir Impey, ‘but you must have patience. Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.’ (Chapter 3)

‘Damn it all, we want to get at the truth!’
‘Do you?’ said Sir Impey drily. ‘I don’t. I don’t care twopence about the truth. I want a case.’ (Chapter 10)

Or the object of jokes:

‘I fear we may have to wait a few moments for Sir Impey,’ said Mr. Murbles, consulting his watch. ‘He is engaged in Quangle & Hamper v. Truth, but they expect to be through this morning—in fact, Sir Impey fancied that midday would see the end of it. Brilliant man, Sir Impey. He is defending Truth.’
‘Astonishin’ position for a lawyer, what?’ said Peter.
‘The newspaper,’ said Mr. Murbles… (Chapter 10)

Oscar

Sayers has a few pokes at the aristocracy. To my mind, these kinds of deprecating jokes made by aristocratic types about their own class always sound like Oscar Wilde.

‘It is possible, my lord, if your lordship will excuse my saying so, that the liveliness of your lordship’s manner may be misleading to persons of limited—’
Be careful, Bunter!’
‘Limited imagination, my lord.’
‘Well-bred English people never have imagination, Bunter.’
‘Certainly not, my lord. I meant nothing disparaging.’

Bookish connoisseur

The loving descriptions of books, attributed to bookish characters, are obviously by a connoisseur i.e. Sayers herself.

Cathcart’s books here consist of a few modern French novels of the usual kind, and another copy of Manon with what the catalogues call ‘curious’ plates.

Opposite the fireplace stood a tall mahogany bookcase with glass doors, containing a number of English and French classics, a large collection of books on history and international politics, various French novels, a number of works on military and sporting subjects, and a famous French edition of the Decameron with the additional plates.

All this stuff about the ‘plates’ – specialist knowledge.

Elsewhere Sayers mocks her own bookishness in the random stream-of-consciousness of the Dowager Duchess, where you can play Spot the Literary Reference.

‘What oft was thought and frequently much better expressed, as Pope says—or was it somebody else? But the worse you express yourself these days the more profound people think you—though that’s nothing new. Like Browning and those quaint metaphysical people, when you never know whether they really mean their mistress or the Established Church, so bridegroomy and biblical—to say nothing of dear S. Augustine—the Hippo man, I mean, not the one who missionized over here, though I daresay he was delightful too, and in those days I suppose they didn’t have annual sales of work and tea in the parish room, so it doesn’t seem quite like what we mean nowadays by missionaries—he knew all about it—you remember about that mandrake—or is that the thing you had to get a big black dog for? Manichee, that’s the word. What was his name? Was it Faustus? Or am I mixing him up with the old man in the opera?’ (Chapter 9)

Literariness

Wimsey is given to making literary references but then so is Charles Parker. The latter has an amateur interest in theology, so both men might make Biblical or scholarly references. This gives them a distinctive flavour, a bit off-putting for the general reader, you’d have thought.

‘There are many difficulties inherent in a teleological view of creation,’ said Parker placidly. (Chapter 3)

After which he went to bed, and read himself to sleep with a commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. (Chapter 5)

Wimsey quotes ‘The Merchant of Venice’:

From such a ditch as this,
When the soft wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise, from such a ditch
Our friend, methinks, mounted the Troyan walls,
And wiped his soles upon the greasy mud.

Refers to Sir Walter Scott’s ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’ and quotes lots of other songs and folk poems. He quotes a clerihew in its entirety.

‘What I like about Clive
Is that he is no longer alive—
There is a great deal to be said
For being dead.’

And music

As in the first book, Wimsey is depicted as knowledgeable about classical music.

He leaned on the wall and began whistling softly, but with great accuracy, that elaborate passage of Bach which begins ‘Let Zion’s children’. (Chapter 3)

Here he revived sufficiently to lift up his voice in ‘Come unto these Yellow Sands‘. Thence, feeling in a Purcellish mood, he passed to ‘I Attempt from Love’s Fever to Fly.’

The self-consciousness of detective fiction

‘Hitherto,’ said Lord Peter, as they picked their painful way through the little wood on the trail of Gent’s No. 10’s, ‘I have always maintained that those obliging criminals who strew their tracks with little articles of personal adornment—here he is, on a squashed fungus—were an invention of detective fiction for the benefit of the author. I see that I have still something to learn about my job.’ (Chapter 3)

‘Trouble?’ she said. ‘Why, you silly old Peter, of course I’m in trouble. Don’t you know they’ve killed my man and put my brother in prison? Isn’t that enough to be in trouble about?’ She laughed, and Peter suddenly thought, ‘She’s talking like somebody in a blood-and-thunder novel.’

I’m amazed that, just like Agatha Christie, Sayers apparently feels compelled to namecheck Sherlock Hlmles in every novel. He is like a ghost that every detective story has to raise in order to exorcise it – not once, but five times! Here’s Wimsey’s mother, the Dowager Duchess:

‘I think my mother’s talents deserve a little acknowledgment. I said so to her, as a matter of fact, and she replied in these memorable words: ‘My dear child, you can give it a long name if you like, but I’m an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it’s so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.’ (Chapter 6)

Here’s Parker waiting for Wimsey when he hears the door open and:

His first thought was that Wimsey must have left his latchkey behind, and he was preparing a facetious greeting when the door opened—exactly as in the beginning of a Sherlock Holmes story—to admit a tall and beautiful young woman, in an extreme state of nervous agitation… (Chapter 7)

Here’s Wimsey arguing with his brother:

‘I wish you’d jolly well keep out of it,’ grunted the Duke. ‘Isn’t it all damnable enough for Helen, poor girl, and mother, and everyone, without you makin’ it an opportunity to play Sherlock Holmes?’ (Chapter 11)

And the garrulous landlord of the xxx pub:

He smacked open a Daily Mirror of a fortnight or so ago. The front page bore a heavy block headline: THE RIDDLESDALE MYSTERY. And beneath was a lifelike snapshot entitled, ‘Lord Peter Wimsey, the Sherlock Holmes of the West End, who is devoting all his time and energies to proving the innocence of his brother, the Duke of Denver.’

Wimsey versus Poirot

Poirot is head and shoulders above Wimsey. I quite enjoyed reading some of the Wimsey novels but have two big objections:

1. Wimsey’s caricature poshboy speech becomes really irksome really quickly. And I don’t really believe in it either, don’t believe someone relatively clever could come across as such an upper-class twit.

2. Somehow this, and Wimsey’s general verbosity, feel like they get in the way of the story. In the two Wimsey novels I’ve read, I felt I didn’t follow the logic of numerous developments, something you rarely experience with Christie whose exposition is often clarity itself. For example, I didn’t follow why Wimsey went to visit Grimethorpe. It feels like numerous clues and elements in the plot are forced and contrived, while at the same time you’re trying to penetrate the fog of Wimsy’s silly manner. Here, for example, is the first time he comes to Gride’s Hole and finds one of Grimethorpe’s men blocking the big gate to the house. This is how Wimsey addresses him when he confirms that Grimethorpe lives in this house:

‘No, does he now?’ said Lord Peter. ‘To think of that. Just the fellow I want to see. Model farmer, what? Wherever I go throughout the length and breadth of the North Riding I hear of Mr. Grimethorpe. ‘Grimethorpe’s butter is the best’; ‘Grimethorpe’s fleeces Never go to pieces’; ‘Grimethorpe’s pork Melts on the fork’; ‘For Irish stews Take Grimethorpe’s ewes’; ‘A tummy lined with Grimethorpe’s beef, Never, never comes to grief.’ It has been my life’s ambition to see Mr. Grimethorpe in the flesh. And you no doubt are his sturdy henchman and right-hand man. You leap from bed before the breaking-day, To milk the kine amid the scented hay. You, when the shades of evening gather deep, Home from the mountain lead the mild-eyed sheep. You, by the ingle’s red and welcoming blaze, Tell your sweet infants tales of olden days! A wonderful life, though a trifle monotonous p’raps in the winter. Allow me to clasp your honest hand.’

Surely the gritty Yorkshire farm hand he’s addressing would be fully justified in punching Wimsey in the face, the patronising toff.

By contrast with all this, Christie is wonderfully crisp and clear in the presentation of her cases. More, Poirot feels like a kind of walking expression of the detecting principle; somehow, he epitomises the stories themselves. The stereotypical scenes where he brings all the suspects together in one room and goes through their stories one by one are not only fictionally effective, but feel like they penetrate to the essence of the detective story as a genre. They feel like X-rays through the body of the murder mystery genre. In this way Poirot is a profound figure, something approaching an archetype.

Wimsey is not. He is often an irritating pillock. The stories are OK, but the clutter of detail is not clarified by Wimsey in the same way that Poirot so acutely picks out details to help the reader. Instead it feels like quite hard work trying to pierce through Wimsey’s silly mannerisms and posh bluster to find out what’s going on.

I’ve mentioned Wimsey’s bookishness, his expertise in old editions and his endless dropping of literary and poetic quotes and tags and references. On the one hand you could say this is a cause of readerly enjoyment i.e. it adds to the multitextual feel, and it certainly gives him an Oxford literary vibe. But in a different mood, you could see it as more of the verbiage and clutter which obscures the stories.

Adventure

On the plus side, I suppose you can put the visceral thrills of some parts of the narrative. The scene where Wimsey and Bunter stumble into the swamp and Wimsey starts to get sucked down into it is, despite being corny as hell, thrilling and exciting. And you can see how the vivid description of Wimsey’s flight in a single-propellor plane across the Atlantic in a storm (broken into two parts by a chapter of the trial coming in the middle; piloted by a world-famous aviator named simply ‘Grant’) is also intended to be as thrilling as possible.

In other words, Sayers threw into her stories a good dollop of Bulldog Drummond / Sexton Blake thrills and spills that Poirot, fastidiously brushing an invisible speck of dust off his shiny spats, couldn’t be further from. I wonder if there’ll be similar thrills and spills episodes in the subsequent books…

Credit

‘Clouds of Witness’ by Dorothy L. Sayers was published in 1926 by T. Fisher Unwin.

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Posted by Simon on October 29, 2025

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Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers (1923)

His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.
(Chapter 1)

‘Hate anything tiresome happenin’ before breakfast. Takes a man at such a confounded disadvantage, what?’
(Chapter 1)

Lord Peter’s library was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London.
(Chapter 2)

‘Worse things happen in war. This is only a blinkin’ old shillin’ shocker.’
(Chapter 2)

‘I don’t think much of your burglary, Bunter,’ said Lord Peter. ‘Competent, of course, but no imagination. I want imagination in a criminal.’
(Chapter 5)

‘When anybody comes blackmailin’ you, Gerald, or your first deserted wife turns up unexpectedly from the West Indies, you’ll realize the pull of havin’ a private detective in the family. ‘Delicate private business arranged with tact and discretion. Investigations undertaken. Divorce evidence a specialty. Every guarantee!’
(Wimsey mocking his hobby to his brother Gerald, Chapter 9)

Parker and Lord Peter were at 110 Piccadilly. Lord Peter was playing Bach and Parker was reading Origen when Sugg was announced.
(Origen! The very highbrow references which sit oddly beside Wimsey’s upper-class attitudes)

The surest and simplest method of making a thing appear to have been done is to do it.
(A murderer’s advice, Chapter 13)

Posh

I knew Lord Peter Wimsey was posh – obviously that’s indicated by his title – but I didn’t realise quite how much of a posh caricature he was:

‘Good-night, sir—good-night, dear lady—it’s simply rippin’ of you to let me drop in like this.’

Wimsey’s comedy, stagey upper-classness is really rammed home on every page, what with his loyal butler, his fastidiousness about clothes and cuisine, his comically upper class family with a village fete-opening dowager duchess for a mother, and so on and so on. Indeed every time he opens his mouth it’s to drop his h’s in the classic upper-class huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ manner.

‘Six bloomin’ medicos contradictin’ each other in the box, an’ old Impey elocutin’ abnormal cases from Glaister and Dixon Mann till the eyes of the jury reeled in their heads!’

And everywhere the effortless confidence of the natural-born aristocrat to handle any situation and any person, no matter how unpleasant, without losing his poise.

‘I don’t, fathead,’ said Lord Peter, with the easy politeness of the real aristocracy.

Peter’s profile

Lord Peter Wimsey is the second son of Mortimer Wimsey, the 15th Duke of Denver, deceased, and his wife, now the Dowager Duchess of Denver. She resides at the family home, the Dower House, Denver Castle, along with her eldest son, Gerald, who inherited the title and became the sixteenth Duke of Denver. His appearance?

The fingers were long and muscular, with wide, flat joints and square tips. When he was playing, his rather hard grey eyes softened, and his long, indeterminate mouth hardened in compensation. At no other time had he any pretensions to good looks, and at all times he was spoilt by a long, narrow chin, and a long, receding forehead, accentuated by the brushed-back sleekness of his tow-coloured hair. Labour papers, softening down the chin, caricatured him as a typical aristocrat. (Chapter 3)

The name?

‘We always have a Peter, after the third duke, who betrayed five kings somewhere about the Wars of the Roses, though come to think of it, it ain’t anything to be proud of. Still, one has to make the best of it.’ (Chapter 4)

Peter had ‘the finest education’ – Eton and Balliol – and now resides at 110 Piccadilly West, in an apartment overlooking Green Park. He is attended by his loyal butler, Mervyn Bunter, as fastidious about Lord Peter’s clothes and shoes, ties and buttonholes and cane and hat, as Jeeves is for Bertie Wooster’s. For which he is paid the princely salary of £200 per annum.

Their relationship is explained a bit when we learn that Peter was a Major during the war and Bunter was his sergeant and batman. And even more, that Wimsey has shell-shock, and has vivid waking nightmares of life in the trenches, when Bunter has to calm him down, see him back to bed, and administer a sedative…

As to that cane:

‘I measured it with my stick—the gentleman-scout’s vade-mecum, I call it—it’s marked off in inches. Uncommonly handy companion at times. There’s a sword inside and a compass in the head. Got it made specially.’

Wimsey is a member of the Marlborough Club. He smokes a pipe.

With no work to occupy him, Lord Peter’s hobby is collecting rare books. But his real interest is an amateur activity as a freelance investigator or detective, a dilettante who solves mysteries for his own amusement, Wimsey is an archetype for the British gentleman detective. As the provincial solicitor Mr Wicks puts it, he is ‘a distinguished amateur of crime.’ And his mother:

The Duchess was always of the greatest assistance to his hobby of criminal investigation, though she never alluded to it, and maintained a polite fiction of its non-existence. (Chapter 1)

His motivation?

‘It’s a hobby to me, you see. I took it up when the bottom of things was rather knocked out for me, because it was so damned exciting, and the worst of it is, I enjoy it—up to a point. If it was all on paper I’d enjoy every bit of it. I love the beginning of a job—when one doesn’t know any of the people and it’s just exciting and amusing. But if it comes to really running down a live person and getting him hanged, or even quodded, poor devil, there don’t seem as if there was any excuse for me buttin’ in, since I don’t have to make my livin’ by it. And I feel as if I oughtn’t ever to find it amusin’. But I do.’ (Chapter 7)

These classic detectives tend to have a dim police officer as a foil: for Sherlock Holmes it’s Inspector Lestrade, for Hercule Poirot it’s Chief Inspector Japp. For Peter, its Inspector Sugg at Scotland Yard, narrow, unimaginative, inflexible and always wrong. Wimsey has even coined a term, ‘Suggery’, to describe obtuse, clue-missing dimness (Chapter 10).

On the plus side, Wimsey is good friends and works well with a completely different type of copper, young Detective Charles Parker.

To an outsider

Late in the story, Parker secures the services of a medical student, Piggott, who he takes to Wimsey’s apartment where he is overawed by the luxury. Here’s how he sees Wimsey:

The friend was embarrassing; he was a lord, to begin with, and his clothes were a kind of rebuke to the world at large. He talked the most fatuous nonsense, certainly, but in a disconcerting way. He didn’t dig into a joke and get all the fun out of it; he made it in passing, so to speak, and skipped 189away to something else before your retort was ready. He had a truly terrible man-servant—the sort you read about in books—who froze the marrow in your bones with silent criticism. (Chapter 10)

Quotes and literary references

Agatha Christie had an erratic education and did not go to university. Dorothy L. Sayers very much did go to university. Outstandingly clever at her boarding school, she won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with first class honours in medieval French.

(Despite her examination results, she was ineligible to be awarded a degree, as Oxford did not formally confer them on women. When the university changed its rules in 1920, Sayers was among the first to have her degree officially awarded.)

This is important because the Wimsey stories differ from Christie and others in the field, not just because Wimsey is such an extraordinarily posh upper-class caricature – but because he and other characters, and the narrator, continually drop cultural references left, right and centre.

It starts with the way Wimsey is a bibliophile i.e. a collector of rare original editions of rare and ancient books. In fact the opening scene of the first novel depicts Wimsey en route to an auction of precious books and briefing his butler about which ones matter to him:

‘The Folio Dante nor the de Voragine—here you are—see? ‘Golden Legend’—Wynkyn de Worde, 1493—got that?—and, I say, make a special effort for the Caxton folio of the ‘Four Sons of Aymon’—it’s the 1489 folio and unique.’ (Chapter 1)

Other quotes and references include:

what Lord Beaconsfield described as a masterly inactivity

The golden mean, Sugg, as Aristotle says, keeps you from bein’ a golden ass.

‘you know, dear—just the proverbial way of putting things—like ‘a saint abroad and a devil at home’—only the other way on, reminding one of the Pilgrim’s Progress.’

‘He’s tough, sir, tough, is old Joey Bagstock, tough and devilish sly’ from Dickens

Sayers has Freke cite ‘Sludge the Medium’, the dramatic poem by Robert Browning. A little later Tennyson appears, then Shakespeare (OK, Christie regularly quotes the obvious Shakespeare). But even her dim socialite characters are relatively well-read.

‘One demands a little originality in these days, even from murderers,’ said Lady Swaffham. ‘Like dramatists, you know—so much easier in Shakespeare’s time, wasn’t it? Always the same girl dressed up as a man, and even that borrowed from Boccaccio or Dante or somebody. I’m sure if I’d been a Shakespeare hero, the very minute I saw a slim-legged young page-boy I’d have said: ‘Odsbodikins! There’s that girl again!’’ (Chapter 7)

And the quotes aren’t just throwaway show-off references, they are frequently part of the woof and web of the character’s thoughts, for example the way the quote from Coleridge’s Xanadu crystallises the wider thought process going on in his mind:

He [Wimsey] traced out this line and that line of investigation—rivers running into the sand. They ran out from the thought of Levy, last seen at ten o’clock in Prince of Wales Road. They ran back from the picture of the grotesque dead man in Mr Thipps’s bathroom—they ran over the roof, and were lost—lost in the sand. Rivers running into the sand—rivers running underground, very far down—

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

At the breakthrough moment of the plot, Wimsey quotes the early Christian theologian Tertullian, entirely appositely.

Lord Peter Wimsey was not a young man who habitually took himself very seriously, but this time he was frankly appalled. ‘It’s impossible,’ said his reason, feebly; ‘credo quia impossibile,’ said his interior certainty with impervious self-satisfaction. (Chapter 8)

Later, after he cross-questions the medical student Piggott, Wimsey remarks that he remembers everything, ‘like Socrates’s slave’, a reference to Plato’s dialogue Meno.

In other words, the quotes aren’t bolted onto the narrative, but are a natural expression of how it thinks, of How Wimsey thinks. Of how the highly literate Sayers thought.

Even the unflamboyant professional, Parker, has surprisingly highbrow tastes.

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. (Chapter 7)

Music

And not just quoting literature, nursery rhymes, folk songs and limericks; also music.

Lord Peter finished a Scarlatti sonata, and sat looking thoughtfully at his own hands. The fingers were long and muscular, with wide, flat joints and square tips. When he was playing, his rather hard grey eyes softened, and his long, indeterminate mouth hardened in compensation. At no other time had he any pretensions to good looks, and at all times he was spoilt by a long, narrow chin, and a long, receding forehead, accentuated by the brushed-back sleekness of his tow-coloured hair. Labour papers, softening down the chin, caricatured him as a typical aristocrat.
‘That’s a wonderful instrument,’ said Parker.
‘It ain’t so bad,’ said Lord Peter, ‘but Scarlatti wants a harpsichord. Piano’s too modern—all thrills and overtones.’

This is the high culture that an expensive education buys you.

Freud

He roused himself, threw a log on the fire, and picked up a book which the indefatigable Bunter, carrying on his daily fatigues amid the excitements of special duty, had brought from the Times Book Club. It happened to be Sir Julian Freke’s Physiological Bases of the Conscience, which he had seen reviewed two days before. ‘This ought to send one to sleep,’ said Lord Peter; ‘if I can’t leave these problems to my subconscious I’ll be as limp as a rag tomorrow.’

Intellectual

Sayers goes out of her way to make Wimsey seem like an upper-class fool and yet, at other moments, he is given intensely intellectual cerebrations (i.e. ways of thinking).

And then it happened—the thing he had been half-unconsciously expecting. It happened suddenly, surely, as unmistakably, as sunrise. He remembered—not one thing, nor another thing, nor a logical succession of things, but everything—the whole thing, perfect, complete, in all its dimensions as it were and instantaneously; as if he stood outside the world and saw it suspended in infinitely dimensional space. He no longer needed to reason about it, or even to think about it. He knew it.

There is a game in which one is presented with a jumble of letters and is required to make a word out of them, as thus:

C O S S S S R I

The slow way of solving the problem is to try out all the permutations and combinations in turn, throwing away impossible conjunctions of letters, as:

S S S I R C

or

S C S R S O

Another way is to stare at the inco-ordinate elements until, by no logical process that the conscious mind can detect, or under some adventitious external stimulus, the combination:

S C I S S O R S

presents itself with calm certainty. After that, one does not even need to arrange the letters in order. The thing is done.

Or take the elaborate passage in Chapter 5, where Wimsey lays out all the possible scenarios which could explain the murder, in terms of five carefully worked-out hypotheses. But it isn’t just a brief paragraph, it goes on for page after page, it’s massive. And note how the posh huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ dropping of g’s and other upper-class mannerisms have completely disappeared. It reads like a textbook of logic. Here’s just part of it:

‘Yes,’ said Wimsey. ‘Then Possibility No. 3 is knocked on the head. There remain Possibility No. 1: Accident or Misunderstanding, and No. 2: Deliberate Villainy, of a remarkably bold and calculating kind—of a kind, in fact, characteristic of the author or authors of our two problems. Following the methods inculcated at that University of which I have the honour to be a member, we will now examine severally the various suggestions afforded by Possibility No. 2.

This Possibility may be again subdivided into two or more Hypotheses. On Hypothesis 1 (strongly advocated by my distinguished colleague Professor Snupshed), the criminal, whom we may designate as X, is not identical with Crimplesham, but is using the name of Crimplesham as his shield, or aegis. This hypothesis may be further subdivided into two alternatives.

Alternative A: Crimplesham is an innocent and unconscious accomplice, and X is in his employment. 97X writes in Crimplesham’s name on Crimplesham’s office-paper and obtains that the object in question, i.e., the eyeglasses, be despatched to Crimplesham’s address. He is in a position to intercept the parcel before it reaches Crimplesham. The presumption is that X is Crimplesham’s charwoman, office-boy, clerk, secretary or porter. This offers a wide field of investigation. The method of inquiry will be to interview Crimplesham and discover whether he sent the letter, and if not, who has access to his correspondence.

Alternative B: Crimplesham is under X’s influence or in his power, and has been induced to write the letter by (a) bribery, (b) misrepresentation or (c) threats. X may in that case be a persuasive relation or friend, or else a creditor, blackmailer or assassin; Crimplesham, on the other hand, is obviously venal or a fool.

The method of inquiry in this case, I would tentatively suggest, is again to interview Crimplesham, put the facts of the case strongly before him, and assure him in the most intimidating terms that he is liable to a prolonged term of penal servitude as an accessory after the fact in the crime of murder— Ah-hem! Trusting, gentlemen, that you have followed me thus far, we will pass to the consideration of Hypothesis No. 2, to which I personally incline, and according to which X is identical with Crimplesham.

This goes on for page after page – and even after the main disquisition is over, there’s a further discussion in similar tone and detail of whether Wimsey or Parker should go down to Salisbury to visit Mr Crimplesham.

‘Very well,’ said the detective, ‘is it to be you or me or both of us?’
‘It is to be me,’ said Lord Peter, ‘and that for two reasons. First, because, if (by Possibility No. 2, Hypothesis 1, Alternative A) Crimplesham is an innocent catspaw, the person who put in the advertisement is the proper person to hand over the property. Secondly, because, if we are to adopt Hypothesis 2, we must not overlook the sinister possibility that Crimplesham-X is laying a careful trap to rid himself of the person who so unwarily advertised in the daily press his interest in the solution of the Battersea Park mystery.’

Notice anything about the style? Gone are all the dropped h’s and upper-class affectations. Instead this is the plain prose of pure logic. It’s a revelation that this is what Wimsey, and Sayers, can be like when they want to.

Plot summary

Lord Peter Wimsey is on his way to an auction of antique books when his mother calls to say that an architect (actually a builder) named Thipps, has just found a naked corpse in his bath, in an apartment in Battersea. Intrigued, Wimsey gets his valet, Bunter, to go to the auction in his place while he takes a cab to Battersea.

Sure enough there is a naked man in Thipp’s bath, naked apart from a gold pince-nez on a chain. The police investigation is led by Inspector Sugg for whose slowness and obstinacy Wimsey has a healthy contempt. It’s Sugg who wonders whether the body is that of the well-known City financier Sir Reuben Levy, who has been reported missing from his house on the same night.

The investigation into Sir Reuben’s disappearance is being led by Inspector Charles Parker who is a friend of Wimsey’s.

Although the body in the bath superficially resembles Sir Reuben’s it quickly becomes clear that it is not him, and it initially appears that the cases may be unconnected.

Now Thipps’s flat is near a teaching hospital, St Luke’s, which suggests the possibility that the body might have been put in Thipp’s bathroom as a student prank. But this is contradicted by the surgeon and neurologist Sir Julian Freke, in charge of St Luke’s, who says no corpse is missing from his dissecting room.

In fact the body in the bath is eventually identified as the inmate of Chelsea workhouse who’d had an unpleasant accident (some scaffolding fell on his neck) and died a lingering death…

One red herring follows another, the biggest one being when Wimsey advertises in The Times for the owner of the pince-nez and gets a response from an elderly solicitor in Salisbury who he travels down to visit, with the comic effect that the old man refuses to believe Wimsey’s who he claims to be, until Wimsey is vouched for by his younger colleague. For a while one or either of them are suspects…

Another red herring relates to Thipp’s maid, Gladys Horrocks, who is discovered to have slipped out with her fancy man, Williams the glazier, and gone to a nightclub in Soho, which leads unimaginative Inspector Sugg to immediately arrest her.

And another one concerns a brash and confident American businessman based in London, one Mr John P. Milligan, who is a fierce business rival of Reuben’s and, at one stage, considered a suspect for this reason – despite the fact that he is charmed by the old Duchess into making a donation to the fund to restore her local parish church, and even to attend one of her village fetes.

We learn that bunter has an informed interest in cameras and uses the latest one that Wimsey buys him to take photos of fingerprints on suspect surfaces, then blow them up for analysis. A handy hobby for a gentleman detective’s man-servant.

A recurring comic thread is the loud, fearless abuse emitted by Thipp’s deaf old mother at anyone who goes near her.

There’s a long, long verbatim description of the inquest into the body in the bath, as attended by Parker and Wimsey’s mother, the Dowager Duchess.

Slowly out of the fog of details, and Wimsey’s own flippant attitude, clarity emerges until all the evidence starts to point towards the surgeon, Freke. Wimsey’s mother fills us in on some crucial backstory when she tells her son that Freke was in love with a young woman named Christine Ford, of a good country family, but that she fell in love with young handsome Levy and eloped with him, infuriating Freke, well… we have our motive, even though it happened 20 years earlier.

Slowly a series of circumstantial details create more links between the two cases, the unknown body in the bath and the mysterious disappearance of Levy.

It is Wimsey who connects the two but rather than go straight to the police, instead he goes to visit Freke in his capacity as nerve specialist, and tell him about the symptoms of his ongoing shell shock or PTSD, picked up in the recent war. This is another long dramatic scene because Wimsey manages to hint, through his answers to Freke’s extended questioning, that he (Wimsey) knows Freke is guilty. it leads up to a genuinely tense moment as Freke casually advises injecting a tranquiliser, and actually has a hypodermic in his hand and is about to stick it in Wimsey’s arm, when the latter grabs his hand in a vicelike grip (sic) and decides he won’t have the injection after all. Just as well; later, Freke confirms that it contained a lethal poison.

This is swiftly followed by another set-piece scene, in the cemetery where the dead man from the Chelsea workhouse was allegedly buried, which is the setting for his ghoulish disinterment. Various officials supervise the digging up of the coffin, its moving to an outbuilding, the bringing of a lamp and opening of the coffin, investigation of the body. The body is, as Wimsey predicted, not that of a pauper but of Reuben Levy.

But what really matters about the scene is the deliberately dramatic style Sayers writes it in, more Dickens than 1920s, with its gravel crunching underfoot and uneven headstones looming up out of the swirling fog, and the abrupt transition from the placid third-person narrator of most of the novel to a bracing second person.

The vile, raw fog tore your throat and ravaged your eyes. You could not see your feet. You stumbled in your walk over poor men’s graves.
The feel of Parker’s old trench-coat beneath your fingers was comforting. You had felt it in worse places. You clung on now for fear you should get separated. The dim people moving in front of you were like Brocken spectres.
‘Take care, gentlemen,’ said a toneless voice out of the yellow darkness, ‘there’s an open grave just hereabouts.’
(Chapter 12)

The identification of Reuben’s body, swapped for that of the pauper, clinches Freke’s guilt and so Wimsey tips off old Sugg who goes to make the arrest. In fact the cops are only in the nick of time because Freke, realising the game was up, was writing a complete confession and then planned to commit suicide by injecting the same poison he had intended for Wimsey.

Instead Freke is arrested and taken to prison, while Parker brings Wimsey the long suicide note the guilty man had written – which has the happy dual purpose of explaining every single detail of Freke’s cleverly-laid plan and thus tying up all the loose ends in a bow.

Except that, maybe it’s me but, I didn’t understand it. Even after carefully reading the ‘confession’ twice I have no idea why Freke went to the enormous trouble of lugging the corpse of the injured workhouse inmate up onto the roofs of the apartment block adjoining his hospital, and no idea at all why he then, for the lolz, decided to haul it through the open window of one of them, which he discovered was a bathroom.

What an idiot! The River Thames runs about 200 yards away from Prince of Wales Road where the hospital and Thipp’s apartment block were situated – why not dump it in there, last resting place of thousands of drownees and suicides. Why draw attention to a mysterious death right on his own doorstep?

In fact I don’t understand why he didn’t just murder Reuben and dump his body in the river. Why the whole elaborate and painstaking swapping of him for the body of the pauper, especially when Reuben was Jewish and so circumcised, while the body in the bath wasn’t.

If you understand why Freke did this and how the whole plot hangs together, please drop me a line to explain it, but until then I find the actual plot puzzlingly stupid. Good thing I don’t read detective stories for the plot but for the style, characterisation, themes and ideas and social history. The plots are nearly always pants.

Cast

  • Lord Peter Wimsey
  • Bunter – his valet
  • The Dowager Duchess – his mother – ‘She was a small, plump woman, with perfectly white hair and exquisite hands. In feature she was as unlike her second son as she was like him in character; her black eyes twinkled cheerfully, and her manners and movements were marked with a neat and rapid decision’
  • Gerald ‘Jerry’ Wimsey, sixteenth Duke of Denver – ‘a good, clean Englishman, sturdy and conventional, rather like Henry VIII in his youth’ – ‘The Duke considered his cadet rather degenerate, and not quite good form; he disliked his taste for police-court news’:

‘I do wish you’d keep out of the police courts,’ grumbled the Duke. ‘It makes it so dashed awkward for me, havin’ a brother makin’ himself conspicuous.’
‘Sorry, Gerald,’ said the other; ‘I know I’m a beastly blot on the ’scutcheon.’

    • Soames – family butler
  • Mr Thipps – working class builder living at 59, Queen Caroline Mansions, Battersea, opposite Battersea Park, who finds the dead body of a naked man in his bath
    • Gladys Horrocks – his maid
    • William Williams – Gladys’s ‘young man’, a glazier
  • Mr and Mrs Appledore – Thipps’ disapproving neighbours in the Mansions
  • Sir Reuben Levy – City financier, self-made man, a Jew, who disappears mysteriously from his house the same night the body is found in Thipps’s bath
  • Lady Reuben Levy née Christine Ford
    • Mrs Pemming
    • Miss Mabel
    • Mr Graves, valet
  • Inspector Sugg – obstinate unimaginative copper, Wimsey’s foil
  • Constable Cawthorn
  • Sir Julian Freke – directs the surgical side of big new St Luke’s hospital in Battersea, situated right behind Mr Thipp’s block of flats – in addition, known in Harley Street as a distinguished neurologist with a highly individual point of view, as expressed in the recently published book, Physiological Bases of the Conscience – ‘He was not only a distinguished man, but a striking figure, with his wide shoulders, upright carriage and leonine head’ – and Wimsey perceives him as: ‘A man taller than himself, with immense breadth of shoulder, and wonderful hands. A face beautiful, impassioned and inhuman; fanatical, compelling eyes, bright blue amid the ruddy bush of hair and beard’
    • John Cummings – Freke’s man-servant
  • William Watts – the dissecting-room attendant at the hospital
  • Dr Grimbold – police doctor
  • Detective Charles Parker – happy to work with Wimsey – ‘Mr Parker was a bachelor, and occupied a Georgian but inconvenient flat at No. 12A Great Ormond Street, for which he paid a pound a week’
    • Mrs Munns, who did for him by the day
  • Mr John P. Milligan – American businessman – London representative of the great Milligan railroad and shipping company – in some sense a rival of Reuben Levy
    • Scoot – his secretary
  • Mr Crimplesham – ancient solicitor in Salisbury – his pince-nez is found on the corpse in the bath
  • Mr Wicks – junior in Crimplesham’s office
  • Lady Swaffham – friends of the Duchess
  • Mrs Tommy Frayle – especially dim friend of the Duchess: ‘Dear me!’ said Mrs Tommy Frayle, with a little scream, ‘what a blessing it is none of my friends have any ideas at all!’
  • Mrs Freemantle – ‘wife of an eminent railway director, and celebrated for her ignorance of the world of finance. Her faux pas in this connection enlivened the tea parties of City men’s wives’
  • Mr Piggott – medical student
  • Mr Levett – represents the Home Secretary at the disinterment
  • The Master of the Workhouse
  • Dr Colegrove – the Workhouse doctor

Bookish

I thought it was just Agatha Christie who did this but Sayers, too, lards the book with characters who themselves refer to detective fiction, crime novels and so on. So I’m beginning to think it’s a feature or rule of the detective story genre itself that its characters are constantly referring to detective stories.

‘Look here, Wimsey—you’ve been reading detective stories; you’re talking nonsense.’ (Chapter 2)

‘No, I ain’t,’ said Lord Peter, sleepily, ‘uncommon good incident for a detective story, though, what? Bunter, we’ll write one, and you shall illustrate it with photographs.’ (Chapter 2)

‘I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn’t a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there’d have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning, but this being real life in a London November, you might as well expect footprints in Niagara.’ (Chapter 4)

‘In this case, the method of inquiry will be to pump the respectable gentleman in Balham, and if he should happen to be a single gentleman with a deaf housekeeper, it may be no easy matter to impugn the alibi, since, outside detective romances, few ticket-collectors and ’bus-conductors keep an exact remembrance of all the passengers passing between Balham and London on any and every evening of the week.’ (Chapter 5)

‘The neuroses, you know, are particularly clever criminals—they break out into as many disguises as—’
‘As Leon Kestrel, the Master-Mummer,’ suggested Parker, who read railway-stall detective stories on the principle of the ’busman’s holiday. (Chapter 6)

Sherlock

And none of these authors can seem to escape the overarching shadow of Sherlock Holmes. They feel compelled to namecheck him, as if warding off an evil spirit. Here’s Wimsey giving a running commentary on himself as he cancels plans to go to a rare books auction and instead gets dressed to investigate a new case.

‘Exit the amateur of first editions; new motive introduced by solo bassoon; enter Sherlock Holmes, disguised as a walking gentleman.’ (Chapter 1)

Here he is joking with Detective Parker:

‘I give you full credit for the discovery, I crawl, I grovel, my name is Watson.’ (Chapter 4)

Here’s his servant, Butler, complaining to Lady Levy’s servants:

‘Many’s the time I’ve sat up till three and four, and up again to call him early to go off Sherlocking at the other end of the country.’ (Chapter 4)

Wimsey himself, again:

‘Y’see,’ said Lord Peter, balancing a piece of duck on his fork and frowning, ‘it’s only in Sherlock Holmes and stories like that, that people think things out logically. Or’nar’ly, if somebody tells you somethin’ out of the way, you just say, ‘By Jove!’ or ‘How sad!’ an’ leave it at that, an’ half the time you forget about it.’ (Chapter 7)

And:

‘Hurray!’ said Lord Peter, suddenly sparkling. ‘I’m glad I’ve puzzled Parker. Gives me confidence in myself. Makes me feel like Sherlock Holmes. ‘Perfectly simple, Watson.’ (Chapter 9)

‘What’s the matter?’ asked the Duke, getting up and yawning.
‘Marching orders,’ said Peter, ‘back to town. Many thanks for your hospitality, old bird—I’m feelin’ no end better. Ready to tackle Professor Moriarty or Leon Kestrel or any of ’em.’ (Chapter 9)

And:

Lord Peter settled down to a perusal of his Dante. It afforded him no solace. Lord Peter was hampered in his career as a private detective by a public-school education. Despite Parker’s admonitions, he was not always able to discount it. His mind had been warped in its young growth by ‘Raffles’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes‘, or the sentiments for which they stand. (Chapter 11)

The constraints of fiction

‘And in short stories,’ said Lord Peter, ‘it has to be put in statement form, because the real conversation would be so long and twaddly and tedious, and nobody would have the patience to read it. Writers have to consider their readers, if any, y’see.’

Antisemitism

I have – maybe rather tiresomely – pointed out all the instances of what I take to be antisemitism in the novels of Agatha Christie, her repeated use of anti-Jewish tropes and stereotypes, even after the Second World War when you would have thought everyone would have been more sensitive on the issue.

Disappointingly, something similar is true of Sayers. Why is the City financier a Jew? There were plenty of Gentile millionaires. Why is he a self-made man who prompts contempt in a more aristocratic person like Freke? And why is he depicted as marrying the good Gentile girl Christine Ford, stealing her from Freke? To be charitable, it speaks to the way detective stories are made of clichés and stereotypes. To be less charitable, it shows that Sayers was happy to deploy antisemitic tropes, pandering to the values of the day, in order to give her story recognition and popularity.

The anti-Jewish animus is conveyed in a long speech given to the posh Dowager Duchess explaining the rivalry between Sir Reuben Levy and Julian Freke over the girl Christine:

‘Christine Ford, she was then, and I remember so well the dreadful trouble there was about her marrying a Jew. That was before he made his money, of course, in that oil business out in America. The family wanted her to marry Julian Freke, who did so well afterwards and was connected with the family, but she fell in love with this Mr Levy and eloped with him. He was very handsome, then, you know, dear, in a foreign-looking way, but he hadn’t any means, and the Fords didn’t like his religion. Of course we’re all Jews nowadays, and they wouldn’t have minded so much if he’d pretended to be something else, like that Mr Simons we met at Mrs Porchester’s, who always tells everybody that he got his nose in Italy at the Renaissance, and claims to be descended somehow or other from La Bella Simonetta—so foolish, you know, dear—as if anybody believed it; and I’m sure some Jews are very good people, and personally I’d much rather they believed something, though of course it must be very inconvenient, what with not working on Saturdays and circumcising the poor little babies and everything depending on the new moon and that funny kind of meat they have with such a slang-sounding name, and never being able to have bacon for breakfast…’ (Chapter 3)

But it isn’t just the Duchess’s view. Here’s Wimsey’s man, Bunter, buttering up Sir Reuben’s valet:

‘I agree with you, Mr Graves—his lordship and me have never held with being narrow-minded—why, yes, my dear, of course it’s a footmark, this is the washstand linoleum. A good Jew can be a good man, that’s what I’ve always said.’ (Chapter 4)

And here’s Wimsey himself, towards the end, explaining Freke’s long, long-standing resentment of Levy.

‘People are opinionated about side-issues, you know. I see red if anybody questions my judgment about a book. And Levy—who was nobody twenty years ago—romps in and carries off Freke’s girl from under his nose. It isn’t the girl Freke would bother about—it’s having his aristocratic nose put out of joint by a little Jewish nobody.’ (Chapter 10)

I know Bunter and Wimsey are broadly sympathetic to the Jewish character, I’m just left wondering why Sayers had the murdered financier be a Jew if she wasn’t catering to the crudest, melodramatic stereotypes.

A little feminism

‘Some blighter said hell knew no fury like a woman scorned. Stickin’ it on to women, poor devils. Sex is every man’s loco spot—you needn’t fidget, you know it’s true—he’ll take a disappointment, but not a humiliation.’

‘Stickin’ it on to women, poor devils.’ Well, it’s a gesture towards understanding how women were blamed in this culture. There’s not much of this kind of thing though. (In 1938 Sayers gave an address to a Women’s Society satirically titled ‘Are Women Human?’ which I hope to get round to reading and summarising, as an accompaniment to Virginia Woolf’s classic A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.)

The Great War and PTSD

It’s not only Wimsey who has prolonged shell shock or post-traumatic stress disorder. In the waiting room of Dr Freke, he sees:

By the fireplace sat a soldierly-looking young man, of about Lord Peter’s own age. 212His face was prematurely lined and worn; he sat bolt upright, his restless eyes darting in the direction of every slightest sound.

And then gets talking to a refugee from revolutionary Russia:

‘And you, monsieur? You are young, well, strong—you also suffer? It is still the war, perhaps?’
‘A little remains of shell-shock,’ said Lord Peter.
‘Ah, yes. So many good, brave, young men—’
(Chapter 11)

Credit

‘Whose Body?’ by Dorothy L. Sayers was published in 1923 by T. Fisher Unwin.

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Posted by Simon on October 27, 2025

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The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie (1922)

‘If that draft treaty turns up—we’re done. England will be plunged in anarchy!’
(Mr Carter, not stinting on the melodrama)

‘Neither of you will leave this room alive!’
(Mwah ha ha, laughed the fiendish baddie, twirling his moustaches)

Certainly Mr Brown’s organization was a far-reaching concern. The common criminal, the well-bred Irish gentleman, the pale Russian, and the efficient German master of the ceremonies! Truly a strange and sinister gathering!
(Yes, it’s the cosmopolitan members of a secret international organisation devoted to sowing anarchy and revolution!)

‘We’ve tried all the orthodox ways, yes. But suppose we try the unorthodox. Tommy – let’s be adventurers!’
(Tuppence coming up with the starting premise of the story)

Christie’s second novel

Published in 1922, ‘The Secret Adversary’ was Agatha Christie’s second novel. Her husband, Archie Christie, playfully encouraged her to write another one after the first one had been published to moderate success in 1920. That debut, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, had been a straightforward detective story and introduced what nobody yet suspected would become the phenomenally successful figure of Hercule Poirot.

By contrast, Christie’s publisher, John Lane, weren’t at all keen on the new one and the way it represented such a drastic switch of genres. Because ‘The Secret Adversary’ is a full-on, John Buchanesque thriller, a spy story, all about a sinister international organisation planning to overthrow the government and spread anarchy on the streets of England, complete with secret meetings, kidnap, fake identities, frantic car chases and shoot-outs. To call it melodrama is to understate the preposterousness of the plot. But it is also very funny.

Setup

Prologue aboard a doomed ship

It was 2pm on the afternoon of May 7, 1915. The American ocean liner Lusitania had been struck by two German torpedoes in succession and was sinking rapidly. A young woman stands by the lifeboats when she is approached by a man who gets talking to her then asks a desperate favour. He hands her a bundle of papers and says they are vital to the safety of Britain. If he doesn’t make it, she must hand it in to the American embassy. She gets into a lifeboat. The ship sinks. The mysterious prologue ends…

Enter Tommy and Tuppence

The scene cuts to a London tea rooms and a completely different tone, as we are introduced to two spiffing young people, Tommy Beresford and Prudence ‘Tuppence‘ Cowley. They knew each other before the War and have now made an arrangement to lunch together.

Here’s Tuppence:

They were an essentially modern-looking couple as they sat there. Tuppence had no claim to beauty, but there was character and charm in the elfin lines of her little face, with its determined chin and large, wide-apart grey eyes that looked mistily out from under straight, black brows. She wore a small bright green toque over her black bobbed hair, and her extremely short and rather shabby skirt revealed a pair of uncommonly dainty ankles.

Later on:

‘Where’s this young lady I’ve been hearing such a lot about?’
Tommy introduced Tuppence.
‘Ha!’ said Sir William, eyeing her. ‘Girls aren’t what they used to be in my young days.’
‘Yes, they are,’ said Tuppence. ‘Their clothes are different, perhaps, but they themselves are just the same.’
‘Well, perhaps you’re right. Minxes then—minxes now!’
‘That’s it,’ said Tuppence. ‘I’m a frightful minx myself.’
‘I believe you,’ said the old gentleman, chuckling, and pinched her ear in high good-humour. Most young women were terrified of the ‘old bear’, as they termed him. Tuppence’s pertness delighted the old misogynist.
(Chapter 27)

Here’s Tommy:

His bared head revealed a shock of exquisitely slicked-back red hair. His face was pleasantly ugly—nondescript, yet unmistakably the face of a gentleman and a sportsman. His brown suit was well cut, but perilously near the end of its tether.

And later on, Mr Carter describes Tommy to no less a personage than the Prime Minister, who is (impressively) kept informed of their investigations:

‘Outwardly, he’s an ordinary clean-limbed, rather block-headed young Englishman. Slow in his mental processes. On the other hand, it’s quite impossible to lead him astray through his imagination. He hasn’t got any—so he’s difficult to deceive. He worries things out slowly, and once he’s got hold of anything he doesn’t let go. The little lady’s quite different. More intuition and less common sense. They make a pretty pair working together. Pace and stamina.’

Let’s be adventurers!

So here Tommy and Tuppence are together in this tea room and they quickly discover that neither of them can get a job and so they are both broke. Tommy had hopes of inheriting from his rich uncle but they’ve had a falling out and he can’t get a job no matter how hard he tries.

There was a silence, and then Tuppence burst out:
‘Money, money, money! I think about money morning, noon and night! I dare say it’s mercenary of me, but there it is!’
‘Same here,’ agreed Tommy with feeling.

Bantering conversation leads them to cook up the idea of forming a company – The Young Adventurers, Ltd – offering to hire themselves out, so they put an ad in The Times.

‘Two young adventurers for hire. Willing to do anything, go anywhere. Pay must be good. No unreasonable offer refused.’

High-speed summary

Whittington The plot is full of yawning holes from the beginning. Their first client, a Mr Whittington, approaches after overhearing them. He gives them his card and Tuppence goes to see him in his office at The Esthonia Glassware Co. Whittington offers her a large sum to impersonate someone in Paris but when he asks her name, on a whim she replies with the name ‘Jane Finn’, a name Tommy causally mentions having heard someone mention in the street on the way to his tea with Tuppence. She repeats it now as a lark and is astonished at the result, for it completely startles Whittington. It’s the first inkling we have that this Jane Finn is at the centre of the plot.

Advertising for leads Clearly perturbed, Whittington offers Tuppence £50. She realises that he thinks she’s blackmailing him. He asks her to return the next day for details of the job, but when she goes back, his office has been closed. Clearly there’s something in this woman’s name so Tommy and Tuppence advertise for information about Jane Finn and receive two replies, from a Mr Carter and a Mr Julius Hersheimmer.

Carter’s briefing When they go to meet Carter Tommy recognizes him from his wartime service in British Intelligence and also that it isn’t his real name. ‘Carter’ describes the story of the Lusitania, confirming our suspicion that in the scene in the Prologue, the girl who received the vital documents was this Jane Finn and the man who gave it to her, a British agent.

The secret treaty Carter explains that the document is a top secret diplomatic treaty and, if its terms were revealed, it would trigger widespread protests, a general strike and the fall of the government. As such, it is gold dust to enemies of Britain and any secret organisations devoted to sowing chaos and revolution! In fact, he goes on to explain, there is exactly such a secret organisation in operation, led by a fiendish mastermind known only by the name… Mr Brown! (Shame Christie couldn’t think up something more operatic, more James Bondish.)

‘Here is a certain man, a man whose real name is unknown to us, who is working in the dark for his own ends. The Bolshevists are behind the Labour unrest—but this man is behind the Bolshevists. Who is he? We do not know. He is always spoken of by the unassuming title of ‘Mr Brown.’ But one thing is certain, he is the master criminal of this age. He controls a marvellous organization. Most of the Peace propaganda during the war was originated and financed by him. His spies are everywhere. (Chapter 4)

Having explained all this, Carter hires Tommy and Tuppence to find her and, if possible, reveal the identity of the mysterious Mr Brown. But they must beware!

Those people are absolutely desperate and incapable of either mercy or pity. I feel that you probably underestimate the danger, and therefore warn you again that I can promise you no protection. (Chapter 9)

The first thing Tuppence does with the advance Carter gives them, is check into the Ritz Hotel and treat herself to a blowout meal.

Hersheimmer They then get in touch with the second replier, Julius Hersheimmer. He turns out to be a rangy, confident American multimillionaire, the kind of guy you want on your team. He replied to their ad because he’s none other than Jane Finn’s cousin.

If you think about it the Lusitania sank in 1915 and it is 1920…. hmmm… Where has Jane got to in the intervening years?

Rita Vandemeyer Tommy and Tuppence’s investigating leads them to the home of Mrs Marguerite ‘Rita’ Vandemeyer. She is a smooth, classy woman.

A woman was standing by the fireplace. She was no longer in her first youth, and the beauty she undeniably possessed was hardened and coarsened. In her youth she must have been dazzling. Her pale gold hair, owing a slight assistance to art, was coiled low on her neck, her eyes, of a piercing electric blue, seemed to possess a faculty of boring into the very soul of the person she was looking at. Her exquisite figure was enhanced by a wonderful gown of indigo charmeuse. And yet, despite her swaying grace, and the almost ethereal beauty of her face, you felt instinctively the presence of something hard and menacing, a kind of metallic strength that found expression in the tones of her voice and in that gimlet-like quality of her eyes.

Vandemeyer has powerful connections, including Whittington and Sir James Peel Edgerton, the famous King’s Counsellor i.e. lawyer.

Convinced she’s something to do with the missing girl, Tuppence (improbably enough) gets a job as Mrs Vandemeyer’s maid. She discovers a young lad hanging round Vandemeyer’s block of flats who earns money as a runner and fetcher, and persuades him to help her out, something he’s eager to do once he realises it’s all like something from the movies.

‘Lumme!’ came ecstatically from Albert. ‘It sounds more like the pictures every minute.’
(Chapter 9)

Edgerton is a frequent visitor to Mrs Vandemeyer’s apartment and realises Tuppence is more than she seems. He cryptically suggests that Tuppence might be better off working for someone else, which none of us understand but leads T&T to visit Edgerton at his office for a longer talk.

Found out But when Tuppence goes back to work at Vandemeyer’s apartment, the latter discovers she’s a fake and pulls a gun on her, until Tuppence, plucky gal that she is, wrests the gun away.

Locked up but murdered Tuppence offers Vandemeyer a large bribe to spill the whereabouts of Jane Finn, but when Hersheimmer and Edgerton arrive at the apartment, she screams and faints. They leave her in her bedroom but lock her in, because of their fear of Mr Brown. But when they return in the morning, Vandemeyer is dead! Someone got to her somehow, through a locked door!

Hersheimmer and Tuppence? In the middle of this mayhem, Hersheimmer is attracted to Tuppence and even makes a proposal of sorts, which throws her into confusion.

‘What about marriage?’ inquired Julius. ‘Got any views on the subject?’
‘I intend to marry, of course,’ replied Tuppence. ‘That is, if’—she paused, knew a momentary longing to draw back, and then stuck to her guns bravely—’I can find some one rich enough to make it worth my while. That’s frank, isn’t it? I dare say you despise me for it.’
‘I never despise business instinct,’ said Julius. ‘What particular figure have you in mind?’
‘Figure?’ asked Tuppence, puzzled. ‘Do you mean tall or short?’
‘No. Sum—income.’
‘Oh, I—I haven’t quite worked that out.’ (Chapter 15)

Boris The pair had learned that another of Mrs Vendemeyer’s contacts is a man named Boris Ivanovitch. Tommy tails Boris to a house in Soho but here the tables are turned. He smuggles himself in past the guard on the door, then hides himself so as to listen in on a meeting of the famous secret organisation, learning that the members assembled amount to ‘the Inner Ring’! Tommy overhears just enough to hint at large plans for chaos and disruption, when someone from behind coshes him and knocks him out. When he comes to, he’s in a windowless room like a cell. He’s been taken prisoner!

Annette helps Tommy Tommy’s incarceration in this windowless, lightless cell goes on for a surprising amount for time, for several days. Periodically he is served a meal by a French serving girl who he eventually discovers is called Annette. As you might expect, she develops a soft spot for handsome Tommy until, in a convoluted scene, she helps him to escape but, as they get to the door out into the London street, her nerve fails her and she refuses to leave. She’s obviously petrified of the gang. She’ll go back into the house and tell them that he (Tommy) overpowered her.

Tommy at liberty Surreally Tommy emerges from the incarceration which had become to feel genuinely claustrophobic to the reader into the cool night air of Soho. He walks back to the Ritz hoping to share everything he overheard in the Soho house, only to find that Tuppence has just left in a hurry.

Off to Yorkshire Tommy and Hersheimmer find the telegram that caused Tuppence to leave so hastily. It’s a note claiming to have been written by Tommy, although he’s never seen it before.

‘Come at once, Moat House, Ebury, Yorkshire, great developments—TOMMY.’

So she’s gone to get the first train to Yorkshire, so Tommy and Hersheimmer take a taxi to King’s Cross and catch the next train. From this point onwards they are on the trail of Tuppence, trying to find her. The boys get off at Ebury station and trudge out to the address in the message Tuppence was acting on only to find it a spooky, old abandoned house. The locals haven’t seen hide nor hair of Tuppence, despite the boys ransacking the locality. They waste a week looking. Obviously it was a decoy.

Jane discovered Back in London after all this, it is Edgerton who discovers Jane Finn, who is in hospital, recovering from losing her memory after an accident. So that’s how the five years since the Lusitania incident passed – Jane had an accident which gave her amnesia! Convenient.

Now she tells Edgerton, Tommy and Julius where she hid the treaty – in a picture frame back at the Soho house – but when they go there they find instead an ironic message from Mr Brown.

Earlier, While, searching for writing paper in Julius’s drawer, Tommy had found a photograph of Annette. Tommy concluded that Annette is the real Jane Finn and the Jane Finn they met was a plant to stop their investigation. He gets an original copy of the telegram which was sent to Tuppence and sees that her destination was altered on the copy he read, to the place in Yorkshire. Originally it read ‘Astley Priors, Gatehouse, Kent’. So, without Julius, Tommy and Albert proceed to the correct destination.

Comrade Kramenin Meanwhile Hersheimmer had pursued his own leads and discovered the arrival in London of a Russian conspirator, Kramenin who they know is associated with the secret organisation. Hersheimmer inveigles his way into Kramenin’s suite of rooms at Claridge’s (another grand London hotel) then pulls a revolver in the best American style (a gun, he later tells the girls, that he calls ‘Little Willy’ – paging Dr Freud!).

She’s in Kent So Hersheimmer terrifies Kramenin into revealing that Jane is being held at this place in Kent, Astley Priors, Gatehouse, Kent. It is a rest home or sanatorium. Jane is being housed there because she has severe amnesia. He forces Kramenin at gunpoint down through the hotel and into his car which he gets his chauffeur, George, to drive down to Gatehouse in Kent. So both Tommy and Julius are heading to Kent, separately.

At Gatehouse Julius forces Kramenin to knock on the door of the house in Kent, which is opened by none other than Whittington. Kramenin tells him there’s a big panic on and he needs both the young women he’s holding i.e. Finn and Tuppence. Whittington demands to know whether these are ‘his’ orders, before sending an orderly to fetch the two girls who emerge wrapped in cloaks. As Julius comes forward to help them some of Whittington’s gang suddenly recognise him. He pushes the girls into the car and tells George to floor it as one of the goons draws a gun and fire as the car screeches down the drive, with Julius standing up in the back and firing off shots at the baddies. All very cinematic!

Car chase The drive back to London is hairy, with the baddies’ car trying to head them off and a shootout, with shots only missing out heroes by a hair’s breadth, one of them nicking Julius – ‘Shucks, ladies, it’s only a scratch’ etc. When the car slows down at a crossroads, to everyone’s amazement, Tommy climbs in over the back. He had been hiding in the bushes at Astley wondering what to do when Julius’s car drew up. He watched the girls being brought out and, as the car pulled away, jumped on the back. He’s been clinging on for dear life for the last half an hour!

So the goodies are all reunited: Tommy and Tuppence and Julius and Jane, and you don’t need to be clairvoyant to see them pairing off very nicely. But things take an odd turn when Tommy forces the girls out of the car at gunpoint, tells them to go to the nearest train station and catch a train to London and make their way to Sir James’s house. He has a bone to pick with Hersheimmer, namely confronting him with the accusation that he is a fake and Mr Brown…

Jane’s story The girls’ journey to London is quite exciting as they become convinced someone on the train is tailing them, then that someone has spotted them at Charing Cross station, and then that the taxi they’re in is deliberately rammed, and then that a supposed drunk is in fact following them as they arrive at Sir James’s.

But they make it to Sir James’s door, knock and are admitted by the suave old lawyer and it’s here that Jane tells her story: after receiving the packet, she became suspicious. Mrs Vandemeyer had been on the Lusitania and took a suspiciously close interest in Jane in the lifeboats and then on the ship which took them to Ireland. So she placed blank sheets in the original packet which the spy had given her, and hid  the treaty inside a magazine. Travelling from Ireland, Jane was mugged and taken to the house in Soho. To fool her captors, Jane faked amnesia and took to speaking only in French. She hid the treaty in the frame of a picture in her room, a scene from Faust, and has maintained her role as ‘Annette’ ever since.

Is Hersheimmer the baddy? The photo of Annette in Hersheimmer’s drawer and some deliberately suspicious behaviour Christie gives him, persuade Tuppence that maybe the nice, friendly American is the mysterious Mr Brown. When she runs her suspicious past the impeccably trustworthy Sir James, the latter agrees, adding the revelation that the real Hersheimmer was killed back in America, that they’ve been taken in by an imposter, and it was this imposter who killed Mrs Vandemeyer before she could spill the beans about the Secret Organisation.

So the narrative is pushing us with all its might towards suspecting Hersheimmer.

Mr Brown revealed! Tuppence and Sir James rush to the Soho house where they find the treaty where Jane said it would be, in the frame of the picture depicting a scene from Faust. But it is here, in the cell where Tommy was incarcerated, that Sir James identifies himself as the true Mr Brown! He had befriended them and lulled them into a complete sense of security.

Threats and suicide Now Sir James announces his plan to kill them, wound himself, and then blame it on the elusive Mr Brown. But unbeknown to him, Julius and Tommy are hiding in the room (!) and they now jump out and overpower Sir James! The big talking they had on the drive back from Kent had confirmed for Tommy that Hersheimmer was not Mr Brown and is who he claims to be. Hooray.

Thus caught in the act and condemned by his own confession, before they can stop him, Sir James commits suicide using poison concealed in his ring. Carter arrives shortly afterwards on the scene of the suicide and is saddened to learn that his old friend was also his bitterest foe.

He had entered the squalid room to find that great man, the friend of a lifetime, dead—betrayed out of his own mouth. From the dead man’s pocket-book he had retrieved the ill-omened draft treaty, and then and there, in the presence of the other three, it had been reduced to ashes…. England was saved! (Chapter 27)

The revolution that never happened A week or so later, Labour Day, which the conspirators had intended to be a day of revolution and chaos triggered by the publication of the incriminating treaty, passes off peacefully. And the papers are full of obituaries for the great lawyer and potential political leader, Sir James Peel Edgerton. As so often in thrillers, the real truth is carefully concealed from a credulous public.

Wedding bells The novel ends with a slap-up dinner at the Savoy Hotel, both Hersheimmer and Jane, and Tommy and Tuppence, engaged to be married. Carter arrives for the dinner accompanied by Tommy’s uncle who has been informed what a patriotic deed he has performed, and who heals their breach, announcing he is formally making Tommy heir to his country estate and fortune. Which is nice.

Money Remember how they were both stony broke when the novel ended. Well, after their sterling work for king and country, Mr Carter informs them they’ll both received very nice cheques. Plus Tommy being made heir apparent to his rich uncle. And as to work, Tuppence asks him:

‘What are you going to do, accept Mr Carter’s offer of a Government job, or accept Julius’s invitation and take a richly remunerated post in America on his ranch?’

To which Tommy replies, Neither. He’s going to stay in London and marry Tuppence!

Summary

What a ridiculous farrago. It makes Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books look like War and Peace.

I can’t help thinking that the best part of these early comic espionage novels is the first chapter while the characters are full of brio and humour and you feel anything could happen, before the long, convoluted plots get going.

Cast

Goodies

  • Lieutenant Thomas ‘Tommy’ Beresford – early 20s – young redheaded Englishman who fought in the Great War, wounded twice – slow but steady type
  • Prudence L. Cowley – known as ‘Tuppence’ – young woman with black bobbed hair, fifth daughter of Archdeacon Cowley of Little Missendell, Suffolk – like Christie, served in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) during the War – clever, quick and funny – ‘And as I’ve said before, and shall doubtless say again, little Tuppence can look after herself, thank you!’
  • Julius P. Hersheimmer, 35 – millionaire from America, seeking his first cousin Jane Finn, a girl he never met in America due to a family quarrel – ‘He was of middle height, and squarely built to match his jaw. His face was pugnacious but pleasant. No one could have mistaken him for anything but an American’
  • Jane Finn – 18, American woman we meet on the Lusitania being handed the packet of vital papers
  • Mr Carter – Englishman high up in the intelligence service and connected with the highest political powers – Carter is an alias
  • Sir James Peel Edgerton – MP and prominent London defence lawyer – socially and politically well connected, touted as a future prime minister – ”just a shade over average height, he nevertheless conveyed the impression of a big man. His face, clean-shaven and exquisitely mobile, was stamped with an expression of power and force far beyond the ordinary. Magnetism seemed to radiate from him’
  • Albert – lift boy at the building where Rita Vandemeyer lives, becomes helper to Tuppence (when she’s working undercover as a maid), then to Tommy (on his journey down to Kent)

Baddies

  • Mr Edward Whittington of the Esthonia Glassware Company – member of the conspirators who first encounters Tommy and Tuppence as they plan their joint venture over lunch in a restaurant – ‘a big man, clean shaven, with a heavy jowl. His eyes were small and cunning, and shifted their glance under her direct gaze’
  • ‘Mr Brown’ – the anonymous leader of the conspirators
  • Mr Kramenin – Russian Bolshevik agent in London, one of the conspirators, called Number One
  • Boris Ivanovitch, Count Stepanov – leading member of ‘the conspiracy’, who keeps in touch with Whittington and Rita
  • Mrs Marguerite Vandemeyer – a beautiful woman in society who followed Danvers on the Lusitania – the ‘Ruth’ referred to in a conversation between Winterton and Boris – takes her orders direct from ‘Mr Brown’
  • Dr Hall – runs the nursing home in Bournemouth where he took in the amnesia patient claimed to be a niece of Rita Vandemeyer, under the name Janet, for several years, where Hersheimmer goes to investigate and falls out of a tree (in a scene I haven’t included in my summary – of which there are many)
  • Conrad – the evil-faced doorkeeper of the house in Soho

Americans

Christie’s father was American – a wealthy stockbroker from New York – so she had a whole American side to her family and this explains why so many of her stories feature Americans, or have American connections. So it is here, where the imperilled heroine Jane Finn, and her handsome rescuer Hersheimmer, are true-blue Americans.

‘We’ll ask Miss Jane Finn to tell us the story that only Miss Tuppence has heard so far—but before we do so we’ll drink her health. The health of one of the bravest of America’s daughters, to whom is due the thanks and gratitude of two great countries!’

‘I love you now, Julius,’ said Jane Finn. ‘I loved you that first moment in the car when the bullet grazed your cheek…’

Bookishness

As I unfailingly point out, all Christie’s novels contain numerous ‘meta’ moments where the characters stop and comment that events, or thoughts or conversations are just the kind of thing that happen or are said in detective novels (or movies).

For the moment this paralysed the Young Adventurers, but Tuppence, recovering herself, plunged boldly into the breach with a reminiscence culled from detective fiction. (Chapter 5)

The sport was a new one to him. Though familiar with the technicalities from a course of novel reading, he had never before attempted to ‘follow’ anyone, and it appeared to him at once that, in actual practice, the proceeding was fraught with difficulties. Supposing, for instance, that they should suddenly hail a taxi? In books, you simply leapt into another, promised the driver a sovereign – or its modern equivalent – and there you were. In actual fact, Tommy foresaw that it was extremely likely there would be no second taxi. (Chapter 7)

But Tuppence had sharp eyes, and had noted the corner of a threepenny detective novel protruding from Albert’s pocket, and the immediate enlargement of his eyes told her that her tactics were good, and that the fish would rise to the bait. (Chapter 9)

Ten minutes later the lady was ensconced comfortably on her bed, smoking cigarettes and deep in the perusal of Garnaby Williams, the Boy Detective, which, with other threepenny works of lurid fiction, she had sent out to purchase. (Chapter 9)

Julius listened spellbound. Half the dishes that were placed before him he forgot to eat. At the end he heaved a long sigh. ‘Bully for you. Reads like a dime novel!’ (Chapter 18)

‘By the way, Julius,’ she remarked demurely, ‘I – haven’t given you my answer yet.’
‘Answer?’ said Julius. His face paled.
‘You know – when you asked me to – marry you,’ faltered Tuppence, her eyes downcast in the true manner of the early Victorian heroine. (Chapter 27)

Or the movies:

‘A crook?’ he queried eagerly.
‘A crook? I should say so. Ready Rita they call her in the States.’
‘Ready Rita,’ repeated Albert deliriously. ‘Oh, ain’t it just like the pictures!’
It was. Tuppence was a great frequenter of the cinema. (Chapter 9)

Dr Hall looked at Julius. Everything that he was for the moment incapable of saying was eloquent in that look.
‘No,’ said Julius, in answer to it, ‘I’m not crazy. The thing’s perfectly possible. It’s done every day in the States for the movies. Haven’t you seen trains in collision on the screen?’ (Chapter 14)

‘Because for the last two months I’ve been making a sentimental idiot of myself over Jane! First moment I clapped eyes on her photograph my heart did all the usual stunts you read about in novels.’ (Chapter 20)

You don’t mean as the crooks have got her?’
‘They have.’
‘In the Underworld?’
‘No, dash it all, in this world!’
‘It’s a h’expression, sir,’ explained Albert. ‘At the pictures the crooks always have a restoorant in the Underworld.’ (Chapter 23)

As well as at least one reference to the greatest fictional detective of them all:

‘Now, obviously this woman, whoever she was, was saved.’
‘How do you make that out?’
‘If she wasn’t, how would they have known Jane Finn had got the papers?’
‘Correct. Proceed, O Sherlock!’ (Chapter 6)

Two, in this case.

‘What have we for lunch? Stew? How did I know? Elementary, my dear Watson – the smell of onions is unmistakable.’ (Chapter 17)

Cunning stunts

Obviously ‘stunt’ was an active part of 1920s slang.

‘I did the usual stunt. Said: ‘What’s happened?’ And ‘Where am I?’
(Chapter 9)

‘I guess I’m a mutt,’ said Julius with unusual humility. ‘I ought to have thought of the false name stunt.’ (Chapter 13)

‘How about some high-class thought transference stunt? The way I reason is this: as a last chance they’ll let Jane Finn escape in the hope that she’s been shamming this memory stunt, and that once she thinks she’s free she’ll go right away to the cache.’ (Chapter 18)

As a last chance they’ll let Jane Finn escape in the hope that she’s been shamming this memory stunt. (Chapter 22)

I left a note for Julius, in case he was Mr Brown, saying I was off to the Argentine, and I dropped Sir James’s letter with the offer of the job by the desk so that he would see it was a genuine stunt. (Chapter 27)

Envoi

‘It has been fun, hasn’t it, Tommy? I do hope we shall have lots more adventures.’
‘You’re insatiable, Tuppence. I’ve had quite enough adventures for the present.’
‘Well, shopping is almost as good,’ said Tuppence dreamily.
(Chapter 28)

Credit

‘The Secret Adversary’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Bodley Head in January 1922.

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Posted by Simon on September 5, 2025

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Leonard Woolf: A Life by Victoria Glendinning (2006)

Leonard and Virginia were agreed that his chief fault was cowardice, and hers was snobbery.
(page 151)

‘If it were not for the divine goodness of L. how many times I should be thinking of death.’
(Virginia Woolf diary 28 May 1931, quoted p.291)

Having read most of Virginia Woolf’s adult work, why read a biography of her husband, Leonard, and not her?

1) Because I’d had enough of Virginia: the essays finished me off, my cup overflowed with Woolf style, snobbery and delirium. 2) I’d learned most of the important facts about her life from the short biographies and notes in each of her novels, and the essays. 3) These notes sometimes referred to books by Leonard, notably a book he wrote called Quack! Quack! mocking the 1930s dictators, Mussolini and Hitler, which intrigued me. He wrote two novels, over 15 books of political science, was a committed socialist, literary editor, publisher, and wrote six volumes of autobiography. Does anyone ever read these? No.

So 4) Leonard is the underdog. The critical industry around Woolf is now mountainous – as Glendinning puts it, ‘There is a small mountain of books and articles on the life and work of Virginia Woolf’ (p.502) – and will only increase year by year. She is a patron saint of feminist writing, as iconic as fellow feminist saints Frida Kahlo and Sylvia Plath. There are lots of biographies of her, hundreds of books and tens of thousands of critical essays about her writing. But what about the mystery man who loved and supported her throughout the years of her great achievements, who tried to manage her recurring bouts of mental illness, who co-founded and ran their famous Hogarth Press? Let’s find out.

Jewish

Woolf was Jewish. He came from a large and extensive Jewish family. I enjoyed Glendinning’s handy summary of the history of the Jews in England, their slow liberation from various legal and customary restrictions during the nineteenth century, and then the transformation in the size of the Jewish population and in attitudes towards them triggered by the mass immigration of Jews from Russia in the 1880s and ’90s.

This more than quadrupled the size of the Jewish community in England and, because so many of them were very poor, from peasant communities, and often settled in the slummiest parts of the East End, it was this mass influx which gave rise to the casual antisemitism you find (distressingly) in so many Edwardian and Georgian writers (Saki and D.H. Lawrence spring to mind. The fact that Virginia includes antisemitic comments in some of her novels, and was regularly casually antisemitic in her letters and diaries – ‘I do not like the Jewish voice, I do not like the Jewish laugh,’ (p.189) – requires a separate explanation).

Father

Woolf was born in London in 1880, the third of ten children of Solomon Rees Sidney Woolf (known as Sidney Woolf), a barrister and Queen’s Counsel, and his wife Marie, maiden name de Jongh). Both parents were Jewish, and from extended families. This is why Glendinning needed four pages to depict the full, extended family trees of both parents. At various points, family members are quoted jokingly referring to it as ‘the Woolf pack’. From time to time grown-up Leonard, feeling sorry for himself, referred to himself as ‘a lone Woolf’.

The family lived at 101 Lexham Gardens off the Earl’s Court Road. The household was:

an example of a typical, well-to-do Victorian way of life, underpinned by an unquestioned social hierarchy and set of values. (p.13)

As a young man Leonard was conscious of ‘the snugness and smugness, snobbery, its complacent exploitation of economic, sexual and racial classes’ (quoted p.15).

We are told all kinds of things about Sidney Woolf but the single most important fact is that he died in his prime, in 1892, aged 47 (p.23). He had earned a lot as a lawyer and that income ended overnight. Now relatively impoverished his widow, Marie, was fortunate enough to have a legacy to live off. She hung on at Lexham Gardens for two years then moved the family to a smaller house further out of town – 9 Colinette Road, off the Upper Richmond Road in Putney.

School

After prep school, Leonard was sent to the prestigious St Paul’s School in west London. Lots of anecdotes, prizes and whatnot, but the important thing is that it was as a slight, shy, Jewish teenager that he developed what he called his ‘carapace’, the protective shell he was to deploy for the rest of his life.

Trinity College, Cambridge

In 1899 he won a classical scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. Glendinning vividly paints how he encountered a small group of fellow undergraduates who became soul mates, including the flamboyant Lytton Strachey and the hulking great Thoby Stephen, nicknamed The Goth, son of the biographer Sir Lesley Stephen and brother of the sisters, Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, the second of which Leonard was, of course to marry. But Strachey was the man. Before he’d arrived at Cambridge Strachey was a fully-formed individual with outrageous views and a particular way of speaking which influenced all his friends. Leonard became closer to Lytton Strachey than anyone else in the world, calling him ‘the most charming and witty of human beings since Voltaire’ (p.189).

I tend to think of E.M. Forster as being an old man, but he was actually a year younger than Leonard and they got to know each other at Cambridge.

Leonard was elected to the elite discussion society called The Cambridge Apostles and it is fascinating to learn the rules of this elite club and the kind of topics they discussed. When I was a sixth-former I read A.J. Ayer, learned about Logical Positivism, and went on to read Wittgenstein, all of which convinced me that talk of Beauty and Love and Truth and God is enjoyable, entertaining but ultimately meaningless.

More precisely, they may have a psychological importance and impact on the people who discuss, write and read about such topics, but they don’t really relate to anything in the real world. They derive from a misunderstanding of language. Because we talk about a good meal, a good person and a good day, it’s easy to be deluded into thinking there must be something they have in common. Plato started the ball rolling by writing dialogues in which Socrates and his followers endless debate the True Nature of The Good. Two and a half thousand years later, clever undergraduates at Cambridge were doing just the same.

I follow Wittgenstein in believing there can be no answer to these kinds of questions because they are non-questions based on a misapplication of language. Viewed from a correct understanding of language i.e. that language consists of a vast number of language games – then any given use of language may or may not be appropriate to the vast number of language games people continually play, invent and evolve and self-important Oxbridge discussions of these great big concepts simply take their place among myriads of other linguistic interactions.

Anyway, all this was to come. For the time being these clever young men thought Truth and Beauty were excellent subjects to write long papers about and present at gatherings of like-minded chaps who all considered themselves part of a literally self-selecting intellectual elite, the Apostles. Members of the Apostles included Leonard, Strachey, E. M. Forster and a year or so later, John Maynard Keynes. Thoby Stephen (his future wife’s brother) was friendly with the Apostles, though not a member himself. What comes over from Glendinning’s comprehensive accounts of these meetings and discussions is how absolutely irrelevant everything they discussed is to us today. Here are the dates of Leonard and significant contemporaries:

  • E.M. Forster b. 1879
  • Lytton Strachey b.1880
  • Thoby Stephen b.1880
  • Leonard Woolf b. 1880
  • Clive Bell b.1881
  • John Maynard Keynes b.1883

G.E. Moore

All of them were deeply in thrall to the moral philosopher George Edward (G. E.) Moore (1873 to 1958), himself an older member of the Apostles. They were still undergraduates when Moore published his influential book, Principia Ethica, in 1903, which was concerned with that age-old problem, What is the good? Moore decides that ‘the good’ is ultimately unknowable, so that:

By far the most valuable thing, which we can know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may roughly be described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects.’ (p.63)

1. The pleasures of human intercourse and 2. the enjoyment of beautiful objects. Friends, lovers and art. Or, as Wikipedia summarises it:

that the summum bonum lies in achieving a high quality of humanity, in experiencing delectable states of mind, and in intensifying experience by contemplating great works of art,

Moore’s conclusions led his book to be treated as a kind of Bible by the network of friends which came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, validating their belief that human relationships are what count most: Love and Beauty. Sounds like Keats, doesn’t it, from almost a century earlier? Glendinning quotes John Maynard Keynes’s extravagant response to Moore’s theory: ‘It seemed the opening of a new heaven on a new earth’ (p.64).

The thing to understand is that the younger generation experienced this as a tremendous liberation from the oppressive burden of Victorian beliefs in duty and honour and nation and empire and queen and country and all the rest of it. For believers like Leonard the book stripped away centuries of oppressive religious beliefs, shedding the calm light of common sense on the agonising questions of how to live and what to believe.

‘Isn’t that the supreme, the only thing – to be loved.’ (Strachey, quote p.98)

But there were plenty of critics who mocked these earnest young believers. Glendinning quotes Beatrice Webb’s shrewish view that the book had little or no value and simply gave the young generation who worshipped it ‘a metaphysical justification for doing what you like’ (p.65).

Glendinning herself criticises the Principia because:

  1. Its unquestioning definition of The Beautiful was heavily Victorian and becoming out of date as the new aesthetics of the 20th century kicked in
  2. Moore’s idea of the good life was very passive and quiescent i.e. simply ignored the active life of politicians, engineers, administrators, people who did things. It was a privileged academic’s conclusion that the best possible way of life was… to be a privileged academic.
  3. No sex please, we’re British: Moore’s ‘asexual mind-set seemed to preclude the “intrinsic value” of any “state of consciousness” elicited by anything more urgent than affection’ (p.63). In other words, Moore’s was a very pallid, underpowered, sexless view of human emotions.

Choice of career and the Civil Service exam

Woolf was awarded his BA in 1902 but stayed on at Cambridge for another year to study for the Civil Service examinations which he took in the summer of 1904. He got a low pass, 69th in the list, and was offered a job as an imperial administrator in Ceylon. First he went the round saying goodbye to his uni friends and this included dinner at the Stephens new house. Sir Leslie Stephen had recently died (February 1904) and his children had moved out of the gloomy family house in Hyde Park Gate to a roomier lighter one in Bloomsbury. Visiting his friend Thoby (the Goth), meant meeting the two beautiful sisters, Vanessa and Virginia. Glendinning points out that the latter was still recovering from the nervous breakdown triggered by her father’s death, one of what was to become a string of breakdowns and mental health problems. During this breakdown she had made the first of several suicide attempts (p.129).

Ceylon

Woolf was in Ceylon for 7 long years, 1904 to 1911. Glendinning makes the point that he met hundreds of native Sinhalese and Tamils but never became friendly with one of them. He liked Ceylon, some of the scenery was breath-taking. He wrote that the jungle:

‘is a cruel and dangerous place, and, being a cowardly person, I was always afraid of it. Yet I could not keep away from it.’ (quoted p.109)

, but he became an increasingly conflicted imperialist. As he was slowly, systematically promoted, he found himself adjudicating law cases and arguments and realised the only thing to do was be as strict and impartial as possible. At the same time he came to hate the impact many imperial laws and restrictions had on the natives.

Glendinning gives a vivid and fascinating account of all this, based on the twin sources of the official diary he kept of his duties, along with the many letters he exchanged with his friends back in England, Thoby, a friend called Saxon but above all Lytton Strachey.

He lost his virginity to a Singhalese woman and seems to have had occasional sexual encounters, but didn’t keep a native mistress as many other young male imperial administrators did.

The conversation of whores is more amusing than the conversation of bores.

The correspondence with Lytton back in England, in Cambridge, is extraordinarily candid about sex. Lytton deploys what he himself calls ‘the dialect of their intimacy’ (p.146). Lytton was a promiscuous homosexual who needed to be falling in love with new young men all the time. Glendinning quotes liberally from his letters which depict not just his sex life, but the sex lives of those in their set or circle, including Duncan Grant, Clive Bell and Keynes. For example, where he explains that he is having an affair with Duncan Grant, who is also sleeping with Keynes. Lytton and the others delighted in using the word ‘copulate’, in a self-mocking tone.

‘I copulated with him [Duncan] again this afternoon, and at the present moment he is in Cambridge copulating with Keynes.’ (p.115)

As always, it’s the promiscuity of gay men which staggers me, compared with the, as far as I can tell, complete chastity of their female contemporaries, specifically Virginia and Vanessa.

A note that Leonard’s sister, Bella, came out to Ceylon in 1907. She married a colonial administrator, Robert Heath Lock, Assistant Director of the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, near Kandy in 1910. She wrote children’s books and the first tourist guide to Ceylon. She was one of many voices advising Leonard to get married. She merits a Wikipedia page of her own.

The Longest Journey

While Leonard was in Ceylon, his friend E.M. Forster published an autobiographical novel, The Longest Journey which describes the coming-to-maturity of young Frederick ‘Rickie’ Elliott, including lengthy descriptions of his time as an undergraduate at Cambridge. Critics think the character of Stewart Ansell, the clever student which Rickie’s and their circle look up to, is at least partly based on Woolf. Certainly the flashy pseudo-philosophical conversations at Cambridge which the novel opens with, are based on The Apostles. Woolf and Strachey both hated it.

Back from Ceylon

After seven years service Leonard was given an extended leave to return to England. Glendinning quotes many of the colleagues and managers in the Colonial Service who advised him to get married. it’s interesting to read the opinions of quite a few contemporaries all advising that marriage is the best thing or only thing which a young man can do to acquire focus and purpose in his life. ‘Marriage was the only way forward’ (p.120).

We know from their letters and diaries that it was Lytton who first proposed to Virginia, in a panic that she might accept (p.114). You have to have followed the text quite closely to understand why this flamboyant queer would even consider such a mad move in the first place. She sensibly turned him down.

Virginia’s character As the focus of the story turns towards Virginia Stephen, Glendinning gives a useful profile and description of her (pages 128 to 130). The bit that stood out for me was the notion that her mother was aloof and distant, so that the girl Virginia hardly ever had time with her alone.

In adolescence and beyond, she became emotionally attached to older women. (p.128)

Aha, I thought – this sheds light on the warmth and fondness for mother figures and older women which you find in her fiction – Betty Flanders, Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs Ramsay, Lucy Swithin.

Virginia’s physicians We learn about the wonderfully named Dr Savage, the physician treating her mental illness, and that he had treated her father for depression, and one of her cousins, who ended up committing suicide. Also, we learn that her sister, Vanessa, was also prey to anxiety and depression. She had her own ‘nerve doctor’, Dr Maurice Craig of 87 Harley Street. So was it genetic?

Brunswick Square The Stephens children moved again, to 38 Brunswick Square, and invited several friends to move in and take rooms. Among these was Leonard who moved in on 20 November 1911. Their wooing was slow and painful.

The Aspasia Papers Constant company led Leonard to fell deeper and deeper in love with the beautiful, mercurial, charismatic Virginia, who he came to nickname Aspasia. This was the name of the wife of Pericles (495 to 429 BC), leader of Athens during its so-called Golden Age. He wrote descriptions of her and these expanded to become sketches of the entire social circle or set, all under pen-names, eventually called the Aspasia Papers. The whole gang he joking referred to as The Olympians.

Leonard proposes to Virginia On 10 January 1912 he proposed to her. This upset her so much she took to her bed. But over the following weeks he maintained his suit and the great day came on Wednesday 29 May when she acknowledged the loved him. They told the gang who reacted in different ways. Rupert Brooke claimed it was Leonard’s sexual know-how that got her. He described her eyes lighting up when Leonard described having sex with prostitutes in Ceylon. Put simply, he was the only man she knew who wasn’t gay and had had sex. With a woman!

He was 31, she was 30, both getting on a bit.

Quits the Colonial Service The Colonial Office required him to end his leave and return to Ceylon by May at the latest but Leonard realised he couldn’t go back, and after some surprising shows of flexibility by Whitehall, he eventually resigned his position. Now what was he going to do? He was writing a novel and had written some short stories, but hadn’t made any money from them.

Wedding They were married on Saturday 10 August 1912 at St Pancras Registry Office, a very small low-key affair. As Glendinning puts it:

Leonard and Virginia were agreed that his chief fault was cowardice, and hers was snobbery.
(p.151)

And both faults lay behind his failure to invite his mother to the wedding. Not being invited to the most important day of a son for whom she had made such sacrifices as a single mother deeply hurt her.

Sex

Glendinning (like all their friends) moves onto the subject of sex. Virginia seems to have got to the ripe old age of 30 without every experiencing sexual feelings. This is what you’d deduce from her novels and essays which have a kind of hallucinatory sexlessness. So she didn’t have a clue and he wasn’t savvy enough to be a teacher. He’d only slept with a few Singhalese prostitutes and prostitutes are 1) experienced and 2) compliant. Apparently when Leonard went to make his move, Virginia became increasingly anxious and over-excited in the way which preceded her breakdowns so he had to desist. Permanently.

Glendinning cites a letter exchange of 1933 with Ethel Smyth the feminist composer, where they talk about a news story that young women are having operations to break their hymens ahead of getting married, and joke about going to have the operation themselves. Woolf was 51 and apparently serious. Glendinning concludes from this and plenty of other evidence that Leonard and Virginia never had penetrative sex, so the marriage was never consummated in the normal way. Within a year they took to sleeping in separate rooms and never again slept together.

Events

Breakdown and suicide attempt After the marriage Virginia’s anxiety, nerves and depression grew worse. She became extremely anxious about the likely reception of her first novel, ‘The Voyage Out’. They went to the country hotel to celebrate the first anniversary of their honeymoon but it was a disaster. Virginia had high anxieties about food and refused to eat. Back in Brunswick Square, unattended for a few hours, she took an overdose of veronal (100 grains of veronal) sleeping pills. Prompt action by Keynes’s brother, Geoffrey who was staying in the house, and a stomach pump, saved her life but this necessitated a round of carers, nurses, consultations with the three physicians now treating her.

The Village in the Jungle In the middle of all this Leonard’s first novel, The Village in the Jungle, was published to good reviews. It’s set in Ceylon but not among the white ex-pat and colonial community, instead it entirely habits the minds of poor Singhalese villagers. And it’s written in what, for the times, was very plain factual English, what Glendinning calls ‘spare and unmannered’. Woolf’s old boss, Sir Hugh Clifford, wrote that:

‘Your book is the best study of Oriental peasant life that has ever been written, or that I have ever read.’ (p.168)

It’s available online and I’ve read and reviewed it for this blog.

Virginia Woolf was five feet ten inches tall. She had a ‘cut glass accent’ (p.299).

The Women’s Co-operative Guild The misery with Virginia lasted for months. Throughout this period Leonard became involved with the Women’s Co-Operative Guild, led by its young and energetic president, Margaret Llewelyn Davies. He went to meetings and the annual conference and write articles to promote their work.

He was by this stage writing lots of articles and reviews for a variety of journals, including the New Statesman.

Exempted from war service When the war came the army was at first fuelled with volunteers. The Military Service Act of 1916 widened the age of conscription to all men aged between 16 and 41. Leonard was 35 but underweight and anxious, with a permanent tremor in his hands. In the next three years he underwent three medical examinations but each time presented a letter from his doctor exempting him, predicting that if he were conscripted he would have a physical and mental breakdown within months.

The Fabian Society As well as the Women’s Co-Operative, Leonard had been collared by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, leading lights of the Fabian Society, who were always recruiting likely young chaps for their cause. Sympathetic to gradualist socialism based on facts and figures, Leonard was commissioned to research and write various reports. Thus in 1916 was published the result of extensive researches, his International Government. The book’s central proposal was for an international agency to enforce world peace, and he went on to join a number of the organisations lobbying for a League of Nations to be set up, becoming friendly with the genial H.G. Wells in the process.

Labour Party Leonard joined the Labour Party and helped research and write policy papers. Women’s Co-Operative, League of Nations charities, Fabians and Labour, he wrote research papers, pamphlets and books for all of them. His next book was the thoroughly researched Empire and Commerce in Africa.

1917 Club As a left-winger Leonard welcomed the Russian Revolution. As promptly as December 1917 he helped set up the 1917 Club in Soho as a discussion forum.

The Hogarth Press In 1917 the couple bought an old printing press for £19 and set it up on the dining room table of Hogarth House in Richmond and taught themselves how to use it, to print pages and stitch them together into books. Their first publication was Two Stories, one by Leonard, one by Virginia. Hers was The Mark On The Wall, a free-associating flight of fancy. It was her first published story. His old friend Lytton Strachey immediately saw it was a work of genius. But as Virginia’s confidence grew, Leonard’s shrank. He had published two novels but began to lose faith. He was happier writing factual books.

Mark Gertler, Lady Morrell, Katherine Mansfield They make friends with Mark Gertler, self-obsessed Jewish painter and lover of Dora Carrington. At Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morell, they meet the New Zealand short story writer Katherine Mansfield and her husband, the editor John Middleton Murray. They agreed to published Mansfield’s 68-page story The Prelude on their press

Leonard produced another book, Co-operation and the Future of Industry and agreed to edit a journal called International Review. The publishing sensation of 1918 was his old friend, Lytton Strachey’s debunking work of biography, Eminent Victorians.

In the war one of Leonard’s brothers, Cecil, was killed and one, Philip, badly wounded.

Recap When the war ended Glendinning summarises that Woolf had established himself as a documentary journalist and political propagandist, an experienced public speaker and author of distinguished books, as well as a seasoned book reviewer, and publisher in his own right. He was a behind-the-scenes figure in the growing Labour Party and was offered a seat to contest as an MP but, after some hesitation, turned it down.

James Joyce In April 1918 Harriet Weaver, patron of The Egoist magazine, approached them with the unfinished manuscript of James Joyce’s Ulysses but they had to turn it down. Far too big for their expertise, it was rejected on the grounds of obscenity by the two commercial printers they approached. Obscenity was Virginia’s central objection to Joyce, see her essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923). She couldn’t get past her snobbish aversion to his references to peeing, pooing and the male anatomy. (The book’s central character, Leopold Bloom, has a bath and idly watches his willy floating in the water.) In her own fictions, almost all references to the body, let alone sex (God forbid) are rigorously excluded, which helps to give them their strange, bloodless, ethereal character.

Woolf’s problematic reaction to Joyce (admiration, envy, rivalry, disgust at his physicality) are explored in two excellent essays by James Heffernan:

T.S. Eliot Conversation with Weaver turned to her other protegé, T.S. Eliot, who they invited to tea to discuss whether he had anything to publish. As a result they published seven of his poems in a small edition of 140 in November 1919. Initially stiff and inhibited, Eliot became friends with Virginia who referred to him, unpretentiously, as Tom. He, like Leonard, was to become carer to a mad wife. He was six years younger than Virginia (born 1888 to Virginia’s 1882). (Later Glendinning wryly notes that ‘Eliot continued to consult Leonard as an expert on mad wives,’ p.265. Ten years later they could have both helped Scott Fitzgerald with Zelda.)

Monk House In 1919 they were meant to go down to Cornwall to join the ménage which had been set up by D.H. Lawrence, his wife Frieda, Middleton Murray and Mansfield – but never did. They had been used to a place in the country named Asheham House but it was sold by the owner. They looked around and settled on Monks House in the village of Rodmell in Sussex. They paid £580 plus £120 for the freehold. This is now a National Trust property. When they moved in it had no running water, electricity or toilet facilities. These two highbrows put up with conditions which would nowadays as unfit for human habitation. Leonard became addicted to working in the garden and had to be dragged away to take Virginia for constitutional walks.

Back in London they bought a bigger press and began to consider the Hogarth Press as a commercial venture. They published Virginia’s story, Kew Gardens. It was 1919 the year of the Paris Peace Conference and Leonard nearly went. They printed Leonard’s Three Tales from the East with a cover by Dora Carrington, to very positive reviews.

Friends’ success Lytton had become a famous name with his Eminent Victorians and Keynes became famous for writing a scathing indictment of the peace terms imposed on Germany in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (December 1919). But although much of Leonard’s research for International Government was used by the British government or other organisations at the Conference, he got little recognition.

Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study in Economic Imperialism (1920) a scathing indictment of British imperial policy in Africa. He was writing for the New Statesman and wrote leading articles on foreign affairs for the Nation. He was secretary to the Labour Party Committee on International and Imperial Questions. He was in the loop.

The Memoir Club Molly McCarthy set up the Memoir Club to bring together old pals from Cambridge to read works in progress. A propos of this you realise that Leonard, the man, was the objective authoritative and grounded one; Virginia, the woman, was flighty, solipsistic, experimental (p.237).

Gorki and the Russians In 1919 Maxim Gorky sent a friend of theirs, Kotelianski, a manuscript of his life of Trotsky, which he brought to the Woolfs. Thus began a series of careful translations of contemporary Russian literature by the Hogarth Press.

Teeth out In June 1921 Virginia had another nervous collapse. It is mind-boggling to read that some experts thought that having your teeth extracted was a cure from mental illness. On this occasion she had three pulled out. By the end of her life she’d had all her teeth pulled out by these experts.

Jacob’s Room In November 1921 she finished writing Jacob’s Room but with the end of any book came a rush of doubt, anxiety and sometimes collapse. She had come to rely on Leonard entirely, and he had evolved to know his place was by her side and supporting. At the time of the peace conference he had been asked to travel abroad, the Webbs asked him to visit Bolshevik Russia and report back, but he turned all offers down in order to remain by Virginia’s side. This makes him a hero, doesn’t it?

Passage To India Leonard played a key role in helping Morgan Foster complete his most important novel, A Passage To India, when Forster had severe doubts and thought of abandoning it (p.242). Passage was published in 1926 and made Forster famous and financially secure. Leonard was the grey eminence behind it.

Stands for Parliament Leonard stood as a Labour candidate for Liverpool in the 1922 General Election but, thanks to his lacklustre speeches about international affairs and against imperialism, came bottom of the poll. It was a relief.

Literary editor

‘I expect you have heard that, having failed as a) a civil servant b) a novelist c) an editor d) a publicist, I have now sunk to the last rung… literary journalism. I am now Literary Editor of The Nation and Athenaeum.’ (letter to Lytton Strachey, 4 May 1923)

The salary, £500 a year, gave the couple some financial stability and coincided with the start of ‘the most prolific and successful period of Virginia’s writing life’ (p.248). She had published Jacob’s Room and started the long process of writing Mrs Dalloway and was, in addition, writing important essays and reviews.

Leonard’s literary positions Wikipedia gives a handy list of Leonard’s editorial positions:

  • 1919 – editor of the International Review
  • 1920 to 1922 edited the international section of the Contemporary Review from 1920 to 1922
  • 1923 to 1930 – literary editor of The Nation and Athenaeum (generally referred to simply as The Nation)
  • 1931 to 1959 – joint founder and editor of The Political Quarterly from 1931 to 1959

The Waste Land It’s a bit mind-boggling to learn that the Hogarth Press published The Waste Land and the type was set in the household larder. ‘Tom’ was pleased with the typescript and layout. In the same year he established a literary magazine of his own, the Criterion and he and Leonard now were friendly and conspiring literary editors, swapping reviewers and ideas. Tom became a regular visitor to their house, mostly alone, in fact maybe a bit too often as his marriage with the mentally unstable Vivian sank into misery.

Glendinning very entertainingly punctuates the key events of Leonard’s life with a roundup of what all the other Bloomsburies were doing, which is mainly having hetero or bisexual affairs with each other. A little grenade was thrown into the mix when Keynes announced he was not only in love with, but going to marry a dancer from the Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova (p.249).

52 Tavistock Square Virginia felt out of it in Richmond and wanted to socialise more. So they sold Hogarth House (for £1,350) and rented 52 Tavistock Square for £140 a year.

Vita Sackville-West At this time Virginia met and became friends with socialite and author Vita Sackville-West. She was married to diplomat Harold Nicholson but they led separate lives, he with a string of boyfriends, she having affairs with women and, eventually, with Virginia. They became ‘tentative’ lovers for about three years. But sex was alien to Virginia’s nature and Vita was a passionate collector of conquests.

Labour As well as working full time as literary editor of the Nation, he continued to be secretary to Labour’s Advisory Committee on International and Imperial Questions. He drafted the foreign policy section of Labour’s 1929 manifesto. Throughout the 1920s he campaigned for India and Ceylon to be given independence. If they had, he later wrote, the murder and mayhem of the independence struggle and the catastrophe of partition would never have happened.

Freud The Hogarth Press embarked on publishing the complete works of Freud being translated by James and Alix Strachey. This project carried on into the 1960s, long after Leonard had parted company with Hogarth, and they’re the edition I own, as republished by Penguin. Despite this, Leonard grew more anti-analysis as he grew older. I’ve reviewed quite a few of Freud’s works:

Vita It became a love affair in December 1925. They took trouble to conceal the full depth of it from Leonard.

Car In August 1927 he bought a car. He drove Virginia all round the country. They drove to the south of France. He wrote that nothing changed his life as much as owning a car.

Mrs Dalloway was published by the Hogarth Press on 14 May 1925. The Common Reader, a volume of 21 short literary essays, was published the same year, and the following year was the first one in which Virginia’s income exceeded Leonard’s. In 1927 her masterpiece To The Lighthouse was published. In 1928 she earned £1,540 to his £394.

Nicknames Virginia never called him Len, she called him Leo. From the start of the marriage they had numerous nicknames for each other but the enduring ones were the Mongoose and the Mandrill. Before she married, Virginia’s nickname in the Stephen household was ‘the Goat’.

They went to Berlin to visit Harold Nicholson, it was a long draining visit with many late nights, and on her return she had a relapse and was in bed for three weeks. Glendinning quotes her as saying she really wanted ‘the maternal protection which… is what I have always wished from everyone’. Suddenly, reading that, I saw how Woolf was a child, endlessly seeking reassurance. And it made me see her novels as essentially childlike, a sexless, jobless, workless, child’s-eye view of life.

Orlando: A Biography was published on 11 October 1928 and sold well, securing their finances. A year later, in October 1929, A Room of One’s Own was also successful.

Richard Kennedy, 24, was the latest young graduate taken on to help out at the Hogarth Press. He describes how Leonard was:

the magician who keeps us all going by his strength of will… and Mrs W is a beautiful, magical doll, very precious but sometimes rather uncontrollable.’

He describes how, when she was lifting off into one of her manic spells, Leonard would gently tap her on the shoulder and she would stop talking, and quietly follow him, go to her bedroom where he talked quietly, read to her and calmed her down. Leonard had to warn new people what they could not say to Virginia to avoid a problem/getting her over-excited. I hadn’t realised she was this on the edge, all the time.

Ethel Smyth During 1930 Virginia gets to know the deaf, feminist composer Ethel Smyth and they become regular, and sometimes bawdy, correspondents. Smyth was 72, Virginia 48. Here’s Smyth’s most famous work, The March of The Women. Very worthy, but heavily Victorian and boring.

New Fabian research Bureau Leonard is appointed to its executive committee in 1931.

Kingsley Martin, an earnest young nonconformist, is appointed editor of the New Statesman which he would remain for 30 years. Leonard became joint editor of the Political Quarterly which he remained for the next 27 years.

The Hogarth Press published 31 books or pamphlets in 1930, 34 in 1931.

John Lehmann just down from Trinity Cambridge, was hired to work on the Press. He lasted two years. While here he published New Signatures, the selection which introduced the poets of the Auden generation. He introduced the Woolfs to Christopher Isherwood. They published Laurens van der Post’s first book. The more I read about the Hogarth press, the more impressive it becomes.

Glendinning cites eye witness accounts from Lehmann, Barbara Bagenal and Harold Nicholson of how Virginia needed Leonard to calm her when she got over-excited or had a fugue, a loss of awareness of where she was or what she was doing (p.294).

There are plenty of eye witnesses testifying to how happy Leonard and Virginia were at Monks House, how relaxed with each other and a civilised routine. Visitors heard Virginia endlessly talking to herself, in the bath, as she pottered round the big garden, and along country lanes, so that the locals came to think of her as bonkers. The servant Louie Everest came to recognise when Virginia was having one of her bad headaches because she pottered round the garden, bumping into trees.

1932

21 January: Lytton Strachey died of cancer. Leonard wrote a sensitive obituary. He had been Leonard’s best friend in their youth. His death confirmed Leonard was middle aged.

11 March, Lytton’s partner, the painter Dora Carrington, shot herself.

Mains water is brought to Monks House and they get a telephone, Lewes 832. Virginia buys new beds from Heals.

1 October Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists. Marches, rallies and violence in the East End. The Woolfs were connected to all this because up till this point Virginia’s lover, Vita Sackville West’s husband, Harold Nicholson, had been secretary to Mosley. Now he quit.

Conversely, T.S. Eliot‘s mentally unstable wife, Vivian, joined the Fascists. Eliot separated from her and never saw her but she stalked him and made public scenes. Virginia sympathised and ‘Tom’ became a good friend and regular visitor to their London or Sussex house.

1933

1933: Victor Gollancz asked Leonard to edit An Intelligent Man’s Way to Prevent War. This is the same subject as prompted Virginia’s great book, Three Guineas. In April Mosley held a rally for 10,000 followers at the Albert Hall. Leonard and the Fabians thought he might be in power in five years’ time.

1934

July: they visited the fabulously wealthy Victor Rothschild and promised to look after his pet marmoset while he went abroad. It was called Mitzy and became so attached to Leonard’s kindness that she never went back. She perched on Leonard’s shoulder or head and the back of his jacked was routinely strewn with her poo.

5 to 10 September: Leonard listens to the Nazi Nurenberg rally, relayed on the radio. He was inspired to write his satire on the totalitarian regimes, Quack Quack!

9 September: art critic and populariser of the French post-impressionist painters, Roger Fry, died. Vanessa had had a fiercely sexual affair with him (13 years older than her) and was inconsolable. Slowly the idea crystallised that Virginia should write his biography. This was to turn into a chore and produce a not very good book.

1935

May: Driving to Italy Leonard decided to take a detour through Nazi Germany. Glendinning points out that in his autobiographies he doesn’t mention the antisemitism of the 1930s, doesn’t mention Mosley or the British Union of fascists. She thinks this is because he didn’t want to put down in black and white even the possibility of his country’s rejection of himself, as a Jew. The British Foreign Office advised Jews not to visit Hitler’s Germany. Brief description of their journey through Nazi Germany, soldiers everywhere, public notices against Jews, mobs of children giving the Nazi salute. They had taken Mitzy the marmoset with them who made people laugh and defused tensions.

June: published his attack on the Fascist governments, Quack Quack!

September: Nazi Nuremberg Race Laws Jews legally different from their non-Jewish neighbours introducing all kinds of legal discrimination.

September: Leonard and Virginia attended the Labour Party Conference where Ernest Bevin argued that Britain had to rearm to face the Fascist powers, annihilating pacifist speaker in the process.

2 October: Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. Sanctions were useless as didn’t include Germany or the USA. Leonard wrote bleakly about the failure of the League of Nations. He had spent 20 years arguing that the only way to keep peace was international co-operation. Now he was forced to abandon that position and agree with Bevin that Britain needed to re-arm and make itself strong.

1 November: UK General Election in which Labour were thrashed and the new coalition government of Conservatives along with small breakaway factions of the Labour and Liberal parties, was headed by Conservative Stanley Baldwin.

Tom Eliot brought Emily Hale, a former love and confidante, to meet Leonard and Virginia, who left a record of their tea, finding Leonard more sympathetic, warm and tired.

1936

20 January: King George V died, succeeded by his son, Edward VIII.

6 March: Hitler’s troops reoccupied the Rhineland in breach of the Versailles Treaty. The atmosphere of growing antisemitism in Britain. British Union of Fascists symbols drawn on the walls.

Trying to finalise The Years and separate out the polemical book which was to become Three Guineas brought Virginia closer to breakdown than she’d been since 1913. She lost half a stone and for over three months was unable to work, an unusual hiatus. Only in the last 3 months of the year could she resume work on what was to be her longest novel.

July: Spanish Civil War broke out with the army’s coup against the republican, anti-clerical socialist government. Leonard concluded the international system had collapsed and a European war was inevitable.

Sunday 4 October: the Battle of Cable Street as anti-fascists attacked a march by the British Union of Fascists through the East End.

5 to 31 October: the Jarrow march.

19 December: after a prolonged constitutional crisis, Edward VIII abdicates because of the Establishment’s refusal to let him marry the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson.

1937

Leonard was ill for an extended period of time. Glendinning thinks it expressed his anguish about the international situation and dread for the plight of the Jews. He tried various consultants who thought it was diabetes or prostate trouble i.e. didn’t have a clue.

April: the bombing of Guernica.

24 June: Leonard and Virginia were among many artists and performers onstage at the Albert Hall for a concert to raise money for Basque orphans.

20 July: the terrible news that Virginia’s nephew (Vanessa’s son) Julian Bell had been killed after volunteering to drive an ambulance in Spain.

Leonard was diagnosed with numerous ailments and prescribed loads of medicines none of which worked. He even went to see the inventor of the Alexander technique, Frederick Alexander, but gave it up as too arduous. His ongoing illness prompted love and support from Virginia. Glendinning quotes Virginia’s diary describing them walking round Tavistock Square like a lovestruck couple:

‘love-making – after 25 years can’t bear to be separate…you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete.’ (Virginia’s diary 22 October 1937)

21 October: after a long gestation, Virginia’s final and longest novel, The Years was published. It received good reviews and was her most commercially successful novel although Leonard thought it was her worst.

In late 1937 John Lehmann became a partner in the Hogarth press, buying out Virginia’s share for £3,000.

1938

March: Lehmann started full time as co-director of the Hogarth Press. Endless bickering with Leonard. But it was making more money than ever, £6,000 in this tax year.

March: Leonard installs a wireless in 52 Tavistock Square. He himself makes regular radio broadcasts.

12 March: the Anschluss, Nazi Germany marches into Austria and takes it over. At the Labour Party Executive Leonard argues for a coalition with the Conservatives and the introduction of conscription.

April: Lady Ottoline Morrell, hostess of the literary salon at Garsington Manor, died.

June: Three Guineas published. Leonard thought it typified Virginia’s impeccable feminism but their friends didn’t like it. Forster thought it cantankerous, Keynes thought it silly, Vita thought it unpatriotic. I think its structure (like a lot of Woolf’s writing) is eccentrically oblique and sometimes confusing, but the picture she builds up, especially through the extended notes, of the patriarchy which held back British women, is magnificent, radiating scorn and quiet rage.

August: Tom Eliot’s wife Vivian was certified insane and sent to a lunatic asylum where she spent the last 9 years of her life. Eliot never visited her.

September: the Munich Crisis, Neville Chamberlain flies to Munich and along with the French Prime Minister allows Hitler to annex the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia with a large German population. Leonard predicted war. Virginia is still very much in love with him. She bakes a loaf of bread and calls out to the garden, where he’s up a ladder ‘where he looked so beautiful my heart stood still with pride that he had ever married me’ (letter to Vanessa Bell, October 1938).

9 November: Kristallnacht when the Nazis unleashed stormtroopers on Jewish homes, business and synagogues across Germany. Hundreds of synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland were damaged, over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Leonard has a recurrence of the painful rash which covers his back and other parts. He sees doctors but Glendinning thinks it was psychosomatic, stress, and to do with the persecution of the Jews.

December: Leonard finished the first volume of After the Deluge, an analysis of Enlightenment thought into the early nineteenth century. His aim was to show the psychological and sociological process which bring about wars, and so avoid them. Fat chance. When it was published in September 1939 it sold pitifully.

1939

January: Leonard and Virginia go to tea with Sigmund Freud, recently escaped from Nazi Vienna. The Hogarth press had been publishing his works for 15 years. Leonard was struck by Freud’s aura of greatness. Freud died a few weeks into the war, on 23 September 1939.

15 March: German army annexes the rest of Czechoslovakia and claims the country has ceased to exist. France and Britain bring forward their rearmament programmes. Leonard’s psychosomatic rash returns with a vengeance.

23 June: their friend the artist Mark Gertler gassed himself. He was suffering from financial difficulties, his wife had recently left him, his most recent exhibition had been slammed, he was still depressed by the death of his mother and the suicide of Dora Carrington with whom he’d been madly in love, and was fearful of the imminent world war.

Victor Gollancz commissioned Leonard to write a book in defence of civilisation and tolerance for the Left Book Club for £500. But the final manuscript of Barbarians at the Gate contained criticisms of the Soviet Union which were unacceptable to the communists at the club, leading to a prolonged exchange of angry letters.

2 July: Leonard’s mother died. He was unsentimental.

The Woolfs moved to 37 Mecklenburg Square, taking their thousands of books and the Hogarth printing press.

23 August: Germany and Russia signed their non-aggression pact. 1 September Germany invaded Poland. 3 September Britain was at war with Germany.

November: The Barbarians at the Gate was published and slated by left-wing fellow travellers.

1940

The War for Peace published in which Leonard defended what critics called his utopianism in international relations.

June: France collapsed. Hitler enters Paris. Dunkirk. Leonard was shaken.

September: the Blitz began and was to last until May 1941. The blackout is enforced in Rodmell (the village where they had their country home). Virginia spoke to the local Women’s Institute then became its secretary. Like many others they equipped themselves with means of committing suicide should the Germans invade (p.353).

Correspondents: Virginia was still writing letters about her everyday life to Ethel Smyth who didn’t die until May 1944. Leonard still wrote letters to Margaret Llewelyn Davies of the Women’s Co-operative Guild.

They drove to London but couldn’t get as far as Mecklenburgh Square because of the bombing. A pill box was built in the field beyond their garden. German planes flew overhead every day. The flat in Mecklenburgh had its windows blown out by bombs, but their old place at 52 Tavistock Square was reduced to rubble. The Hogarth press machinery was evacuated to Letchworth. The books from Mecklenburgh were shipped down to Monks House where they packed the corridors.

23 November: Virginia finishes first draft of Between the Acts. She slowly fell into a depression, Her hand started to shake.

1941

25 January: Virginia turned 59 and Leonard began to be worried about her persistent depression. She was revising Between the Acts, always a dangerous time. They socialise, Virginia telling people her new novel is no good, though Leonard praised it.

March: she went for a walk in the fields and fell into the river whose banks had broken and flooded some of their land. Leonard returned from giving a talk to find her staggering back towards the house, wet and upset. Vanessa visits and tries to cheer her up.

Monday 24 1941: he realised she was becoming suicidal. The situation was as bad as her collapse in 1913. He consults a friend, Octavia Wilberforce, about whether to his nurses and force 24 hour supervision on Virginia against her will. But this is what had triggered furious psychotic breakdowns in the past so they decided to try and gentler approach, of Leonard calmly supporting and encouraging her.

Next day was a series of humdrum chores, recorded by Leonard and the house servant, and Virginia said she was going for a walk before lunch. An hour or so later Leonard went up to his sitting room and found two letters there, one for Vanessa one for himself, suicide notes. The letter to him is so full of love it made me cry. She thanked him and said she had had a wonderful life but she could feel her madness coming on, she was hearing voices, she couldn’t read, he would be better off without her.

Obviously he came running downstairs, hailed all the servants, sent one to get the police and help and spent the day till sunset searching the flooded river Ouse. He found Virginia’s walking stick lying on the bank. In subsequent days the river was dragged for the body. Eventually the authorities gave up the search for her body.

Three weeks later he body was discovered floating in the river by some teenagers having a picnic. They called the police. Leonard had to identify it. Coroner’s report etc. Leonard drove on his own to the cremation.

All his friends tried to console him, saying she was better off dead than really mad, but Leonard swore she would have recovered from this attack as from previous ones. He buried her ashes under two elm trees in the garden at Monks House which they had jocularly named after themselves.

Joyce and death Born February 2, 1882, Joyce was precisely eight days younger than Virginia. Two days after his death on January 13, 1941, she noted in her diary that he was ‘about a fortnight younger’ (D 5: 352-53). She outlived him by just a little over ten weeks.

Virginia asked Leonard to destroy all her papers

He disobeyed and in the years to come Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters, autobiographical writings and unpublished works, were to be published and pored over in ever greater detail. The shape of her legacy, and the broader picture of the Bloomsbury Group, would have been very different if he’d obeyed her wishes.

Was he right to ignore her explicit, direct request, as Max Brod disobeyed Kafka’s request to burn his papers?

The shocked response of friends and family, other writers, journalists, and the wider world, are described and done with by about page 380 of this 500-page book. Leonard Woolf still had 28 years to live (died 14 August 1969). A man who was born the year Gladstone replaced Disraeli as Prime Minister (1880) lived to see men land on the moon. The twentieth century, century of marvels but also cataclysmic disasters.

After Virginia

What’s interesting is the power of the biography completely evaporates with Virginia’s death. I hadn’t realised how much Leonard’s story had come to be entwined with hers, and his existence justified by his support of her as she wrote her masterpieces. When it’s back to just him it remains sort of interesting in a journalistic gossipy way but the pressure drops right down.

Twenty-eight more years of living, writing, politicking, editing, publishing and loving – one year less than his marriage to Virginia (1912 to 1941). According to Glendinning ‘Few people are so fortunate in their later life as Leonard Woolf’ and he had many happy years. But for this reader, at any rate, all the life went out of the book when Virginia died.

Trekkie

In the next few years he fell in love with a woman called Trekkie (real name Margaret Tulip) Parsons, a keen but nondescript painter, married to Ian Parsons, an editor at Chatto and Windus, a handsome charming man. Ian sort of permitted a menage a trois to develop though it’s doubtful that Leonard and Trekkie ever had sex, and I hate myself for reading about other people’s sex lives, though this is an unavoidable aspect of modern biography. Ian meanwhile was having an affair with his editorial assistant Norah Smallwood so… so people will be people.

Superficial though it sounds, the relationship with Trekkie lasted for the rest of their lives.

The growth of Bloomsbury

The other theme which emerges is the slow steady growth of the Bloomsbury industry. Post-war interest in Virginia and other figures just kept on growing. The surviving members of the network –published books every year and fed the market throughout the 1950s (p.433). The advent of the swinging 60s, sexual liberation, the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, a greater openness about sex, made the Bloomsburies, with their fluid sexuality and open relationships, seem forebears and founders.

The members wrote autobiographies and memoirs, and a steadily growing tribe of academics wrote books about them. Glendinning describes some of the early Virginia scholars who began to approach Leonard asking for help, advice, an interview, and whatever papers he could spare.

Glendinning records Leonard’s growing involvement with not just American scholars but professional buyers of manuscripts such as Hamill and Barker, to whom he sold off packets and parcels of letters, manuscripts and diaries, through the 1950s and ’60s, for lucrative sums (pages 427, 450).

The schism between academics and public intellectuals

This move to biography was encouraged by the growing schism between general, freelance public intellectuals such as Leonard, and the growing number of professional academics housed in the growing number of postwar universities. When Virginia and Leonard started writing all intellectuals were on about the same level, with some being experts at universities, but many freelance writers knowing quite as much across a broad range of subjects. The tone of discourse across public writers and academics was comparable. In the new era of academic specialisation, academics developed technical terms and jargon, assumed specialist knowledge, which increasingly cut them off from generalists let alone the man in the street.

Leonard fell victim to this specialisation with his book on international politics, After the Deluge, published in 1955. He intended it to form the third part of a trilogy (the previous books published in 1931 and 1939) which he allowed himself to be persuaded to give the grandiose title Principia Politica. This begged comparisons with the masterworks of Newton (Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica), Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica or GE Moore’s Principia Ethica, but it was nothing of the kind, as reviewers were quick to point out. Compared to the new ranks of professional academics, Leonard appeared discursive, repetitive, anecdotal and amateurish (p.444).

The spread of universities and growth of a class of specialist academics was epitomised by the opening, in 1961, of the University of Sussex, just outside Brighton and only 5 miles from Leonard’s rural retreat in the village of Rodmer (p.465).

For the public intellectual locked out of the growing ivory tower of academia, there remained publishing (he continued to be a director of the Hogarth Press), ‘the higher journalism’ (he continued to edit the Political Quarterly, and biography and memoirs. So this feeds back into the growth of Bloomsbury books – none of the survivors (Vanessa, Duncan, Quentin and so on) were really expert, scholarly expert-level on anything except… themselves.

Leonard himself epitomised the trend. Having had his masterwork of political commentary rubbished he retreated to the safer territory of his own life, and commenced his own autobiography which ended up taking no fewer than six volumes:

  • Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880 to 1904 (1960)
  • Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904 to 1911 (1961)
  • Diaries in Ceylon 1908 to 1911, and Stories from the East: Records of a Colonial Administrator (1963)
  • Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918 (1964)
  • Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939 (1967)
  • The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years 1939 to 1969 (1969)

I’d never heard of these but they won him prizes. Beginning Again won the W.H. Smith book prize and the handy sum of £1,000.

Michael Holroyd’s two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey published in 1967-8 proved to be a turning point. Its openness about Strachey’s homosexuality, his numerous affairs, his thousands of camp letters, shed a completely new light on the Bloomsburies, rendering much that had been written up to that point obsolete, but confirming their reputation as sexual pioneeers (p.475).

Pointless

In the last volume of his autobiography Leonard candidly, devastatingly, adjudged that a lifetime of political activism, sitting on innumerable committees, spending years researching and writing position papers and polemical books (calling for international co-operation for peace) achieved more or less nothing.

‘I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing.’ (quoted p.484)

Thoughts

Authoritative, thorough, empathetic, insightful, fascinating and often very funny, nonetheless Glendinning’s definitive biography becomes increasingly focused on the mental illness of poor Virginia, relentlessly building up to Virginia’s suicide which is so terrible, so upsetting, so devastating, that I could barely read on and stopped trying to review it after that point.

Credit

‘Leonard Woolf: A Life’ by Victoria Glendinning was first published by Simon and Schuster in 2006. Page references are to the 2007 Pocket Books paperback edition.

Related links

Virginia explaining and justifying her technique in ‘Modern Novels’ (TLS 10 April 1919):

The mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface a myriad impressions–trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, composing in their sum what we might venture to call life itself; and to figure further as the semi-transparent envelope, or luminous halo, surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not perhaps the chief task of the novelist to convey this incessantly varying spirit with whatever stress or sudden deviation it may display, and as little admixture of the alien and external as possible.

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

Revised as ‘Modern Fiction’ in The Common Reader (1925).

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by Simon on May 7, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 7, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/05/07/leonard-woolf-a-life-victoria-glendinning/

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love @ the Hayward Gallery

Mickalene and Linder

A word of explanation. The Hayward Gallery is currently hosting two exhibitions, one of the radical British feminist artist Linder, one of the radical Black queer American feminist artist, Mickalene Thomas. When I got there I mistakenly thought they shared the same main gallery space, with Mickalene downstairs and Linder upstairs. This was my mistake. Although you buy a joint ticket to both of them, the two exhibitions are completely distinct and you enter them by different doors. The Mickalene is situated in the Hayward’s main gallery with its huge rooms, while you enter the Linder by a different entrance into a series of smaller, more intimate rooms along the ground floor. This is a review of the Mickalene Thomas show. I’ve written a separate review of the Linder show.

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

‘The central place of my work, and my art, is from a loving space’

This is an outstanding exhibition, I heartily recommend it. Mickelene Thomas’s paintings, collages, photomontages, videos and installations start big and become huge, filling the cavernous spaces at the Hayward Gallery with bold colours, delirious patterns, glitter and glamour. And then there’s a soundtrack, a continual loop of chilled soul and jazz classics drifting through the gallery which makes the whole thing a lovely Saturday morning experience. And, for me personally, I got chatting to several of the (female) visitor assistants who answered my questions, drew my attention to all kinds of details, and significantly deepened my understanding and enjoyment of the show (see below).

Afro Goddess Looking Forward by Mickalene Thomas (2015) © Mickalene Thomas

A reproduction like this gives no sense of the scale of the original, which is nearly 3 yards wide and 2 yards high, completely filling a gallery wall, towering over you and, as you get closer, enfolding in its bright, warm, welcoming designs.

Theory or beauty, issues or love

Born in 1971, Thomas is a Black, queer woman and proud as hell of it. This is catnip to the world of straight white women curators who write lots of wall captions claiming that her work subverts all the usual stereotypes (gender, ethnicity, identity), questions social norms, interrogates the blah blah blah. Thomas is well aware of this, and freely draws on the tenets of Black feminist and queer theory. In fact the title of the exhibition derives from bell hooks’ 2000 book ‘All About Love: New Visions’. Thus every wall label sounds like this:

Thomas work challenges societal norms and provides a powerful counter-narrative to mainstream depictions of beauty and identity…

It may well do all of that, and you can certainly immerse yourself in a critical theory-level response to her art – but what that style of writing doesn’t convey is how beautiful her work is. It’s big and bold and stunning and full of LIFE, full of lovely details and full of LOVE. Don’t need no theory to understand that.

Mickalene Thomas biography

From her Wikipedia article:

Mickalene Thomas (born January 28, 1971) is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas’s collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.

From the press release:

Thomas is a trailblazer of portraiture and collage, widely renowned for her large-scale paintings of Black women posed against boldly patterned backgrounds embellished with rhinestones. As an artist who fearlessly transcends creative boundaries, her artworks have also adorned album covers (Solange’s EP True, 2013) and emblazoned fashion runways (Dior, 2023).

Love, leisure, and joy

All true, but much nearer the point is the first sentence of the first big wall label:

Mickalene Thomas’s art is an exploration of love, leisure, and joy.

This is certainly the keynote for the works on the ground floor of this two-floor exhibition. They are big and bold and depict friends and lovers and family in a candid, open, vivid and delightful way. Here’s a portrait of her beloved mother, a former fashion model named Sandra Bush, fondly known as Mama Bush.

Mama Bush: (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher by Mickalene Thomas (2009) © Mickalene Thomas

Now clearly half a dozen things are going on in this piece so let’s try to unpick them one by one.

Family

Thomas’s paintings depict family, friends and (women) lovers.

‘My gaze is the gaze of a Black woman unapologetically loving other Black women.’

There are some installations based on her childhood home (see below). As you read about this in the wall labels, as you see the sweet furnishings of the family rooms, as your heart rate goes down to match the smooth jazz soundtrack. It all creates a sense of warmth and love.

Based on photos

Thomas’s creative process begins by photographing her muses in a variety of sets created in her Brooklyn studio. These photos then form the basis of paintings in oil, acrylic and enamel paint which are inlaid with lustrous multi-coloured rhinestones. Originally chosen by the artist as affordable substitutes for oil paints, these materials have since become her signature.

Fabrics

After I’d got over the size, and the bold design and colour, and the use of shiny rhinestones, I began to notice the role of fabric and fabric-style patterning in the works. The figures are almost secondary to the dazzling collage of fabrics of starkly clashing colours and designs.

Installation view of Mickalene Thomas ‘All About Love’. ‘Din avec la main dans le miroir et jupe rouge’ (2023). Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

The overall effect is dramatic but each of the works repays going up close to enjoy the detail of each of these fabrics.

Detail from ‘Naughty Girls Need Love Too’ (2009) by Mickalene Thomas in ‘All About Love’ at the Hayward Gallery

As mentioned above, the wall labels overflow with references to queer Black theory, and yet the exhibition can, sort of, be considered an adventure among fabrics. My wife knits, sews, crochets and is fascinated by fabrics and yarns and so, quite oblivious to all the critical theory, spent ages looking very closely at all these fabric designs.

Collage

According to the Tate website:

Collage describes both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and other ephemera are arranged and stuck down onto a supporting surface.

Quite clearly, then, the pictures are massive examples of collage in which the photos of friends and family form just the base layer over which she drapes patterned fabrics, cuts and rearranges imagery using the papier collé technique, and studs them with patterns of glittering rhinestones.

‘Collage is how I create form and composition. It’s a way to edit, disrupt, and dismantle – creating a space that is complex, by deconstructing the depth of the field of illusion.’

The wall labels reference a number of influences and even I could see the legacy of Henri Matisse’s cutouts in the more seaweed-shaped designs. But there are plenty of other influences including the Black woman artist Faith Ringgold, whose work we recently saw at the Serpentine Gallery.

The male gaze

‘My gaze is the gaze of a Black woman unapologetically loving other Black women.’

Before we move on to the other rooms, let’s address an issue which cropped up in the opening rooms with their enormous portraits, not least because it is mentioned ten or more times in the wall labels, our old friend The Male Gaze.

This concept crops up in more or less every exhibition about or which includes women artists. It is a standard accompaniment to any women’s art which includes depictions of female figures.

The male gaze was first articulated by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, so it’s 50 years old this year. According to the Wikipedia page:

The male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer… thus reinforcing a patriarchal visual narrative.

With the explosion of feminist and critical theory over the past 50 years, the male gaze is now detected in every medium whenever women are portrayed, in not just classical painting, but advertising, films and TV, social media, all forms of literature, you name it.

I get it and I agree with it. What I don’t understand so readily is how all these paintings of scantily-clad young women, generally exposing their breasts, can be said to subvert the male gaze. Surely – without wanting to – they cater to it.

Portrait of Marie by Mickalene Thomas (2015) © Mickalene Thomas

Now one of the reasons I enjoyed my trip so much was because I got into conversations with several of the (female) visitor assistants, who were extremely knowledgeable and very perceptive. I benefited a lot from their insights.

One of these visitor assistants was giving periodic tours of the exhibition. When she’d finished, genuinely puzzled, I asked her how lots of images of scantily-clad, attractive young women with their boobs out was meant to subvert the male gaze. Speaking as a heterosexual male, they seem to me to encourage the male gaze by playing up to every expectation of women as a) beautiful b) lounging on sofas and beds c) half dressed. The visitor assistant made the following three points:

1. Thomas starts a lot of her works with photographs then paints and assembles collages of materials over them. The relevance of this is that her sitters only pose for a few hours i.e. not for days and days on end. I.e. the relationship between artist is less hierarchical, less dominating and demanding.

2. This lack of a male-female power imbalance extends to collaboration. After discussing a backdrop and a pose and what to wear, the subjects then help decide which poses and shots are best, which ones they feel most comfortable with. So, again, less of a male master and woman servant relationship, more a collaboration of equals, and of women equals.

3. She went on to make the rather more obvious point how so much Western art of the beautiful-woman-half-dressed-on-a-divan type was commissioned by rich men to adorn their walls. Many examples of rich men commissioning titillating images of scantily-clad young women to decorate their homes, or even assemble semi-pornographic collections of them in private rooms, where they could be enjoyed (i.e. leched over) by other creepy men. In all of this the woman model had no control whatsoever but was paid a pittance to be converted into a sex object.

Now I understood all these points, and they deepened my understanding of the concept of the male gaze and how women artists depicting the female body operate in a different atmosphere with different aims, and of Thomas’s anti-male gaze ethic. But the assistant didn’t really address my core point which is… they’re still images of half-naked women. To paraphrase Taylor Swift, ‘Male gazers will malely gaze’ and how, in practical terms, are you gong to stop them?

But maybe I’m misunderstanding. Maybe this isn’t about changing society as a whole (stopping men malely gazing) and a much more limited term, an art world term, restricted to describing certain works by certain women artists.

Women at rest

Another apparent contradiction intrigued me. At several points the commentary deprecated the old male art tradition of showing women lying around on beds or divans, thus creating a sexualised boudoir atmosphere for easily aroused male viewers. There are so many paintings like this in the western tradition that it is a genre unto itself, the Odalisque.

The odalisque not only presents women as sexual objects but plays to the gender stereotype which associates The Male with Activity and The Female with Passivity. Active men doing things, bursting with agency. Utterly passive women lying around half-dressed like pets or sex objects, existing solely to please their male owners.

And that’s bad. OK. I get it. The contradiction comes in as you realise that so many of Thomas’s huge paintings show women, er, lying around on beds or divans, half undressed. Why is it sexism and misogyny when painted by men but the exact same subject, with the exact same visual result, is not only ‘reclaimed’ from the male gaze, but is actively liberating, when painted by a woman? Here’s how the curators put it:

Thomas’ celebratory and glamorous portraits put Black women front and centre. Their poses are restful, but filled with power, meeting our gaze and staring right back with regal force.

Or:

These works centre on repose, rest and leisure which, in Thomas’s handling, are shown to be radical acts.

You can see what the curators are trying to do here – to get round the contradiction by rewriting the terms, by changing the vocabulary, by asserting that these works by a woman artists are different from a male depiction of the same subject. But it does it fit the reality of what you actually see? Here’s one of the most notorious odalisques in western art, Olympia by Édouard Manet (1863).

Olympia by Édouard Manet (1863)

Is Olympia not ‘meeting our gaze and staring right back’? Whether or not with ‘regal force’ is for the viewer to decide, but the ‘meeting our gaze and staring right back’ is an undeniable fact. So the ‘meeting our gaze and staring right back’ does not distinguish Thomas’s works from the male work she is meant to be ‘subverting’. The real difference lies elsewhere.

Is it in a certain spirit of defiance in the expressions of (some of) the women sitters? Something in their pose and their expressions is markedy, definably different from the passive acquiescent expressions of the classic odalisque? Maybe I’m missing something obvious and you can help me. Anyway, I only dwell on it at such length because 1) this type of pose is the core subject matter of all the works on the ground floor, and 2) the make gaze and how Thomas undermines and subverts it is mentioned in more or less every wall label i.e. it’s a central feature of the curators’ commentary.

A Moment’s Pleasure #2 by Mickalene Thomas (2008) © Mickalene Thomas

Living rooms

Moving on, if you know the Hayward, you know that you then walk up a gently sloping ramp to the second main downstairs space. Here there are a few more massive rhinestone paintings, including her reworking of The Sleep, a painting by French artist Gustave Courbet, given the Thomas treatment. (Later on we meet a big bright reworking of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe by Eduard Manet. What with the visual references to Matisse’s cutouts, we are learning that Thomas has a fondness for modern nineteenth century French art.)

But more dramatically, here you find a couple of big installations. These are mock-ups or reconstructions of family living rooms Thomas remembers from her childhood. They are designed to transport visitors back to domestic settings of the artist’s 1970s and 1980s childhood. On the left is a room from the late 1970s during Thomas’s early childhood in New Jersey, a homage to her late grandmother.

Installation view of ‘I was born to do great things’, room 1, by Mickalene Thomas (2014) Photo by the author

Of these she says:

‘I created domestic settings primarily for fellow Black women – my muses – to spend time and have new experiences in familiar surroundings, perhaps resembling their mother’s or grandmother’s living rooms.’

Inside the installation are two artworks from early in Thomas’s career. The green one at the back is ‘Portrait of Mickalena’, a painted self-portrait in which Thomas performs her childhood alter ego, Quanikah. On the wall on the left is a photographic triptych of her mother from 2003, in which Sandra Bush poses in the style of actor Pam Grier, star of 1970s Blaxploitation cinema

One of the visitor assistants I spoke to was mixed race and she said the rooms triggered warm memories of her childhood. They feel sweet and comfortable and at least part of this is because is this is the source of the mellow soul and jazz music which permeates the ground floor, emanating from a genuine old-school record player and hi fi unit, with ageing record covers by The Supremes and such like, leaning against it at the bottom left.

This hi fi unit is in the second room which recreates a room from Thomas’s teenage years in the 1980s, a completely different vibe from the previous one, this is all shagpile grey carpet and Art Deco lampshades.

Installation view of ‘I was born to do great things’, room 2, by Mickalene Thomas (2014) Photo by the author

As to the curators’ commentary:

‘The living room is where we see black imagination made visual’, writes poet Elizabeth Alexander in The Black Interior. She suggests that the home holds a sacred significance for African Americans who have grappled with the impermanence of place perpetrated by enslavement, segregation and gentrification.

Remember what I was saying about the importance of fabrics, of Thomas collaging together wildly varying and disparate fabrics and patterns? When you look more closely you realise every piece of furniture in room 1 is made of crazy collages of fabrics, patched together, sometimes with very overt stitching. Is this something to do with relative poverty, with having to make do and mend? Or a purely aesthetic statement, in fact it’s a style statement. The visitor assistant I was chatting to made the point that none of the fabrics really ‘go’ with each other and yet, at the same time, because everything is made out of crazy patching, it all, somehow, does go. It makes a Gestalt.

Installation view of ‘I was born to do great things’, room 1, by Mickalene Thomas (2014) Photo by the author

Off to one side of the room is another installation, smaller, dinky, filled with bedroom bric-a-brac, reminding me of my teenage daughter’s bedroom. Takes as a whole the shape is reminiscent of a shrine and it is, in fact, titled Shrine. I’m guessing it is a shrine to her teenage self.

Installation view of Shrine by Mickalene Thomas (2024) Photo by the author

It’s packed with interesting and charming details. There’s a fridge magnet-style motto which reads: ‘I’m not opinionated, I’m just always right.’ Books by Black and queer authors. And I noticed, underneath a classic photo of Black activist Angela Davies, a picture frame which holds a list of names.

Detail of Shrine by Mickalene Thomas (2024) Photo by the author

Recognise the names?

  • Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter and feminist icon
  • Kara Walker, the contemporary Black political and feminist artist
  • Georgia O’Keefe, woman painter of big bold flowers and scenes of the desert south-western USA

And she’s added her name to the list. Her lineage. Her heroines and herself.

Music

By far the majority of exhibitions I go to are staged in empty, church-like silence, a deadening white-walled sterility as antiseptic as an operating theatre which intimidates visitors into whispering or intimidated silence. The dozen or so sexy, soul music tracks, smooth jazz and soul classics, which play on a loop went a long way to taking the frozen edge off the gallery space and making it a nice place to be.

It made me feel warm and fuzzy about her art, about the rooms she grew up in, about her mum and friends and lovers, it made the whole thing feel warm and welcoming. It made a significant different. Here’s the track list:

Upstairs

Upstairs there are five more rooms, some big, some enormous, more installations, and a wider range of her works, including straight (no pun intended) photography, video installations, and more overtly political works.

The water lilies room

The biggest room features her largest collage to date, an absolutely massive work covering one huge wall (on the left here), in which are embedded ten or more smaller collage pictures. This towers over a lot of plastic rubber plants arranged in a grid pattern on a huge rectangular mirror.

Installation view of La Maison de Monet by Mickalene Thomas at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

I think this is titled ‘La Maison de Monet’ and dates from 2022. In 2011, Thomas took part in a summer residency at Claude Monet’s house and studio located at Giverny, in northern France. Giverny provided Thomas with the opportunity to reflect on Monet’s iconic depictions of gardens and the vibrant domestic spaces that he designed as places of inspiration and leisure. The grid of plastic pot plants represents the famous water lilies in Monet’s garden pond, the lily pond he painted so many times at the end of his life.

On the opposite wall are two more standard-sized works. These are noticeably different from the earlier works in two respects: although they still use jagged-edged collage the elements are mostly plain colour washes instead of intricately decorated fabrics. And no rhinestones. The one on the right reminded me of a record cover from the 1980s, though I can’t remember which one. Can anyone remind me?

Installation view of Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

A note on laminated flooring

It was only after I’d strolled around the room and looked at the massive wall collage a few times that I began to appreciate the importance of wood in it. On the left you can see photos of a number of wooden shelving units such as you might find at Habitat, while on the bottom right are black and white photos of what looks like laminated wood flooring. Hold that thought…

The wrestling room

Beyond the water lily room is the wrestling room. Here are half a dozen rhinestone and jagged collage-style images of two Black women in various wrestling poses. To quote the curators:

Thomas created her series of Wrestlers to explore multiple sides of herself. All the figures depicted in the paintings are representations of Thomas, featuring the artist Kalup Linzy as her twin. The paintings reveal only one face – the artist’s. The artist considers the series a form of self-portraiture, embodying internal conflicts between our multiple selves within society.

The figures, locked in an embrace, blur the boundaries between erotic pleasure and pain, struggle and affection, dominance and submission, all expressions of desire. The tiger and zebra print leotards worn by the wrestlers can be seen as a critique of the stereotypical and exploitative portrayals of Black women’s strength and sensuality.

Well, as I’ve said in my comments about the male gaze, does dressing Black women in jungle animal leotards (tiger and zebra) ‘critique’ stereotypes about Black women… or subtly confirm them? You, the viewer, decide.

Installation view of the wresting room at Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

I chatted with the visitor assistant about the bean bags. On the two times I visited the room nobody was sitting on them. Remember I mentioned the wooden shelf units and laminated flooring in the previous room? Well look at the walls here! The stripped varnished pine walls make it feel a bit like a shop, quite a clinical vibe.

Also, you only want to throw yourself on a bean bag if there’s something you really want to spend some time looking at and, I hate to say it, but these were probably the weakest set of works in the show.

But the visitor assistant, as so often, pointed out something I hadn’t noticed, which was the colour red. The bean bags are dark red because all the wrestling images who the two figures wrestling on a dark red blanket. Aha! More like interior decorating than art, the bean bags are visually tied in to the surrounding paintings.

Lastly, most visitors to most of the exhibitions I go to are old. Lots of grey-haired old men and women. I imagine no-one was using the bean bags because pretty much every visitor would struggle to get back to their feet. They’re appropriate to a younger crowd at a younger show and with something to really look at. (I vividly remember the beanbags in a projection room at the Victoria and Albert Museum show about So You Say You Want A Revolution, where you plumped down in a bag to watch excerpts from the rock movie, Woodstock.)

‘Me as Muse’

Round the corner from the lily pond room is a smaller installation, visually tied to it by the present of another clump of rubber plants and titled ‘Me as Muse’. It’s a multimedia video installation meaning there’s a bench and you sit on this and face

Installation view of ‘Me as Muse’ (2016) at Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Now what I noticed first about this was the way the bench was made of Thomas’s characteristic patched fabrics. I really liked the bench, vivid and colourful. The wall is covered by a massive montage of mostly black-and-white photos of woods and forest, which are complimented, I suppose, by the rubber plants.

But obviously the centre of attention is the 12 TV monitors. What appears on these screens is a little complicated. The core image is a self portrait of Thomas lying naked on a divan, the classic odalisque pose which prompted all those questions about the male gaze and the history of art and so on, on the ground floor.

What happens then is that different monitors cut to other images, not all at the same time but so that fragments of images are juxtaposed against each other. These other images include two classic odalisque paintings from western art, one by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a more modernist one by Amedeo Modigliani. I think the point is to contrast the representation of Black or ‘exotic’ women in classical male art, with the body of a real Black woman (Thomas herself).

This process goes a step further when the monitors show us a photographic image of Sarah Baartman (1789 to 1815), a Khoikhoi woman from southwestern Africa who was displayed in colonial exhibitions across Europe in the 19th century. This obviously deepens things from just being an art history issue to showing its relationship to the wider world and to historic issues of colonialism, dehumanisation and so on.

So far, so very like an A-level exercise in gender and racial politics. Intercut with all this are clips from a BBC interview with Eartha Kitt in which the famous singer (apparently) speaks candidly about the abuse, suffering and racism she experienced throughout her life. This would have been more powerful if I could have heard anything she said. Maybe there were headphones or a QR code to use on my phone or something, but none of the other visitors who were in this area at the same time as me were listening to anything. Then again maybe the images of a Black woman talking but muted and silenced, were – in a presumably unintentional way – more powerful than hearing her words.

And it’s a collage, isn’t it, just in a different format (video instead of picture). Like the paintings, and the furniture, its basic idea is cutting up and juxtaposing elements from strikingly different sources.

This view shows the geographical relationship between the lily pond room and the TV room (in this photo you can see the Modigliani odalisque on the TV screens), and also shows how the rubber plants – and now I look closely, I can see how the use of black and white stripes and squares – bind the two pieces together. In fact it was only when reviewing my own photos that I realised that immediately behind the monitors are photos of… water lilies in a pond! Surely, they must be shots of Monet’s lily pond. In which case the two installations are really tied together.

Installation view of the upstairs rooms at Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Eartha Kitt sings Angelitos Negros

Eartha Kitt crops up in another work, another multiple screen installation just along the corridor. It consists of four much bigger screens, each one divided into three sub-screens. On them we see face shots of several Black women all singing the same song. The singing feels notably non-professional i.e. like you or me singing in the shower, and it sounds like several voices singing together at once though not in any kind of professional unity or harmony.

Installation view of Angelitos Negros by Mickelene Thomas at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

It’s only when you read the wall caption that you realise one of the screens is showing Black singer and actress Eartha Kitt performing her 1953 song Angelitos Negros. In this the singer implores artists to paint Black angels in their religious paintings. ‘You paint all our churches, and fill them with beautiful angels,’ the song laments, ‘but you never do remember, to paint us a Black angel.’ As far as I can tell, in that original video Kitt starts crying so the tone of the music is obviously tearful, if not tragic.

So the other faces and voices are all of Thomas herself singing along. So that explains why there’s a kind of core track which sounds good (Eartha) accompanied by an impassioned by amateur rendition (Mickalene).

What I assume to be several takes of her doing this are cut and pasted into the different channels shown by the monitors, which continually change angle and distance. So it’s yet another example of Thomas’s use of collage, reusing, repurposing, juxtaposing original source material into new combinations.

In a way more striking than the piece itself is the fact that in front of it is something like the living room installations downstairs, a collection of armchairs place on a big carpet, with side tables piled with classics of Black and queer literature.

Installation view of Angelitos Negros by Mickelene Thomas at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Note 1) the way all the furniture is made of patchwork fabric, like the bench in the other TV room, like the furniture in the two living room installations, echoing the intense use of fabric patterns in her rhinestone paintings. 2) Note the use of fake wood laminated tiles, such as you see in flooring shops, visually linking this to the images of cheap wooden furnishing and flooring in the previous installations. And 3) our old friends, the pot plants, also linking this with the other upper gallery installations. It’s not only paintings that can have recurring motifs, but installations too.

The sly way all these displays are tied together by these motifs is enjoyable to decipher and savour. Clever. Very clever, and fun. In the manner of all good art, you feel all these linkages are saying something, something important and meaningful, but can’t work out what. But that’s fine. Art isn’t a scientific thesis. Hints and echoes and implications are what it’s good at. Very clever. Echoes and re-echoes.

Incidentally, the paintings on the wall in the background of this photo are a departure from everything we’ve seen so far. They’re portraits of people right enough, but painted on big mirrors. In fact here on the upper floor there’s a much greater variety of works, a greater range of paintings plus a corridor of simple (i.e. uncollaged) colour photographs, nicely staged and shot.

A note on James Baldwin

The Black American author James Baldwin (1924 to 1987) is frequently encountered in the art world. Why? Because he’s Black, queer and a writer. I’m not being sarcastic or snarky when I say he ticks all the boxes. We live in a liberal culture which is concerned to tick all the boxes – literally in the case of many organisations’ legally binding commitments to diversity and inclusion. In a thoroughly feminist culture like the art world most straight white men are frowned on and excluded. In a backlash against thousands of years of white heteronormative domination, there is currently a wave of exhibitions by Black artists, and an ever-growing number of exhibitions by queer artists.

Baldwin’s writings often address his challenges with identity. When he came of age in the 1940s a man was meant to be white and manly, Clark Gable or John Wayne. Being Black exposed him to the massive race discrimination in 1940s USA, but being queer made him doubly an outsider, especially in his own Black community which was just as homophobic as the white world, if not more so.

After facing years of everyday racism and homophobia, despite the support of other Black writers who spotted his talent, Baldwin in the end fled America, travelling to France in 1948 where he lived for the rest of his life.

It’s not just that Baldwin ticks the boxes, he’s not just an empty figurehead. It’s that he wrote so eloquently about the challenges and complexities of juggling his multiple identities: American, man, Black, gay.

So it is no surprise that in our times, when progressive politics, art and literature are more than ever before concerned with questions of gender and identity, Baldwin is not just a symbol of these issues, but his often very eloquent expressions of them find themselves being quoted again and again, in texts, in documentaries and in countless exhibitions.

When I visited the contentious Masculinities exhibition at the Barbican, supposedly a comprehensive survey of art from around the world about masculinity, no surprise that the massive quotation written in big letters on the wall right at the start of the exhibition was by Baldwin. Not a British writer, a white writer or a straight writer. To define masculinity, to set the keynote in their huge exhibition about masculinity, the curators chose the writing of a gay Black American man.

Not long ago I was at the Photographer’s Gallery in Soho and discovered quotes from Baldwin being used in their exhibition of queer photos. And here in the Mickalene show, Baldwin is 1) referenced in the wall captions, specifically the one for the Money installation which aligned Baldwin’s flight to France with Mickalene’s stay there 60 years later. 2) In the Shrine and here in this Earth Kitt installation, when there are little piles of books to make the place look more homely, you can bet your house they’ll include works by Baldwin and guess what? They do. 3) And photos of him appear in Thomas’s series celebrating Black politics, ‘Resist’. He’s everywhere.

I’m not mocking. I’m pointing out that particular periods or eras in history are defined by their economic and technological substructure, and the cultures they produce are marked by particular anxieties and means of expression. So that in an era saturated in issues to do with race and gender, it’s almost inevitable that Baldwin’s eloquent descriptions of the interplay of these issues – not that commercially successful in his own time (the 1950s, 60, 70s) – have come into their own. This goes some way to explaining why his words or image keep cropping up in so many exhibitions I visit.

Sorry for this long digression.

The Black Lives Matter room

The last room I arrived at, the room beyond the Eartha Kitt room, is a cul-de-sac, a comparatively small space and the most ‘political’ room. It contains just three works and these are completely unlike the homespun, family-oriented, bright and joyful vibe of the rhinestone works. They all address the dire state of race relations in contemporary America. They’re examples of a series of works gathered under the collective title ‘Resist’, being:

  • Resist #12: Power to the People
  • Resist #6: Say Their Names
  • Resist #7: Guernica detail

Rather than rewrite them, I’ll quote the curators’ own words:

While Thomas’s art is fundamentally and radically political, this recent series of paintings is explicitly so, centring on Civil Rights activism from the 1960s to the present.

The central painting serves as a memorial to Black men and women who have lost their lives at the hands of U.S. law enforcement or while in custody, urging the viewer to remember the names of countless victims.

The two flanking paintings explore the central role of Black women within civil rights activism from the 1960s onwards. Thomas finds echoes of the past in the present, layering archival images from the Civil Rights era with images from recent protests and uprisings related to Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements.

Here’s that central work, the ‘memorial to Black men and women who have lost their lives at the hands of U.S. law enforcement or while in custody’.

Installation view of ‘Say Their Names (Resist #6)’ (2021) by Mickalene Thomas in Mickalene Thomas: All About Love’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

If you pull back from the specific names and focus on the dark grey outlines you can see that they echo or in fact repeat the shapes of the animals in Pablo Picasso’s famous painting, Guernica. As in her copies, pastiches of and homages to classic paintings by Ingres, Manet and Modigliani, you can see 1) her fundamental principle of collage at work, cutting and pasting and incorporating materials from other sources into her own art; and 2) in these particular instances, taking classic works from the canon and rewriting them for her own, modern purposes, to address contemporary social and political issues.

This is a very powerful room and you only have to start thinking about the long, dire history of race relations in America, about American slavery, the civil war, the Jim Crow era, the miserable segregation and racism Afro-Americans suffered for most of the twentieth century, the long battles of the Civil Rights Movement, the assassination of Martin Luther King, through various race riots of the 1960, ’70s’, ’80s and up to the present day with its ongoing litany of Black people killed by white cops and the vast numbers of Black men imprisoned in America’s incarceration complex, to feel yourself completely overwhelmed by the scale and horror of this terrible history and these ongoing horrible realities.

All of which has an undermining effect on the smooth jazz vibe of the ground floor, with its atmosphere of proud women and domestic happiness. This small room casts a long shadow over everything which came before it… But then, we are grown-ups and have to deal with the fact that the world is a troubled, complex and riven place. There’s really very little I can do to influence the community policies of most American police forces. But all the more reason to value the love, leisure and joy which she described at the very start of the show and which those first big collages convey so wonderfully.

Take-home

It’s big, colourful, inspiring, inventive, dark and troubling, all at the same time, all in one big complex feast. Go and see it.

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Posted by Simon on March 15, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/03/15/mickalene-thomas-all-about-love-hayward-gallery/

Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence (1920)

‘I do think,’ he said, ‘that the world is only held together by the mystic conjunction, the ultimate unison between people — a bond. And the immediate bond is between man and woman.’
(Rupert Birkin, sounding like his creator, Women in Love, page 169)

‘Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.’
(More Birkin wisdom)

‘One must be free, above all, one must be free. One may forfeit everything else, but one must be free.’
(Gudrun, voicing Lawrence’s fundamental position)

‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’ are not so much novels as overwhelming, mind-blowing experiences.

Originally Lawrence conceived of ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’ as one massive novel which would have been as long as War and Peace. It was his publisher, Methuen, who persuaded him to break it into two (still very long) works of 500 or so pages each. In the event, what with the negative reviews and then the official banning of ‘The Rainbow’, Methuen chose not to publish the sequel, in fact Lawrence had trouble placing it until the American publisher Martin Secker brought it out, in a privately subscribed edition, in 1920.

‘The Rainbow’ is a masterpiece at least in part because the first half describes the lives of farmers in their part of the West Midlands in a kind of timeless, elemental style, making the figures almost like mythical figures who live close to the land, and this legendary power is carried over into the more modern, mundane life of the final figure in the novel, Ursula Brangwen, who carries echoes and shades of the murky ancestors with her.

‘Women in Love’, by contrast, starts in the recognisable modern world of cars and collieries, trains and trams and work, making its lead figures, the two oldest Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, thoroughly modern women, at home in the world of universities, art school, managers, cities, trains, London and Paris. So it lacks the mythical depth and resonance of the first novel.

It starts some years after ‘The Rainbow’ ends because Ursula has been teaching at Willey Green grammar school ‘for some years’ (p.9), whereas she hadn’t started that job at the end of ‘The Rainbow’, and Gudrun is back from three years art school in London, whereas she hadn’t left in ‘The Rainbow’.

Ursula is 26, Gudrun is 25. They are wondering what to do with their lives and the novel opens with them having a half-hearted conversation about marriage.

They decide to visit a wedding they know is taking place that morning. The walk to the church through the ugly industrial town places them class-wise, because they have to walk through working class miners’ areas where the miners’ wives stare at the pair in their bright fashionable clothes, and children shout abuse. They are both a class above their setting.

The wedding introduces us to three more key characters: firstly to the two young men the sisters fancy, being:

Gerald Crich who Gudrun passionately fancies. He is heir to the local mining business, a commanding man and presence – ‘fair, good-looking, healthy, with a great reserve of energy. He was erect and complete, there was a strange stealth glistening through his amiable, almost happy appearance’.

Rupert Birkin who Ursula fancies:

She craved for Rupert Birkin. When he was there, she felt complete, she was sufficient, whole… If only Birkin would form a close and abiding connection with her, she would be safe during this fretful voyage of life. He could make her sound and triumphant, triumphant over the very angels of heaven.

Rupert is one of the school-inspectors of the county.

What’s a little surprising about both these men is we aren’t shown the girls first meeting them, bumping into them again, getting to know them and so on. The novel opens with both girls fully committed to their crushes on both men.

The third character is the dashing, fashionable, tall, slow, reluctant woman with a weight of fair hair and a pale, long face, named Hermione Roddice, a friend of the Criches.

She was the most remarkable woman in the Midlands. Her father was a Derbyshire Baronet of the old school, she was a woman of the new school, full of intellectuality, and heavy, nerve-worn with consciousness. She was passionately interested in reform, her soul was given up to the public cause. But she was a man’s woman, it was the manly world that held her.

And:

a tall queer, frightening figure, with her heavy fair hair slipping to her eyes.

The plot revolves around an apparently endless number of meetings, conversations and debates between these five central characters.

Lawrence’s hyperbole

A terrible storm came over her, as if she were drowning. She was possessed by a devastating hopelessness.

As with ‘The Rainbow’, the characters’ feelings are portrayed as evanescent, ever-changing and, crucially, extreme. They flash from one extreme to another even as we watch:

Birkin’s eyes were at the moment full of anger. But swiftly they became troubled, doubtful, then full of a warm, rich affectionateness and laughter.

Or cohabit in extremes of contradiction.

A wonderful tenderness burned in him, at the sight of her quivering, so sensitive fingers: and at the same time he was full of rage and callousness. (p.346)

She could not believe—she did not believe. Yet she believed, triumphantly (p.372)

Gudrun looked at Ursula with steady, balancing eyes. She admired and despised her sister so much, both! (p.493)

The simplest argument can lead to characters hating each other.

He could feel violent waves of hatred and loathing of all he said, coming out of her. It was dynamic hatred and loathing, coming strong and black out of the unconsciousness. (p.116)

Some event or conversation leaves a character so tortured she wants to die. Hermione listens to Birkin explaining why he’s copying the design of a Chinese vase and her reaction is way over the top:

She suffered the ghastliness of dissolution, broken and gone in a horrible corruption. And he stood and looked at her unmoved. She strayed out, pallid and preyed-upon like a ghost, like one attacked by the tomb-influences which dog us. And she was gone like a corpse… (p.99)

Ursula bursts into tears and doesn’t know whether from joy or misery. Rupert and Gerald sometimes love, sometimes hate, sometimes admire and sometimes despise each other, neither of them, nor the reader, can predict their ever-changing moods.

‘Gerald,’ Birkin said, ‘I rather hate you.’
‘I know you do,’ said Gerald.

Of course he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along denying it. (p.231)

Hermione loves Birkin but at the same time:

She hated him in a despair that shattered her and broke her down, so that she suffered sheer dissolution like a corpse, and was unconscious of everything save the horrible sickness of dissolution that was taking place within her, body and soul.

In fact the Italian Contessa staying with Hermione, explicitly points this out after dinner:

‘Look,’ said the Contessa, in Italian. ‘He is not a man, he is a chameleon, a creature of change.’ (p.103)

Nobody has any control over their feelings. Nobody has the smooth detachment, the stiff upper lip, the gift for under-statement which was supposed to characterise the English. Lawrence’s metier is over-statement. I noticed early on that the most recurring emotion is fear.

If only Birkin would form a close and abiding connection with her, she would be safe during this fretful voyage of life. He could make her sound and triumphant, triumphant over the very angels of heaven. If only he would do it! But she was tortured with fear, with misgiving.

This kind of hyperbole occurs on every page.

Suddenly [Ursula] started. She saw, in the shaft of ruddy, copper-coloured light near her, the face of a man. It was gleaming like fire, watching her, waiting for her to be aware. It startled her terribly. She thought she was going to faint. All her suppressed, subconscious fear sprang into being, with anguish.

Sometimes she [Ursula] had periods of tight horror, when it seemed to her that her life would pass away, and be gone, without having been more than this.

Gudrun went on her way half dazed. If this were human life, if these were human beings, living in a complete world, then what was her own world, outside? She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour. And she felt as if she were treading in the air, quite unstable, her heart was contracted, as if at any minute she might be precipitated to the ground. She was afraid.

Hermione and Ursula look at some luxury shirts but when Hermione comes near her, Ursula panics:

Hermione came near, and her bosom writhed, and Ursula was for a moment blank with panic. And for a moment Hermione’s haggard eyes saw the fear on the face of the other… overcome with dread… (p.104)

Why? Because this is how all Lawrence’s characters feel, constantly overwhelmed, falling into panics or despairs, tortured by the never-ending intensity of their feelings.

There are other feelings, lots of them, I just noticed how often fear dominated. One of the few criticisms I’d make of Lawrence is I dislike it when this hyperbole makes him use the word ‘insane’. He does mean feeling something to an extent which is almost deranged but use of the word makes me draw up short, and realise how preposterous he’s being.

The result was a nasty and insane scene with Halliday on the fourth evening.

Why not just say ‘The result was a nasty scene with Halliday on the fourth evening’? Most of Lawrence’s hyperbole I can take, but his references to insanity and madness grated.

The book’s worldview

By chapter 4 I began to realise that every chapter (more or less) contains at its core an argument, two or more characters getting into a debate about something or other. Characters in other novels have conversations which move the plot along, but in Lawrence – certainly in this book – very often they start talking purely in order to have a 6th form debate about a Big Issue. The five central characters are all very opinionated and at the drop of a hat start arguing.

The fundamental premise of Lawrence’s worldview seems to be that God is dead and so people have to make their own values, figure out how to live their own lives. The God is dead premise is obviously key but only made explicit once, by Birkin, the Lawrence avatar.

‘And you mean if there isn’t the woman, there’s nothing?’ said Gerald.
‘Pretty well that – seeing there’s no God.’ (p.64)

Part of the statement’s impact is its throwaway nature. In the later nineteenth century hundreds of novels and autobiographies featured Great Debates about the existence of God or the devil, the protagonists’ agonising about their Loss of Faith etc. But here, around 1915, is Lawrence simply dismissing all of that. It’s a non-subject. Junk. Thus freed, we have to get on with living our best lives.

Mind you, Birkin goes quite a long way beyond a sensible atheist humanism. Lawrence gives him extreme views, regularly positing the end of humanity. With characteristically Lawrentian contempt, he wonders if humanity’s time has come? It would be a good thing.

Birkin looked at the land, at the evening, and was thinking: ‘Well, if mankind is destroyed, if our race is destroyed like Sodom, and there is this beautiful evening with the luminous land and trees, I am satisfied. That which informs it all is there, and can never be lost. After all, what is mankind but just one expression of the incomprehensible. And if mankind passes away, it will only mean that this particular expression is completed and done. That which is expressed, and that which is to be expressed, cannot be diminished. There it is, in the shining evening. Let mankind pass away — time it did. The creative utterances will not cease, they will only be there. Humanity doesn’t embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way. Let humanity disappear as quick as possible.’

An opinion which is repeated right at the end of the novel. But this is just one character’s opinion, Birkin, the most negative of the quartet: ‘His dislike of mankind, of the mass of mankind, amounted almost to an illness.’ (p.66)

Gerald’s worldview is less vivid and memorable because he lives it; he is the embodiment of masculinity, virile and in control, a manifesto in action. It’s easy to quote Birkin as if he represents Lawrence’s view, but really the book’s worldview is generated by the dialectic between Birkin the gloomy theoriser and Gerald the confident man of action; and that’s before you bring in Ursula, Gudrun and Hermione, who all contribute to its complex weft of opinions. The difference between a lecture or manifesto, and a work of art, is complexity and ambiguity.

Chapter 1. Sisters

Introducing Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, sitting chatting about whether they’ll ever get married before they set off walking through their ugly industrial town to see an actual wedding. This features the two men they fancy, coalmine owner Gerald Crich and county school inspector Rupert Birkin. The groom is late and there’s an odd moment when he arrives, sees, his bride on the path to the church, and then makes a mad dash to try and beat her to the door.

Chapter 2. Shortlands

The wedding reception is held at the Criches’ family home, Shortlands, where we see Gerald confidently hosting the party (his father retires ill) and see him and Birkin interacting with guests, notably the breezily confident Hermione Roddice. Gerald, Rupert and Hermione have a three-way argument about race and nationality:

‘Do you think race corresponds with nationality?’ she asked musingly…

Chapter 3. Class-room

Ursula at work teaching children about the structure of catkins. She is startled by the arrival of Birkin and then, unexpectedly, Hermione. Hermione and Birkin have an argument, she saying education makes children too conscious and stops them behaving spontaneously.

‘Isn’t the mind—’ she said, with the convulsed movement of her body, ‘isn’t it our death? Doesn’t it destroy all our spontaneity, all our instincts? Are not the young people growing up today, really dead before they have a chance to live?’
‘Not because they have too much mind, but too little,’ he said brutally.
‘Are you sure?’ she cried. ‘It seems to me the reverse. They are over-conscious, burdened to death with consciousness.’
‘Imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts,’ he cried.

So far, every chapter has featured a kind of central debate or argument. I wonder if this is the pattern for the book.

Chapter 4. Diver

Ursula and Gudrun go for a walk to the local lake, Willey Water, come to a lake and see a naked man run off a jetty and dive in. It is confident Gerald. They’re both jealous of men’s freedom.

‘God, what it is to be a man!’ [Gudrun] cried.
‘What?’ exclaimed Ursula in surprise.
‘The freedom, the liberty, the mobility!’ cried Gudrun, strangely flushed and brilliant. ‘You’re a man, you want to do a thing, you do it. You haven’t the thousand obstacles a woman has in front of her.’

Ursula tells Gudrun the terrible story of Gerald accidentally shooting his brother dead with a rusty old gun when they were boys. Then they comes across Hermione out for a walk with Laura. After Hermione greets, converses a bit then wanders off, Gudrun says how much she admires her, but Ursula is dead set against her.

The two sisters were like a pair of scissors, snipping off everything that came athwart them; or like a knife and a whetstone, the one sharpened against the other. (p.56)

The sisters jokily tell each other that they are a thousand times more intelligent and beautiful than Hermione, let alone the masses in the street.

‘Strut,’ said Ursula. ‘One wants to strut, to be a swan among geese.’
‘Exactly,’ cried Gudrun, ‘a swan among geese.’

Chapter 5. In the Train

Birkin has to go to London by train. On the platform he bumps into Crich and they’re more or less obliged to travel together. As in every preceding chapter there is a debate. Gerald has been reading a newspaper leader which argues that ‘there must arise a man who will give new values to things, give us new truths, a new attitude to life, or else we shall be a crumbling nothingness in a few years, a country in ruin’. This triggers Birkin to say all such announcing of plans is just playing; what we need to do is tear up society, starting by tearing up ourselves. Lawrence’s characters’ opinions are always vehement but often don’t really make sense:

‘We are such dreary liars. Our one idea is to lie to ourselves. We have an ideal of a perfect world, clean and straight and sufficient. So we cover the earth with foulness; life is a blotch of labour, like insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier can have a pianoforte in his parlour, and you can have a butler and a motor-car in your up-to-date house, and as a nation we can sport the Ritz, or the Empire, Gaby Deslys and the Sunday newspapers.’ (p.60)

Disappointingly this morphs into Birkin asserting that the meaning of life is love, that he wants the finality of a definitive love.

‘The old ideals are dead as nails – nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman – sort of ultimate marriage – and there isn’t anything else.’

It’s on this journey that Birkin expresses his dislike of people and his contentment if all of humanity were wiped out, quoted above.

He tells Gerald he stays with a man in Soho, Halliday, and mixes with a Bohemian crowd. Interesting to read how little the profile of this type has changed in the last hundred years:

‘Painters, musicians, writers – hangers-on, models, advanced young people, anybody who is openly at outs with the conventions, and belongs to nowhere particularly. They are often young fellows down from the University, and girls who are living their own lives, as they say.’

The most significant changes would be that nowadays such a crowd would be 1) diverse and multicultural and 2) LGBTQ+ and gender fluid.

Chapter 6. Crème de Menthe

Later the same day Gerald meets Rupert in a Bohemian cafe. The latter is chatting to Minette (Minny) Darrington, small, bobbed hair, with a lisp, nicknamed ‘the Pussum’.

Her ex-boyfriend, Halliday, an old Etonian, turns up. He chucked her and told her to go to the countryside when he learned that she’s pregnant but she refuses. Others join the table, Maxim Libidnikov and Julius who Lawrence has Minette rather unnecessarily tell us is a Jew.

Gerald is more and more attracted to her wanton behaviour and sits pressed up against her in the taxi they get to Halliday’s house (the flat where Birkin bunks down when in London) where they are surprised by the illiterate Arab servant he’s taken in off the streets. Bohemia, darling.

Chapter 7. Totem

Next morning in the same apartment, Gerald wakes up. Going into the main room he is surprised to find Halliday and Maxim naked in front of the fire. Bohemia. Rubert has his bath and, after he’s followed, Gerald adopts the manners of the house and comes out naked. He goes into the bedroom where he obviously slept with Minette. Her eyes are chaotic. She is like ‘a violated slave’ which arouses Gerald all over again but he realises he has to separate himself from her.

They go about their business for the day, and all reassemble to go to a music hall that evening, then back to Halliday’s flat. Gerald hangs on for two more days but the group become more fractious until Halliday provokes Gerald one evening and Gerald is on the verge of punching his face in before he turns and leaves.

Thus Minette achieves her aim, which was to make Halliday jealous and make him love her again and, hopefully, get him to marry her. This she has achieved by the time Gerald leaves.

Chapter 8. Breadalby

Breadalby was a Georgian house with Corinthian pillars, standing among the softer, greener hills of Derbyshire, not far from Cromford. It is Hermione Roddice’s family home, set in landscaped ground. She invites Ursula and Gudrun to stay. Also staying are Birkin, a young Italian Contessa, young athletic-looking Miss Bradley, Sir Joshua, a dry Baronet of fifty, and a woman secretary, a Fräulein März, young and slim and pretty. Later arrive Hermione’s brother, tall debonaire Alexander Roddice, a Liberal MP, who arrives along with Gerald Crich.

Edwardian lunch presented by servants under the lovely old elm tree in the garden while the characters witter about education. Tea and a walk round the grounds. Hermione loves Birkin but realises that he’s come to hate her and a break is coming.

Gorgeous dinner with all the ladies wearing fashionable dress. Followed the staging of an impromptu ballet in the style of the Russian Ballet of Pavlova and Nijinsky, the servants bringing down Hermione’s gorgeous Oriental costumes, Alexander playing the piano.

Next morning they go skinny dipping in the ponds in the grounds, except Ursula and Gudrun and Birkin. Gerald gets his kit off at the drop of a hat. He knows how handsome and male he looks. After lunch a discussion about whether the old social values have collapsed in which case, what news ones are emerging? Gerald thinks people should and will be defined by the role in society, their job. Their private lives will remain private. Birkin objects that there is no social equality. Birkin feels people are as different and self sufficient as stars.

Later, he goes to Hermione’s boudoir, feeling he had been rude. He sits quietly and reads while she writes letters but in fact she is flooded by a vast wave of hatred, suddenly she realises Birkin is standing in her way and only eliminating him can she be free. So she takes a lapis lazuli paperweight and cracks it down on his skull with all her might. Fortunately her fingers get in the way masking a lot of the blow. She raises it again but Birkin ducks under his book and crabs out of the room.

Instead of going looking for medical help he walks out of the house across the grounds and into a wood where he strips naked and rolls in the grass and flowers then walks through a young pine wood deliberately letting the needles sting him, experiencing an epiphany of the post-human world. Is he mad? Who cares.

He climbed out of the valley, wondering if he were mad. But if so, he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.

Eventually, dressed again, he staggers to the railway station and catches a train home where he is laid up in bed with concussion.

Chapter 9. Coal-dust

Two scenes. In the first Ursula and Gudrun go for a walk to the coalminers’ town, are delayed at a closed level crossing while a long train shunts by and up rides Gerald Crich on a horse, a beautiful mare, which panics at the very loud noise of the clanging carts and rears and bucks and terrifies the sisters while Gerald enjoys mastering the poor terrified beast.

The second half describes Gudrun’s addiction to walking the working class colliers quarters, especially in Friday night when they get paid and get pissed in the pubs. She pairs off with an electrician named Palmer, a fairly educated man, they promenade, go to the movies, but are never really an item.

Chapter 10. Sketch-book

The sisters go to a remote part of Willey Water to sketch. Who should appear but a rowing boat rowed by Gerald containing Hermione. Domineering Hermione asks to have a look at Gudrun’s sketchbook but bickers with Gerald and the book falls into the lake, Gerald reaching out and into the water to retrieve it. Hermione makes a dramatic show of being sorry, while Gudrun wants the book back, and Gerald a) despises Hermione b) is taken with Gudrun’s pride. And this incident establishes a link between them. it establishes Gudrun’s ascendancy over Gerald.

Chapter 11. An Island

Meanwhile Ursula has wandered along a stream which feeds the lake up to a big mill pond where she finds Birkin trying to fix a punt. Only leaking a little the punt bears him and Ursula out to a muddy little island. Here Birkin lets rip with his nihilistic misanthropy.

‘I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away. It could go, and there would be no absolute loss, if every human being perished tomorrow. The reality would be untouched. Nay, it would be better. The real tree of life would then be rid of the most ghastly, heavy crop of Dead Sea Fruit, the intolerable burden of myriad simulacra of people, an infinite weight of mortal lies.’
‘So you’d like everybody in the world destroyed?’ said Ursula.
‘I should indeed.’
‘And the world empty of people?’
‘Yes truly.’

Ursula stands up for the importance of love (alas) while Birkin rudely dismisses it as just another human emotion, appropriate in some situations not in others. She starts to dislike and even to hate him, ‘priggish and detestable’.

Birkin says he’s renting rooms at the mill which is empty. If he could he’d chuck in his job (school inspector) and live there by himself like a hermit, away from the mankind he loathes so much. Hermione’s threatened to furnish the rooms for him. He tells Ursula it’s over between him and Hermione, not that there was anything anyway. Ursula tells him she hates Hermione anyway.

Chapter 12. Carpeting

Still at the mill they find Gerald and Hermione in the building itself. Hermione offers to help Birkin measure the rooms and then offers him a valuable carpet which he tries to reject. He hates being dominated and owned by her. Neither of them mention her attacking him with the paperweight.

The landlady of the mill, Mrs Salmon, makes tea for them all. Over tea Ursula brings up Gerald’s beastly behaviour to the mare at the level crossing which triggers a debate about whether animals have lives of their own or exist solely to serve human purposes.

Birkin comes in with the idea that horses have two wills, one which wants to submit utterly to man, another which rebels and wants to be completely free. Not uncontroversially, he goes on to say the same about women.

Hermione and Ursula wander of while the men bicker about horses, and agree that they both dislike Birkin’s anatomising and botanising, he’s always opening and dissecting rather than leave life be.

Chapter 13. Mino

The Mino is Birkin’s cat. Following their ‘clicking’ at the watermill, Ursula goes to visit Birkin at his flat. They almost immediately start arguing. Birkin insists he doesn’t believe in love but in something much deeper, in penetrating to your essential self and making a primeval bond with another essential self.

The argument is interrupted when Birkin’s tom cat goes through the French windows into the garden to confront a wild she-cat and cuffs her. Ursula yells at it to stop being a bully but Birkin sympathises with his cat’s wish to create a stability.

‘It is the desire to bring this female cat into a pure stable equilibrium, a transcendent and abiding rapport with the single male. Whereas without him, as you see, she is a mere stray, a fluffy sporadic bit of chaos.’

Back in their flat, they carry on their argument, Birkin demanding something far beyond love, Ursula unable to see it and saying he’s being obstinate and obtuse. Eventually she wins, beating him down and getting him to say ‘I love you’ in the classic style, embracing and kissing her.

Chapter 14. Water-party

The Criches hold a big midsummer party on the lake, with a motor launch and some rowing boats, all sporting lights and lanterns, the launch letting off fireworks, people laughing aboard the boats or strolling through the grounds or sitting in groups. The water side of things is being hosted by manly Gerald.

Ursula and Gudrun attend, walking there with their mother and father (Will and Anna from The Rainbow). They are intimidated by all these strangers and ask Gerald for a hamper and a canoe and paddle far away from the crowds. They beach it in a hidden spot, strip off and skinny dip, finally emerging, drying themselves. Then Ursula sings while Gudrun performs a eurhythmic dance.

Ursula interrupts this by pointing out some cattle have approached but undaunted Gudrun confronts them, dancing, outfaces them and makes them run off. At this point Gerald and Rupert appear, having tracked them down. Gerald and Gudrun go up the hillside in pursuit of the cattle leaving Ursula and Rupert to fall deeper in love.

Up the hill Gerald tells Gudrun that it’s dangerous to drive the Highland bullocks, she says ‘I suppose you think I’m afraid of you and your cattle, don’t you?’, Gerald asks her ‘why’ and, for answer, she hit him round the face. These passionate Bohemians.

Back at the lakeside the quartet clamber into two dinghies to head back and are laughing and joking when they hear shouts across the water. It’s quite dark now and someone has fallen overboard the launch. Gerald makes Gudrun row fast to the place, the skipper of the launch tells him about where the girl went overboard. She was followed by her young doctor boyfriend who jumped in to save her. Gerald strips down and jumps into the freezing water.

In brief, he dives again and again till he’s exhausted but can’t find them. Birkin pulls him out and rows him to the jetty, where he can barely stand. Gerald apologises to his father who’s appeared, and orders Birkin to drain the lake. So Rupert sets off with Ursula to the lock-keeper’s cottage where he gets the key to the sluices and laboriously opens them, releasing the lakes water into overflow channels. Slowly the levels sink.

Walking back, Birkin explains to Ursula his odd ideas about death, about needing to escape this life, slough it off like an old shell etc.

Unexpectedly in the middle of the road he stops and gives her exquisitely gentle and sensitive bunny kisses. A bit further down the road, not to be outdone, she pulls him towards her and gives him more traditional passionate kisses. They both experience an efflorescence of lust.

Then she goes home and Birkin goes back to the lake to find Gerald still supervising the search and the scouring of the water. He says he can’t sleep till they find the bodies which they eventually do. The young woman, Diana Crich, had panicked and thrown her arms round the boy’s neck so tight it choked him, and so they both drowned.

A page describes how, on that Sunday morning, word spreads throughout the colliery community and all the working class men, women and children are abuzz with the tragedy, imagining the feelings of the people at Shortlands, ‘the high home of the district.’

Chapter 15. Sunday Evening

All that day and into the evening Ursula waits for Birkin to come. She is now fully in love with him. But he doesn’t and as dusk comes she sinks into a deep depression, really deep, page after page thinking about dying and death and what comes after death, thus:

How beautiful, how grand and perfect death was, how good to look forward to. There one would wash off all the lies and ignominy and dirt that had been put upon one here, a perfect bath of cleanness and glad refreshment, and go unknown, unquestioned, unabased. After all, one was rich, if only in the promise of perfect death. It was a gladness above all, that this remained to look forward to, the pure inhuman otherness of death.

Eventually, at the children’s bedtime, he arrives, coming in out of the rain. He helps Ursula get a few of the younger children ready for bed. Then her mum and dad return from church. She is furious with him and gets into an argument about him neglecting his body, making it poorly (i.e. neglecting the battery by Hermione). When he finally leaves she is overcome by hatred of him. See what I mean by Lawrence characters veering from burning love to virulent hatred, from snogging Birkin on Sunday morning to hating his guts by Sunday night.

When he was gone Ursula felt such a poignant hatred of him, that all her brain seemed turned into a sharp crystal of fine hatred. Her whole nature seemed sharpened and intensified into a pure dart of hate. She could not imagine what it was. It merely took hold of her, the most poignant and ultimate hatred, pure and clear and beyond thought. She could not think of it at all, she was translated beyond herself. It was like a possession. She felt she was possessed. And for several days she went about possessed by this exquisite force of hatred against him. It surpassed anything she had ever known before, it seemed to throw her out of the world into some terrible region where nothing of her old life held good. She was quite lost and dazed, really dead to her own life.

Chapter 16. Man to Man

Birkin has a recurrence of illness. He lies in bed which allows Lawrence to give him a great fantasia of wild thoughts. Birkin hates lots of things. He hates the idea of married love, ‘horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction’. He hates sex because it is so limiting, it makes the sexes dependent on each other. He hates women’s need:

always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant.

In the ideology of love and sex men and women are considered fragments who can only be made whole by the other. Birkin dreams of a world where men and women are always whole and voluntarily associate as entirely whole.

Gerald comes to visit. The death of the young couple triggers a discussion about death, about the impact on Gerald’s family, then on whether the youngest daughter, Winifred, should be sent away to school.

Both men feel such a closeness that Birkin, bubbling with silly ideas, suggests they swear Blutbruderschaft like the old German knights used to, to swear to love each other all their lives. The novel is titled ‘Women in Love’ but the complicated love between Birkin and Gerald is just as central.

Birkin floats the idea of Gudrun being hired as a private tutor to young Winifred. Aha.

Chapter 17. The Industrial Magnate

After experiencing such closeness, Gerald now fades out of Gudrun’s mind. She dreams of getting away from England. She writes to friends in Munich and Petersburg to see if they could help or put her up.

Ursula and Gudrun visit a working woman who makes honey, ‘Mrs Kirk, a stout, pale, sharp-nosed woman, sly, honied, with something shrewish and cat-like beneath.’

Mrs Kirk was also a wet nurse to the Crich children and remembers what a little devil Gerald was. Any normal person might find this sweet and funny but Gudrun, with Lawrentian melodrama, has a fit, is overcome with rage, and wants the woman ‘ taken out at once and strangled’. Sometimes you feel like telling Lawrence’s characters to calm down, take a breath, count to 10 and everything will be better. But there’s no point. Everything about his world is ramped up to maximum. The spectacular insights into complex human nature, the moments of intense feeling, as well as the staggering nature poetry, all are part of the same package.

Up at Shortlands Mr Crich the patriarch, Thomas Crich, is slowly dying and Lawrence describes his retreat from the world and his own life. He had always treated his workers well, considering them as superior to him, closer to God. But in this had to fight his wife, Christiana, ‘like one of the great demons of hell’. Specifically, he encourages the poor to come and claim charity while Christiana, filled with hatred, drives them away like a witch. Something like hatred and terror exists between them (!)

The dying father’s last thoughts are to secure the wellbeing of Winifred, his youngest, favourite child, several pages on her wilful, anarchistic character. Meanwhile, as his father dies, Gerald feels more and more exposed. He’s managed the business well with his father as mentor and protector. Once he’s gone, Gerald will be fully exposed. We learn what wasn’t obvious up to now, which is that the last few months have changed Gerald: under the influence of 1) the death of Diana 2) Birkin’s visions and 3) Gudrun’s love he’s ceased to be a mechanical old Tory, doors have opened in his mind, he’s become confused.

The chapter goes back to describe Gerald’s boyhood, education, wanderlust, off to uni in Germany, serving in the war, exploring in the Amazon, before returning to take up the family business. He sees the world as instrumental to the will of man. This is the exact opposite of Birkin, who fantasises about nature freed by the complete extermination of man.

Man was the archgod of earth. His mind was obedient to serve his will. Man’s will was the absolute, the only absolute. (p.251)

Lawrence describes industrial strife, the colliers striking for more pay which led to lockouts which led to marches, riots, and soldiers being sent to the most troublesome pit, Whatmore, shots fired, a miner shot dead. This broke old Man Crich’s heart but excited Gerald, who was a boy.

In brief: as Gerald takes over the business he reforms it from top to bottom, sacking all the old managers, bringing in new professionals and equipment from America, scrapping all the perks and charities his father had introduced, overhauling it and making it a modern profitable business.

Lawrence presents it in moralising, general terms, as the triumph of the modern machine ethic over the old organic one. The triumph of Gerald’s heartless Fordian mechanical efficiency over his dying father’s old-fashioned Christian Victorian paternalism.

Chapter 18. Rabbit

Mr Crich agrees for Gudrun to come to Shortlands regularly as an art tutor for Winifred. The latter expects her to be yet another servant but quickly learns they are to be equals. They sketch Einnie’s Pekinese dog, Looloo. Gerald turns up after a few days and they realise they are both in love. The strange incident of them getting out the family’s huge pet rabbit from its hutch. It’s called Bismarck and is a monster, going into a frenzy wherein it badly scratches both Gudrun and Gerald before they get it to a courtyard with grass where it settles down to feed.

Chapter 19. Moony

Birkin goes to recuperate in the South of France leaving Ursula bereft.

She despised and detested the whole show. From the bottom of her heart, from the bottom of her soul, she despised and detested people, adult people.

She takes a walk up to the mill pond as night is falling and sees the big moon reflected in the water. Then it is smashed by someone throwing a stone in, and another, repeatedly breaking the moon into fragments. It is, of course, Birkin, who has come back without telling anyone.

She makes themselves known and they have a hell of an argument because she simply wants him to say I love you while he has a difficult-to-understand, rarefied theory of two people existing together without needy things like ‘I love you’ etc, he wants ‘the paradisal unknowing’. He mocks it as her war cry.

But then she reaches out her hand to his and their bodies take over. They kiss again and again and Birkin gives in and says ‘I love you’.

Next day Birkin has doubts about his entire attitude. It’s connected with a 2-page meditation on the truth revealed by the African sculptures in Halliday’s flat, some truth cold northerners have reached. Suddenly he knows he must propose to Ursula so goes to Beldover. She’s out so he explains his intentions to her father, Will Brangwen.

This goes badly. While they wait, Brangwen and Birkin get into an argument. Brangwen has raised his children Christian like him and doesn’t want to see the girls throw themselves away. Birkin is nettled by all of this. When Ursula arrives from the library it’s her father who tells her Birkin is there to propose, reducing Birkin to inaudible mumbling. This inauspicious manner leads Ursula to bridle and then accuse them both of trying to railroad her, at which Birkin gets up and leaves.

Over the next few days Ursula and Gudrun are very close and dissect Birkin’s character, a preacher. But then there’s a reaction against her sister and she finds herself pondering what kind of love she wants from Birkin.

She wanted unspeakable intimacies. She wanted to have him, utterly, finally to have him as her own, oh, so unspeakably, in intimacy. To drink him down—ah, like a life-draught… But only on condition that he, her lover, loved her absolutely, with complete self-abandon.

This is a central crux so worth lingering on:

She believed that love far surpassed the individual. He said the individual was more than love, or than any relationship. For him, the bright, single soul accepted love as one of its conditions, a condition of its own equilibrium. She believed that love was everything.

Birkin has a model of the self where love is one among many attributes which bring out and complete the self. For Ursula, love is bigger than all individuals and we must submit ourselves to it.

Chapter 20. Gladiatorial

The famous chapter describing Rupert and Gerald wrestling in front of the fire. Straight after walking out of Ursula’s house after the proposal fiasco, Birkin walks up to Shortlands, to find Gerald standing in front of the fire in his drawing room, bored to tears.

They get talking about how to alleviate boredom: there’s work, intoxicants, women or… Birkin suggests fighting. Gerald says he shared a house with a Japanese wrestling expert in Heidelberg and offers to show Birkin jiu-jitsu. So Gerald gets the butler to bring sandwiches and soda, to close the door and leave them undisturbed.

And so they strip naked and wrestle. Modern sensibilities look for the homoerotic in the scene, which may well be there, but Lawrence is primarily concerned with the spiritual or psychological aspects. The actual wrestling lasts just four paragraphs. In the fifth one Gerald lies back on the carpet exhausted, faints and Birkin passes out over his body. When Birkin comes to, he props himself up and his hand accidentally touches Gerald’s, who seizes it. A strong male clasp. Gerald asks if this was the Bruderschaft Birkin wanted. It’s certainly something.

They get dressed (Gerald nips upstairs to dress in a luxury dressing gown) before settling in front of the fire to eat the sandwiches the butler brought. Birkin tells him he came hotfoot from proposing to Ursula. He loves her. Which triggers them to discuss the nature of love and for Gerald to worry that he might never find it.

Chapter 21. Threshold

Gudrun goes to London to attend a show of her artwork. On her return Winifred has a bouquet for her. Gudrun goes to sit with the dying old man. He arranges for a stable to be converted into a studio for Winifred and Gudrun to work in.

Birkin arrives driving his car to collect Winifred, Gudrun and Gerald. The two latter sit in the back and ripely satirise Birkin’s ideas about an association of man and woman which leaves them separate and distinct, as stars. Gudrun and Gerald agree they want passionate love between committed partners. (Gudrun gives her opinion of marriage being a purely social form – ‘Marriage is a social arrangement, I take it, and has nothing to do with the question of love’ – which I imagine was shocking in the late 1910s.)

Chapter 22. Woman to Woman

Only at this point do we learn Birkin was driving Gerald to the railway station, then taking the other two on to his place for tea before disappearing off somewhere. Hermione turns up and she and Ursula have a long dissection of Birkin’s character, Hermione strongly advising Ursula not to marry him.

Like the rabbit in his chapter, the star of this one is Rupert’s cat which Hermione feeds cream and speaks to in Italian. Hermione is of that class of gentlewoman who know Italy, and Florence in particular, so exquisitely well. Her dear mama died in Florence. (Cf A Room with a View.)

Chapter 23. Excurse

Next day is a half holiday at the school so Birkin calls by in his car and takes Ursula for a spin. He hands her a tissue which turns out to be full of rings he’s giving her. But this has the unintended consequence of making her feel like she’s being bought, making her very angry and she launches into pages and pages criticising him, calling him a perverse death-eater (p.346) before getting him to stop the car, throwing the rings at him, getting out and walking off. He stoops to pick the rings out of the mud and acknowledges some of her criticisms are true.

Then she comes back. She asks for the rings again. Everything which made the fight, disappears and now they are both soppily in love and do lots of kissing. Get back in the car and drive to Southwell, home of Southwell Minster and have a grand high tea at The Saracens Head. Here, in a scene which would be easy to over-interpret, she kneels on the hearth

And she was drawn to him strangely, as in a spell. Kneeling on the hearth-rug before him, she put her arms round his loins, and put her face against his thigh. Riches! Riches! She was overwhelmed with a sense of a heavenful of riches.
‘We love each other,’ she said in delight.
‘More than that,’ he answered, looking down at her with his glimmering, easy face.
Unconsciously, with her sensitive fingertips, she was tracing the back of his thighs, following some mysterious life-flow there. She had discovered something, something more than wonderful, more wonderful than life itself. It was the strange mystery of his life-motion, there, at the back of the thighs, down the flanks. It was a strange reality of his being, the very stuff of being, there in the straight downflow of the thighs. It was here she discovered him one of the sons of God such as were in the beginning of the world, not a man, something other, something more.

There’s more than a page of her kneeling and tracing the outline of his loins and feeling his primal power. Very easy to give a sexual interpretation to. Utterly entranced, he decides they must both quit their jobs and travel. In a mad enthusiasm they both write letters to their bosses quitting with immediate notice. Birkin posts hers first so they don’t arrive at the same time. I smell trouble.

Then back into the car and touring the lanes absolutely transformed by total love. He feels like an Egyptian Pharaoh. They end up driving through Sherwood Forest, then stop at a circle of grass near a stream. It is darkest night. He throws down a rug, they strip off and make love, the first sex in the book, described in high mystical magical terms.

She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the maximum of unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a magnificent gift and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a mystery, the reality of that which can never be known, vital, sensual reality that can never be transmuted into mind content, but remains outside, living body of darkness and silence and subtlety, the mystic body of reality. She had her desire fulfilled. He had his desire fulfilled. For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness. (p.361)

Chapter 24. Death and Love

Old Thomas Crich is a long time a-dying. And the impact on his son, Gerald? Characteristically Lawrentian hyperbole.

Day by day he felt more and more like a bubble filled with darkness, round which whirled the iridescence of his consciousness, and upon which the pressure of the outer world, the outer life, roared vastly.

He takes to hanging round the studio watching Gudrun. One day he asks her to stay on into the evening for dinner. As he explains how he is suffering, the void his father’s illness makes him feel, she feels powerfully attracted. A strong soldierly type obviously suffering brings out the mothering instinct.

Interlude when Gerald’s cold mother comes down, tells him not to take it all on himself, then departs. Gerald insists on walking Gudrun down the drive to the gates. He puts his arms round her and draws her near and she melts. Under the railway bridge, where the colliers snog their sweethearts, they kiss:

So she relaxed, and seemed to melt, to flow into him, as if she were some infinitely warm and precious suffusion filling into his veins, like an intoxicant. Her arms were round his neck, he kissed her and held her perfectly suspended, she was all slack and flowing into him, and he was the firm, strong cup that receives the wine of her life…

But then she checks herself, as all women do; you don’t want to be thought ‘too easy of winning’.

How much more of him was there to know? Ah much, much, many days harvesting for her large, yet perfectly subtle and intelligent hands upon the field of his living, radio-active body. Ah, her hands were eager, greedy for knowledge. But for the present it was enough, enough, as much as her soul could bear. (p.375)

Gudrun doesn’t come next day because she has a cold. The day after, Gerald is sitting by his father’s bed when the old man gasps and arches and coughs up a gout of blood and dies. The mother makes a weird speech, telling her children none of them must look so beautiful and young on their deathbeds. Next day Gudrun goes to Winifred and the studio where Gerald pays a meek visit and shares their coffee.

The funeral is barely described. Instead the three horrible days when Gerald feels like a prisoner chained over an abyss of darkness. On the third evening he can’t bear it any more and goes for a vast walk in the darkness, which eventually brings him to the graveyard where his father’s grave is, and then he conceives a mad notion of seeing Gudrun. She is the only one who can save him.

So he asks directions from a drunk miner emerging from the town pub at chucking-out time (10pm) and makes his way to the Brangwen house. In a coincidence he arrives just as Birkin and Ursula step out, and hides from them in the shadows. Then he sneaks into the house – father William is asleep in the living room, his wife is in their bedroom – sneaks on tiptoe upstairs. There’s a comic digression when he figures he has the right room, sneaks over to the bedroom only to find the sleeping form of a boy, one of the brothers and has to tiptoe back out onto the landing.

Long story short, he finds Gudrun’s bedroom, wakes her. At first terrified, she locks her door, makes him take off his wet things and lets him have sex with her. He falls deeply asleep, as men do, while she lays for hours in the dark wondering what has just happened, what it means, remembering all her life up to this point.

She waits till the church bell rings 5 o’clock, then wakes him and urges him to go. In fact she has a nausea of him, needs him to be gone.

Chapter 25. Marriage or Not

Birkin has taken out a marriage licence but Ursula keeps delaying. She is in the third week of notice to the school. Christmas is coming. Gerald jokes that maybe he and Gudrun should hurry up so they can make it a joint wedding. Birkin isn’t sure marriage will suit Gerald.

Gerald and Birkin compare theories of marriage. For Birkin it is a social convention which denotes the partnership of free and equal lovers. Gerald has a more fatal view.

Marriage was not the committing of himself into a relationship with Gudrun. It was a committing of himself in acceptance of the established world, he would accept the established order, in which he did not livingly believe, and then he would retreat to the underworld for his life. (p.398)

Chapter 26. A Chair

Birkin and Ursula go to the flea market. They buy a beautiful old wooden chair but then argue about whether the present is accursed (Birkin) or the past was just as crudely materialistic (Ursula). This triggers Birkin into expressing Lawrence’s dogma of never having a home, of permanent travel.

‘The truth is, we don’t want things at all,’ he replied. ‘The thought of a house and furniture of my own is hateful to me.’
This startled her for a moment. Then she replied:
‘So it is to me. But one must live somewhere.’
‘Not somewhere – anywhere,’ he said. “One should just live anywhere – not have a definite place. I don’t want a definite place. As soon as you get a room, and it is complete, you want to run from it. Now my rooms at the Mill are quite complete, I want them at the bottom of the sea. It is a horrible tyranny of a fixed milieu, where each piece of furniture is a commandment-stone… You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside.’

Ursula had earlier noticed a working class couple, the woman heavily pregnant, sifting through the junk on display. On an impulse she decides to give them the chair they’ve just bought. Lawrence dwells on the pair’s working class appearance, the woman short and stocky, the man thin like a rat. The repeated word is ‘slinking’. In fact this is the longest description of working class people in the book. Gerald takes direction from a drunk miner. Working class women mock Ursula and Gudrun on their way to the wedding. There are the servants, of course. This is the longest description of proles and the key words are ‘slinking’ and ‘rat’.

Our couple find the whole place grim and miserable and low and wretched, ‘cold, somehow small, crowded, and like the end of the world.’ They catch a tram and agree that they need to get away, to wander the world.

‘And we will wander about on the face of the earth,” he said, “and we’ll look at the world beyond just this bit.’ (p.408)

Chapter 27. Flitting

At dinner, Ursula tells her family she’s getting married tomorrow. Her father is furious at not being told, not being given any notice. She says it’s her life, he says she owes her family and her parents the information. She defies him, makes him furious and he smacks her. She leaves the room, goes upstairs, packs her bags, comes downstairs, says goodbye, marches out of the house, down to the station, catches a train to where Birkin is staying, walks past his landlady into his room. (Birkin appears to be living in rented rooms as well as sometimes at the Mill which Hermione so wanted to decorate for him, thus retaining her hold over him.)

Rupert is non-plussed but reckons something like this was inevitable, embraces her and tells her he loves her. That is the reassurance she needs, but she can’t really see how deeply she is rescuing him from the fallen world, from his own doubts and incompleteness. They marry the next day (p.417). The wedding ceremony is not described in the slightest because it doesn’t matter to Rupert, Gudrun or Lawrence.

A few days at the Mill, while Rupert is away, Gerald and Ursula discuss marriage. He says she looks well on it. He asks her whether he should propose to Gudrun. They both have their doubts. Later when Rupert comes home, they agree that Gudrun is more the mistress type than the wife type, and Gerald a born lover rather than faithful husband. But Gerald floats the idea that they should all go away somewhere, somewhere abroad, as a foursome, which Ursula loves.

The Brangwen family have moved out of the house in Beldover. Will Brangwen needed to move to Nottingham for his work. They leave Ursula’s belongings behind for her to collect. She and Ursula walk over one afternoon. They’re both appalled by how bleak the empty house is. Birkin shows up with his car and shares the general horror at the bleak empty rooms.

Birkin drives Ursula back to the Mill with him, dropping Gudrun at the cottage she’s now renting in Willey Green. She watches them go, haunted by their happiness. Next day she goes to the Mill and finds Ursula alone, asks if she doesn’t think Gerald’s suggestion they all go away together is a cheek. Gudrun thinks the menfolk are treating her like a chattel, like a type (French for ‘trollop’).

Chapter 28. Gudrun in the Pompadour

The trip abroad begins. Gudrun and Gerald, being ready first, set off via London and Paris to Innsbruck, where they would meet Ursula and Birkin. In London they stayed one night. They went to the music-hall, and afterwards to the Pompadour Café. Gudrun hates this place because all the tight little groups of artists and bohemians hang out here.

Minette is there, the girl from chapter 6 who was pregnant and slept with Gerald in order to get back her target, Halliday. She comes over from a group of the gang and asks him to join them but he suavely refuses. She says just enough to indicate to Gudrun that she’s one of his mistresses.

The bohemian set (Halliday, Maxim, Julian and Minette) start slagging off Birkin, then Halliday finds a letter to him written by Rupert, full of his ripest pontificating, and reads it out loud to general ridicule. Gudrun is worked into a frenzy by their mockery, gets up, walks over to their table, politely asks if she may read the letter, takes it, turns and walks out of the cafe. The others can’t believe what is happening then start to boo. This makes her walk all the slower and more superior. Outside she hails a cab as Gerald catches up with her, thinking her magnificent. Gudrun thinks they are ‘dogs’ and calls Rupert a fool ‘to give himself away to such canaille.’

(According to Anthony Burgess’s biography of Lawrence, this scene is closely based on fact. The setting was the Café Royal where Lawrence’s enemy Philip Heseltine, started reading out Lawrence’s poems from the volume Amore in a mocking voice, and so infuriated Katherine Mansfield that she snatched the book out of his hands and stormed out, followed by her embarrassed husband, John Middleton Murray, Burgess page 97.)

Chapter 29. Continental

By far the longest chapter, 60 pages long, almost a novella.

Description of Birkin and Ursula’s voyage across the Channel, curled up in the prow of the ship in the absolute darkness. They disembark in Ostend by night. In a dream they take their bags through customs to the railway station, grab a sandwich and horrible coffee (nothing changes) then onto the train which travels through Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, through Luxembourg, through Alsace-Lorraine, through Metz, arriving at Basle. Overnight in a hotel, then another train to Zürich and then their final destination, Innsbruck.

They catch an open sleigh to the hotel where they see Gudrun. Ursula and Gudrun go to her hotel room to gossip, talking about mutual friends in Paris. Then everyone dresses and comes down for dinner where they agree how wonderful it is to be out of England, a country with the damper permanently on.

Next morning they take a small train to Hohenhausen, up in the snow, and then take sledges higher, higher into the snowy mountains, arriving at another, more remote hotel. In the hotel room, Gudrun is overcome, looking out the window at the snowy landscape and mountains she cries and Gerald embraces her.

They go down for coffee and cake, delicious. There are ten other guests, all German. They are introduced to the group who are listening to an odd man-child give a performance of the Cologne accent. When he’s finished Ursula is invited to sing the song, Annie Lowrie, with Gudrun accompanying her on the piano.

After dinner Ursula wants to go out into the darkness. She is intoxicated by the wonderful cold and the primal scenery. When they return to the hotel lounge, the Reunionsaal, they discover the other guests dancing the Schuhplatteln, the Tyrolese dance of the clapping hands and tossing the partner in the air at the crisis, with jumping and clapping, to the music of three zithers.

To no-one’s surprise, Gerald quickly learns the steps and becomes a demon. He dances with the Professor’s youngest daughter who is incandescent with awe at this Real Man holding and twirling her. Gudrun is lusted after by one of the young men who is to shy to ask to dance with her. Twas ever thus.

In their bedroom, Gudrun has a panic attack about Gerald, is completely alienated from him. Luckily he doesn’t notice. She mocks his dancing with the young girl, he doesn’t understand her. They sleep separately and she wakes superior to him. Looking at him asleep, she realises he can solve any practical problem, all challenges fall before his will. She imagines marrying him, supporting him as he becomes a Conservative MP, goes into politics, becomes Prime Minister.

But then she mocks her own girlish dreams. Who cares about politics? It’s all so old. And somehow, through this interior monologue, she becomes convinced to marry him. She wakes him with kisses, telling him he’s convinced her and he doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

The first days passed in an ecstasy of physical motion, sleighing, skiing, skating, moving in an intensity of speed and white light that surpassed life itself, and carried the souls of the human beings beyond into an inhuman abstraction of velocity and weight and eternal, frozen snow. (p.473)

Loerke

One day they’re snowed in. Gudrun and Ursula get to know Loerke, the puny little sculptor, who tells them his backstory, a broken home and deprived background, hitching to Italy, learning to sculpt the hard way. Now he is a professional with well-paid commissions and is working on a frieze in granite for a new factory in Germany. He gives an impassioned defence of art beautifying new industrial buildings that has a Bauhaus ring. Anyway, it puts Gudrun’s funny little clay models in the shade.

Lawrence’s antisemitism

Gerald and Rupert both dislike Loerke and the girls’ interest in him. Birkin, as always the most virulent and malicious, gives an extended slagging of Loerke which ends up with an unexpected, unnecessary and dismaying antisemitism. I could leave it at that but I’ll quote the entire passage so you can see for yourself the vehemence of Lawrence’s dislike and racism.

‘What do the women find so impressive in that little brat?’ Gerald asked.
‘God alone knows,’ replied Birkin, ‘unless it’s some sort of appeal he makes to them, which flatters them and has such a power over them.’
Gerald looked up in surprise.
‘Does he make an appeal to them?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes,’ replied Birkin. ‘He is the perfectly subjected being, existing almost like a criminal. And the women rush towards that, like a current of air towards a vacuum.’
‘Funny they should rush to that,’ said Gerald.
‘Makes one mad, too,’ said Birkin. ‘But he has the fascination of pity and repulsion for them, a little obscene monster of the darkness that he is.’
Gerald stood still, suspended in thought.
‘What do women want, at the bottom?’ he asked.
Birkin shrugged his shoulders.
‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Some satisfaction in basic repulsion, it seems to me. They seem to creep down some ghastly tunnel of darkness, and will never be satisfied till they’ve come to the end.’
Gerald looked out into the mist of fine snow that was blowing by. Everywhere was blind today, horribly blind.
‘And what is the end?’ he asked.
Birkin shook his head.
‘I’ve not got there yet, so I don’t know. Ask Loerke, he’s pretty near. He is a good many stages further than either you or I can go.’
‘Yes, but stages further in what?’ cried Gerald, irritated.
Birkin sighed, and gathered his brows into a knot of anger.
‘Stages further in social hatred,’ he said. ‘He lives like a rat, in the river of corruption, just where it falls over into the bottomless pit. He’s further on than we are. He hates the ideal more acutely. He hates the ideal utterly, yet it still dominates him. I expect he is a Jew—or part Jewish.’
‘Probably,’ said Gerald.
‘He is a gnawing little negation, gnawing at the roots of life.’
‘But why does anybody care about him?’ cried Gerald.
‘Because they hate the ideal also, in their souls. They want to explore the sewers, and he’s the wizard rat that swims ahead.’ (p.481)

Not a good look, as the Yanks say.

So Loerke is also a sculptor. As she looks at his pieces and hears his stories, Gudrun is beguiled. Loerke shows them a photo of a sculpture of a young girl sitting on a horse. Ursula says the horse is oddly distorted which triggers a little harangue.

‘It is a work of art, it is a picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with anything but itself, it has no relation with the everyday world of this and other, there is no connection between them, absolutely none, they are two different and distinct planes of existence, and to translate one into the other is worse than foolish, it is a darkening of all counsel, a making confusion everywhere. Do you see, you must not confuse the relative work of action, with the absolute world of art. That you must not do.’ (p.484)

They all have different reactions. Gudrun agrees on the difference between the artist and the work, but Ursula insists the horse and the girl are reflections of the artist’s horrible personality. Gerald strolls up, takes a look at the photo and, characteristically, says he likes the look of the girl, Gudrun saying ‘wouldn’t he just’. But in a further development, when Loerke tells them the girl was an art student Gudrun immediately leaps to the conclusion that she was a naive and innocent young girl from a good family exploited and used by her wicked male teacher. #metoo. The sisterhood. As outraged by masculine abuse in 1920 as 2020.

But there’s more. Loerke freely admits he had to regularly smack and hit the girl before she’d sit still in this pose. And then, to make himself even more despicable, says that he only likes his models young:

‘I don’t like them any bigger, any older. Then they are beautiful, at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen – after that, they are no use to me.’

Furious, Ursula goes out into the snowy night and suddenly realises she hates it. Five pages back, they were all snow gods and snow artists, now, with Lawrentian abruptness, she’s shifted to the other extreme. She wants to go south to warmth and olive groves. She goes back into the hotel and finds Birkin in their room, reading and tells him. He laughingly agrees.

Next day they tell the other couple and can tell Gerald and Gudrun are relieved to hear of their departure. The men have been riling each other a bit. The two genders have last meetings. When Ursula explains that she and Birkin want to continue moving on, into new freedoms, Gudrun irritates her by saying that wherever you go you’ll always be with the same person, ‘only to secure oneself in one’s illusions.’

The men chat and Birkin asks Gerald when he’ll leave and Gerald replies maybe never. Maybe he’ll never go back to England. The sledge arrives, picks up Birkin and Ursula and off they go, leaving Gerald and Gudrun dwindling in the snow, waving.

Chapter 30. Snowed Up

The second longest chapter at 38 pages. Taken together, the two ‘abroad’ chapters make about 100 pages.

Left to themselves, Gudrun and Gerald fall into a fierce and bitter war for supremacy. They rage and argue. She moves into a separate bedroom. They fight all the time. She begs him to tell her he loves her. He feels like he has been ripped open. He has fantasies of murdering her. They both go mad.

While Gerald’s off skiing, Gudrun become friendlier with Loerke over their shared aesthetic, particularly the basic principle that the artist and the art exist in different realms.

The suggestion of primitive art was their refuge, and the inner mysteries of sensation their object of worship. Art and Life were to them the Reality and the Unreality.

One time Gerald is bullying Loerke in argument like an arrogant Englishman and when Loerke turns to her for appeal, she angrily tells him to stop calling her Mrs Crich. She is not Mrs Crich. She is not married. A light goes on in Loerke’s eye and Gerald is mortified.

Perversely he is so self contained about this insult that she loves him and goes to his bedroom that night to have sex, gladly. ‘And she had extreme pleasure of him.’ But she withholds her soul. Any couple eventually reach the end of fleshly pleasure and everything is just repetition. Gudrun unconsciously knows that the next step, for her, is alliance with Loerke. Loerke is very patient and encourages long conversations about Mozart and Goethe et al, to win her over.

She and Gerald have a massive argument when Gerald asks her what on earth she sees in Loerke and she bluntly tells him the little German understands women and is not a fool. Stunned, Gerald asks if that is the end of their relationship. She says either of them are free to leave at any time. For some reason the bluntness of all this arouses Gerald, she sees it, is disgusted, and walks out.

And so on. After a long campaign Loerke subtly suggests that she might go with him to his studio in Dresden. Not to be his mistress. But because he admires her company and her intelligence. She is flattered though a little chagrined that he doesn’t flatter her beauty.

Gerald is out all day skiing, feeling king of the mountains up in the high slopes. He doesn’t want to come back to the hotel and people. As soon as he sees Gudrun he fantasises about murdering her, the sheer pleasure of strangling the life out of her. They dine and later, in his room, she says the experiment is over. They gave it a try and it failed. Why, he asks. Because you cannot love, and I could never love you.

At this Gerald feels the pure desire to kill go down his arms and into his hands and turns towards he but, sensing his rage, she nips out the room, across to hers and locks the door. Cue pages of her pondering her whole life and above all the patheticness of men, of Gerald, Birkin, all of them, of the mining business with all its managers. Babies, all of them. And the sheer tedium of doing the same thing day after day. Gerald stays up all night reading, mortally afraid of lying sleepless in the dark.

Next morning over breakfast she announces she’ll be leaving the following day. Gerald says he’ll make the necessary arrangements then goes out for a day’s skiing. Gudrun feels wonderfully empowered. The long vigil and pondering her life situation has clarified everything. She lets Loerke take her out tobogganing even though he looks like a ridiculous pixie. He doesn’t take the tobogganing very seriously which she finds an immense relief from Gerald’s intense seriousness about all activities. Lightness and irony are what she needs.

At the end of the day he crashes them in the snow, laughing, then produces a coffee thermos, some Schnapps and biscuits. They are merrily discussing where Gudrun will go the next day – she doesn’t know and doesn’t care – when Gerald looms whitely up out of the snow.

Crack! Gerald punches Loerke aside, then punches him again. Gudrun brings her fist down on his face and chest which prompts him to turn and, finally, fulfil his deepest wish, to strangle her to death. His hands grip her throat and strangle the life out of her as she thrashes and then starts to go limp which is the moment when Loerke comes to himself and makes one of his sarcastic remarks, in French: ‘Monsieur! Quand vous aurez fini –’ ‘Sir, when you have quite finished…’ and the mockery of it brings Gerald back to his senses.

Not in horror, but futility. What is he doing? Who cares if this silly woman lives or dies? Oh what’s the point? And he drops Gudrun, looks round in a daze, then stumbles off into the snow. He has had enough. He wants to sleep. He wants it to end. He climbs higher and higher into the land of sheer cliffs and rockslides. He slips in a snowslide but that doesn’t wake his daze. Onwards and upwards. He comes across a crucifix almost buried in the snow and is overcome with terror that he is going to be murdered, looking all round him in his fear, raising his arm to ward off the blow. And thus walking he slips over the edge of a deep bowl,

surrounded by sheer slopes and precipices, out of which rose a track that brought one to the top of the mountain. But he wandered unconsciously, till he slipped and fell down, and as he fell something broke in his soul, and immediately he went to sleep. (p.533)

Chapter 31. Exeunt

Gerald died. They bring the body back to the hotel. Next morning they bring the body back to the hotel. A woman comes to tell Gudrun. She is amazed by how cold and unaffected she is. Like Mersault and his mother. She finds Loerke in the main room but he is not pleased to see her. She telegrams to Birkin and Ursula who arrive the next day but she is cold with them. In fact after five minutes the sisters have nothing to say to each other.

The final pages focus on Birkin. He makes all the practical arrangements and deals with the authorities. He visits the frozen corpse then treks up the hill to the snowy bowl where Gerald dies, then comes back to the hotel and confronts the corpse again. This time he breaks down in hysterical tears, and Ursula sees him. Birkin is distraught that Gerald didn’t love him. He says he offered him his love but he didn’t take it. He remembers their hands clutching each other as they came round from the famous wrestling scene. If only that moment had lasted, if only Gerald had loved him, maybe he would still be alive.

Birkin and Ursula and one of Gerald’s brothers accompany the body back to England where the family insists he be buried. Ursula and Birkin remove to the Mill and live very quietly. (Gudrun has gone to Dresden and ‘writes no particulars of herself.’)

On the last pages of this vast book, Ursula and Birkin argue. She says, Aren’t I enough for you and he says, No. You are all women to me but I wanted something more, I wanted a male kind of love, I wanted one true friend, and I had him but he rejected me. Ursula says she doesn’t believe Birkin’s notion of an eternal love between men, ‘It’s an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity’ and he replies ‘I don’t believe that’ and that’s the end of the book.

A war novel?

Lawrence rewrote the novel to achieve its final form, between 1915 and 1917, the central years of the First World War. In his foreword to the American edition, he said he wanted to the timeline of the novel to be unfixed. But critics at the time and ever since have pointed out the tremendous bitterness observable in many of the characters – most extreme in Birkin’s visions of exterminating humanity altogether – radiate the bitterness and anger and disillusionment which Lawrence was hardly the only one to experience during these years. If Birkin repeatedly express this, it is Gerald who in a sense acts it out, overcome with psychopathy at the novel’s bitter end. And the carrying of the body of a young Englishman, killed abroad, back to his home in England was, of course, something experienced by hundreds of thousands of families.

Lawrence at one point considered titling the book Dies Irae, Days of Anger.

Flouting conventional morality

‘The old ideals are dead as nails – nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman – sort of ultimate marriage – and there isn’t anything else.’
‘And you mean if there isn’t the woman, there’s nothing?’ said Gerald.
‘Pretty well that – seeing there’s no God.’ (Chapter 5, on the train to London)

Just to note the obvious:

1. None of the characters seem to believe in God, Christian teaching or Christian morality. The girls’ father, William, tells Birkin he expects it of his daughters, but nobody else even mentions it.

2. None of the quartet are bothered by pre-marital sex in the slightest. There’s nothing about sin, hell and damnation, nothing at all. It’s assessed solely on whether it is right for the individual and their relationship i.e. the ‘modern’ view.

3. Even marriage, which they all enter into, none of them really care about much. It’s a purely social convention which cements what has already been agreed between free individuals.

GUDRUN: ‘Marriage is a social arrangement, I take it, and has nothing to do with the question of love.’ (Chapter 21)

BIRKIN: ‘I’m not interested in legal marriage, one way or another. It’s a mere question of convenience.’ (p.396)

In fact Birkin has a violent objection to traditional ideas of marriage.

‘Marriage in the old sense seems to me repulsive. Égoïsme à deux is nothing to it. It’s a sort of tacit hunting in couples: the world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests, and stewing in its own little privacy—it’s the most repulsive thing on earth.’ (p.397)

In fact, you can easily misread him to be attacking the institution of marriage which, of course, for conservatives then and now, was sacred:

‘You’ve got to take down the love-and-marriage ideal from its pedestal. We want something broader. I believe in the additional perfect relationship between man and man – additional to marriage.’
‘I can never see how they can be the same,’ said Gerald.
‘Not the same – but equally important, equally creative, equally sacred, if you like.’ (p.397)

4. And experimentation. Why not go whole hog? Here’s Gudrun fired up by the wild dancing in the Reunionsaal at the Tyrolese inn:

They might do as they liked – this she realised as she went to sleep. How could anything that gave one satisfaction be excluded? What was degrading? Who cared? Degrading things were real, with a different reality. And he [Birkin] was so unabashed and unrestrained. Wasn’t it rather horrible, a man who could be so soulful and spiritual, now to be so – she balked at her own thoughts and memories: then she added – so bestial? So bestial, they two! – so degraded! She winced. But after all, why not? She exulted as well. Why not be bestial, and go the whole round of experience? She exulted in it. She was bestial. How good it was to be really shameful! There would be no shameful thing she had not experienced. Yet she was unabashed, she was herself. Why not? She was free when she knew everything, and no dark shameful things were denied her. (p.464)

You can see how old-fashioned moralists and social guardians would be outraged. For all these reasons Lawrence couldn’t find a publisher for the book in the UK and when it was, finally, published in the US, in 1920, it was to subscribers only. Such was the threat and illegality of what to us now appear completely harmless, indeed anodyne, opinions.

Summary of people and places

Ursula Brangwen

26, class teacher at Willey Green Grammar School. Always a bit flustered, always rushing in too soon. Greenish eyes. Pairs with Rupert Birkin. Favourite phrase: why not? which drives her father mad.

Gudrun Brangwen

25, artist and model. Dark hair. In London at art school she got to know the extended networks of Bohemia. The more conventionally beautiful of the two. Calm and confident on top, profoundly restless underneath. Ursula’s nickname for her is ‘Prune’. Pairs with Gerald Crich.

Rupert Birkin

‘Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.’ (p.230)

School inspector. Tall, thin, tired misanthrope. Wishes all humanity could be exterminated. Prophet of individualism (someone should write a book comparing Wilde and Lawrence as proponents of unflinching absolute individualism.) An inveterate lecturer and preacher:

‘He isn’t sympathetic, he wants to dictate.’ (p.367)

Here’s Maxim slagging him off in chapter 27:

‘He is a megalomaniac, of course, it is a form of religious mania. He thinks he is the Saviour of man.’ (p.433)

An emotional chameleon, ‘he is so changeable and unsure of himself’ or, as Ursula puts it late on:

‘He says he wants me to accept him non-emotionally, and finally – I really don’t know what he means. He says he wants the demon part of himself to be mated – physically – not the human being. You see he says one thing one day, and another the next – and he always contradicts himself – ‘
‘And always thinks about himself, and his own dissatisfaction,’ said Hermione slowly. (p.330)

Rupert is generally agreed to be a self portrait by Lawrence in which case he was painfully aware of his own shortcomings. Here’s Hermione dissecting him:

‘He is so uncertain, so unstable — he wearies, and then reacts. I couldn’t tell you what his reactions are. I couldn’t tell you the agony of them. That which he affirms and loves one day — a little latter he turns on it in a fury of destruction. He is never constant, always this awful, dreadful reaction. Always the quick change from good to bad, bad to good.’ (p.332)

At the start of the novel Birkin is going out with Hermione, under her thumb. Takes a long time to shake her off. The growing attraction between him and Ursula entails prolonged rivalry between Ursula and Hermione. After much arguing they finally surrender to each other and, on page 360, have sex in Sherwood Forest.

Gerald always feels a bit superior and protective towards him, thinks him ‘amazingly clever, but incurably innocent’. They stay in the London Soho flat together. They wrestle naked together (chapter 20).

Gerald Crich

31, coalmine owner, superb physical specimen, fair hair and moustache, blue eyes. His ‘gleaming blondness.’ Imperious, ‘very good-looking and self-contained.’ Former officer in the Army till he resigned his commission. Explored the Amazon so occasionally tells stories about the Indians. Compelled to become head of the family coalmining business as his father falls ill, Gerald clings onto his boyhood dreams of being Odysseus. In his imagination:

The world was really a wilderness where one hunted and swam and rode. He rebelled against all authority. Life was a condition of savage freedom.

Tries to quell the mare he’s riding as the colliery train goes by, to Ursula and Gudrun’s horror. Wrestles naked with Rupert in front of the library fire (chapter 20).

Hermione Roddice

A friend of the Criches, ‘a tall, slow, reluctant woman with a weight of fair hair and a pale, long face.’ Upper class and used to dismissing people when she’s lost interest. Flat bosom. Long, grave, downward-looking face. Heavy, drugged, shadowy eyelids. Grey eyes. Her musing sing-song voice. Needs to dominate men: ‘It was always the same, this joy in power she manifested, peculiarly in power over any male being.’ (p.337)

The book starts with her going out with her partnered with Birkin, who is restless to escape her domination but it takes half the book for him to become free enough to commit to Ursula.

Beldover

The small colliery town in the Midlands where the Brangwen family live. Gudrun, fresh back from living in London, is repelled by its ‘amorphous ugliness’, the high street ‘part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and sordid,’, ‘the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street’, ‘this shapeless, barren ugliness’, ‘the insufferable torture of these ugly, meaningless people, this defaced countryside’. In chapter 9 Lawrence gives a vivid depiction:

This was the world of powerful, underworld men who spent most of their time in the darkness. In their voices she could hear the voluptuous resonance of darkness, the strong, dangerous underworld, mindless, inhuman. They sounded also like strange machines, heavy, oiled. The voluptuousness was like that of machinery, cold and iron.

And the party atmosphere on Friday nights:

It was dark, the market-place was hot with kerosene flares, which threw a ruddy light on the grave faces of the purchasing wives, and on the pale abstract faces of the men. The air was full of the sound of criers and of people talking, thick streams of people moved on the pavements towards the solid crowd of the market. The shops were blazing and packed with women, in the streets were men, mostly men, miners of all ages. Money was spent with almost lavish freedom.

Gudrun perceives Gerald as ‘her escape from the heavy slough of the pale, underworld, automatic colliers.’

Shortlands

Home of the Crich family. ‘It was a long, low old house, a sort of manor farm, that spread along the top of a slope just beyond the narrow little lake of Willey Water. Shortlands looked across a sloping meadow that might be a park, because of the large, solitary trees that stood here and there, across the water of the narrow lake, at the wooded hill that successfully hid the colliery valley beyond, but did not quite hide the rising smoke. Nevertheless, the scene was rural and picturesque, very peaceful…’

‘The panting and rattling of the coal mines could always be heard at Shortlands…’ (p.249) The drive is a mile long. ‘The dark drive that ran between close-cut hedges through sloping meadows’ (p.370).

Willey Water

‘The narrow little lake of Willey Water’, where Diana Crich and her lover drown at the annual water party (Chapter 14).

Based on real people

Publication of ‘Women in Love’ was delayed not only because publishers feared prosecution under the obscenity laws which ‘The Rainbow’ fell foul of, but also because of the threats of libel actions by people who thought they had been included and, generally, mocked in the novel.

1. In the version we read, the young woman Gerald sleeps with in Soho is named Minette. She was originally named ‘the Pussum’. This was because the Lawrence’s friend, Philip Heseltine (who appears as Halliday) had a mistress who was nicknamed the Puma’. Changing her name to Minette, and a payment of £50, staved off a libel case.

(Anthony Burgess’s entertaining biography of Lawrence tells us that Heseltine was very young when he came into Lawrence’s orbit. Under the name Peter Warlock he was to become a noted writer of classical songs. Coincidentally, he died in the same year as Lawrence, 1930.)

2. More important was Lady Ottoline Morrell who was furious that the rather pompous, opinionated and superior character of Hermione Roddice was based on her.

a woman of the new school, full of intellectuality, and heavy, nerve-worn with consciousness. She was passionately interested in reform, her soul was given up to the public cause. But she was a man’s woman, it was the manly world that held her.

Hermione’s country house, Breadalby, is Lady Ottoline’s Oxford house, Garsington Manor, transplanted to Derbyshire. Not only her aloofness and cloying clinging to Birkin, but the scene where she attacks him with a paperweight, intending to kill him… No wonder she threatened to sue.

3. One of her lunch parties features ‘a learned, dry Baronet of fifty, who was always making witticisms and laughing at them heartily in a harsh, horse-laugh’. This is Bertrand Russell.

4. The notion of a quartet of two couples might be based on the attempt by Lawrence and Frieda to live in a joint household in Cornwall with the writers, John Middleton Murray and Katherine Mansfield. Murray is nothing like Gerald but Mansfield does have some similarities with Gudrun, an artist expert at working in miniatures, her loyalty: and also the fact that she was unfaithful to Murray, having an affair with the artist Mark Gertler who was, apparently, partly the basis for Loerke, both being German-Jewish.

5. Thomas Crich, owner and patriarch of the coalmine, is clearly modelled on Thomas Barber of Barber Walker Company in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, whose mines Lawrence’s father, Arthur, worked in.

Reviews

Anthony Burgess tells us the novel was met with review headlines including ‘A Book The Police Should Ban’ and ‘Loathsome Study of Sex Depravity Leading Youth to Unspeakable Disaster’ (Burgess, page 101). The stupidity, imaginative incapacity, and the obsession with sex in the crudest, most literal sense remain signs of the philistine mind to this day.

The rationale of Lawrence’s travels

At several points Birkin reiterates Lawrence’s own view about ‘settling down’ in a ‘nice little home’, namely that it’s death of the soul.

‘One should avoid this home instinct. It’s not an instinct, it’s a habit of cowardliness. One should never have a home.’ (p.397)

So as soon as the war was over and he was able to leave wretched little England, Lawrence was off!

Credit

‘Women in Love’ by D.H. Lawrence was published in 1921 by Martin Secker. References are to the 1970 reprint of the 1960 Penguin Classics paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on February 5, 2025

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Francis Bacon: Human Presence @ the National Portrait Gallery

This is a fascinating and thorough exhibition devoted to the relationship between Francis Bacon (1909 to 1992) – probably one of the most famous and recognisable of post-war British painters – and the ancient genre of The Portrait, which he dragged kicking and screaming into the post-war, nuclear age.

Second of ‘Three Studies for a Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne’ by Francis Bacon (1965) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS / Artimage 2024. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia

Just at the end of the Second World War Bacon established his brand with the shocking Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. As you can see there’s a big dollop of Surrealism in the way he has painted what are, in effect, monsters, maybe enabled by the surreal visions of Max Ernst. But the picture contains three other aspects which were to endure in his work:

  1. distortion of a basically humanoid subject
  2. with a formal, portrait setting
  3. sets of three

The nominal subject, ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’ is, of course, an extremely traditional subject, going back nearly two thousand years. Bacon has obviously chucked a bucket of post-war Angst in the face of the entire tradition to create something monstrous and yet… the ancient titles remains, and so does the ancient design, namely the triptych i.e. a work of art that is divided into three sections or panels.

These elements – 1) the wild distortion of human appearance, 2) while retaining the key elements of portrait convention, and 3) sets of three – were to persist in his work till the end of his life, 45 years later.

Regarding triptychs, the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) says that this exhibition contains 50 or so works and yet it definitely felt like more. It was only in the final and largest room, devoted to portraits of his friends and lovers, that I realised why. It’s because what the NPG counts as single works are often, in fact, sets of three images. I counted nine of them = 27 distinct portraits, making the total number of painted portraits closer to 70 than 50. On the evidence here, the triptych remained central to Bacon’s art for nearly half a century.

Installation view of ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing (on the left) Three Studies for a Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne’ and, on the right, ‘Three Studies for Portraits’ (photo by the author)

Origins

In the late 1940s and early 1950s Bacon’s images of people metamorphosing into screaming chunks of meat shocked and scandalised the art world, here and abroad. They were quickly associated with those twin blows to human dignity, the revelation of the Holocaust death camps and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. It became an instantly recognisable brand. But arguably the overfamiliarity of some of his cardinal images (the screaming pope, a body like a haunch of meat on a raised platform) obscure the variety of what he actually painted and its striking development and evolution over the long period from the late 1940s to the early ’90s.

Certainly they can easily overshadow the continuity of his interest in the genre of The Portrait and, in particular, portraits of specific, named individuals. This exhibition is the first in 20 years to concentrate only on Bacon’s portraits, to consider them within the genre and tradition of portraiture, to show how his style of painting portraits changed and evolved over his long career. In the second and central part, it concentrates very much on a handful of repeat sitters – six or seven in all – and Bacon’s relationships with them as friends and (gay) lovers.

In one sense Bacon never developed beyond the extremity of this ‘primal scream of pain’ vision of humanity. And yet, to walk through this exhibition is to quickly realise how the original vision was tempered, modified and, ultimately, domesticated.

The exhibition is divided into five sections:

  1. Portraits Emerge
  2. Beyond Appearance
  3. Painting from the Masters
  4. Self Portraits
  5. Friends and Lovers

1. Portraits Emerge

Includes Head VI (1949) and Study of the Human Head (1953), works that depict anonymous male subjects. Both bear all of the visual conventions of formal portraiture. The sitters are presented in a traditional three-quarter-length format against dark backgrounds and yet, as you can see, all the politeness of traditional portraiture has been thrown out in favour of searing extremity.

‘Head VI’ by Francis Bacon (1949) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS / Artimage 2024. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Arts Council collection

In Head VI, the figure is trapped within a transparent cage, while Study of the Human Head peers through striations and appears X-rayed, disconcertingly revealing the sitter’s skull and teeth.

Bacon’s early work was devastatingly innovative, capturing the post-war mood of horror and despair at the bankruptcy of civilisation and morality, and the ongoing terror of the Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation.

2. Beyond Appearance

In the early 1950s, Bacon attempted to paint sitters from life in the studio. The heightened drama of the screaming figures made way for portraits that were more individualised, representing his friends and lovers. Bacon avoided traditional domestic settings for his portraits – he detested a ‘homely atmosphere’ – preferring to isolate individuals against an ambiguous dark background within a cage-like framing device.

there are several classics of this type, notably a portrait of R.J. Sainsbury, against one of his jet black backgrounds but confined in the ghostly outline of some kind of cuboid cage. What I noticed about the handful of works in this section was how smartly dressed they were. You can see the white shirt and black tie and dark suit and it all feels as if, despite the nuclear holocaust they seem to have got caught up in, they’re still maintaining the courtesies and manners.

3. Painting from the Masters

This room reveals Bacon’s obsession with two paintings. It’s widely known that he was obsessed with Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X (see Head VI above and the link to the Portrait with Meat). I didn’t know that he was equally as obsessed with a less well-known work by Van Gogh titled The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888).

Bacon obsessively reworked it and this room contains 2 or 3 huge sketches for reworkings and they are a revelation. I never know that Bacon could actually be bad. These works, albeit unfinished, are dire. they’re wretched. They’re rubbish. Especially given that a whole exhibition of Van Gogh originals is taking place a few hundred yards away in the national Gallery, these are embarrassingly bad. I’m amazed anyone connected with the artist let them be displayed.

Installation view of ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing ‘Study for Portrait of Van Gogh VI’ and ‘Study for Portrait of Van Gogh IV’, both 1957 (photo by the author)

OK, maybe they’re only studies and never meant to be exhibited, but still… And anyway, next to them is a ‘finished’ work which Bacon did exhibit. It’s bad, too, isn’t it? Embarrassing. I thought it was a spoof.

‘Homage to Van Gogh’ by Francis Bacon (1960) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2024. Gothenburg Museum of Art

Photos

Bacon ripped photos of art works out of magazines and books and strewed them around his notoriously messy studio, spattered in paint, dropped on the floor, crumpled up and walked over. He found it easier to work from these heavily degraded objects than from pristine poster-sized images.

This habit coincided with the way that, by the late 1950s he’d gotten bored of trying to paint portraits from life. He found the presence of the sitter in the studio inhibiting and restricting and so, from the end of the 1950s onwards, he increasingly used photos of his sitters as the basis of his portraits. Photos don’t fidget, move or need entertaining.

This working-from-photos approach also allowed him the freedom to ‘distort’ the image as he wanted to without having to worry about the reaction of the sitters, who were sometimes quite upset by the finished product. In one interview he spoke about the ‘injury’ which knew he could inflict through his interpretations.

And this also explains why, alongside the 70 or so paintings, the exhibition includes some 35 photos. Now many of them are of Bacon himself, who was increasingly sought after as a subject by top name international snappers such as Cecil Beaton, Bill Brandt, Irving Penn, Arnold Newman, Mayotte Magnus and many more.

Francis Bacon by Mayotte Magnus (1972) © Mayotte Magnus / National Portrait Gallery, London

But there are also plenty of examples of the photos he commissioned and used as the basis for his portraits, especially taken by the house photographer of Soho, John Deakin. So we see black-and-white photos of regular Bacon sitters such his friend Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawsthorne and so on.

There are also three videos of Bacon, including an interview with art critic David Sylvester, a long-term supporter and writer on his work.

4. Self Portraits

The exhibition has a drily humorous quote from Bacon on the wall of this section:

I’ve done a lot of self-portraits, really because people have been dying around me like flies and I’ve had nobody else to paint but myself.

Despite saying that he ‘loathed’ his own face, Bacon painted over 50 self-portraits and a dozen or so of them are on display here. The curators claim they offer ‘an extraordinary range of responses to his body, psyche and ego over time’ and that they ‘not only track the artist’s relationship with his appearance and his artistic and sexual identities, but also trace his changing technique and innovations in format’.

To be honest, I couldn’t really see this except in the narrow sense that the ‘sitting-on-a-sofa’ self portrait looked very like the scores of ‘sitting-on-a-sofa-portraits’ he did of friends and lovers. The example the gallery’s press team included in the selection we reviewers are allowed to reproduce, for me demonstrates a completely different point, which is how homely and domestic his later work became.

‘Self portrait’ by Francis Bacon (1987) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS / Artimage 2024. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Private Collection, NYC

Sweet. He looks like a chubby schoolboy from the 1940s. It could be the cover of a young adult fiction book, certainly of a modern graphic novel. The screaming pope and hunks of meat vibe has completely disappeared.

5. Friends and Lovers

The final section is, according to the curators, the core of the whole show. It brings together about 20 portraits of the lovers (George Dyer, Peter Lacy) and close friends (Henrietta Moraes, Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne) who he painted again and again in the later 1970s and ’80s.

Having told us about photographs in Bacon’s practice, the exhibition now brings together contemporary photos of each of these people accompanied by panels which tell us about their lives and relationships to Bacon – and these are placed next to his portraits of them.

The result combines art criticism with quite a lot of gossip, and smatterings of social history about Soho Bohemian life in the 1950s and ’60s, mildly interesting to the average visitor, gold dust to the committed Bacon fan.

For example we get potted biographies of Bacon’s three principle partners, Peter Lacey (1916 to 1962), George Dyer (1934 to 1971) and John Edwards (1949 to 2003) (such white, English names, aren’t they?)

Peter Lacey was Bacon’s long-term partner during the 1950s. The curators tell us that:

The relationship endured almost a decade in spite of numerous complications, absences, infidelities and episodic violence. During their time together, Lacy squandered his inheritance and moved from London to Barbados to Henley-on-Thames. He eventually settled in Tangier, where he played piano in a local bar.

We read that Bacon himself was devastated to learn of Lacey’s death by telegram shortly after the opening of his career-defining retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1962. Bacon responded with a small triptych of portraits that memorialised their relationship. In fact it was from that moment that his work began to take a more personal turn and portray friends and lovers rather than unnamed or invented figures.

A decade later, Bacon lost his second lover George Dyer, another potent presence in so many of his paintings. Dyer’s death in 1971 triggered Bacon to make a series of self-portraits which capture his grief and isolation.

‘Self portrait, 1973’ by Francis Bacon © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS / Artimage 2024. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Private Collection

I’m afraid I couldn’t help thinking of the famous quote from Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest:

‘To lose one life partner, Mr Bacon, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.’

My view

I like the earliest work best. I like the screaming popes and X-ray horrors. In my opinion they have the shock of the new. You can tell that he’s just invented the approach and is experimenting with all the new possibilities it opens up. And also they speak of the times and the new horrors revealed about human nature. They also have a strong science fiction vibe, which I enjoy.

‘Study of the Human Head’ by Francis Bacon (1953) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2024. Private Collection

But, in my opinion, this kind of melted molten flesh vibe quickly became a manner and a cliché. J.S. Lewinski’s photomontage of Bacon’s face seen from two angles, rather than shedding light on his compositional process or something, highlights how banal this vision can be. Overlap 2 or 3 exposures of someone’s face at slightly different angles and, bingo! you have the look. At one time these shots were taken as visionary depictions of a prophet of post-war Angst. Now any A-level art student can do the same on their camera phone.

Francis Bacon, 1967 by J.S. Lewinski © The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth / Bridgeman Images

Thus I found the last room which, for the curators, is the heart of the exhibition, the most boring. The more I saw the same treatment being meted out to his mates and lovers the more boring it became. Somewhere (in the 1960s) his whole approach became a cliché and a mannerism.

‘Portrait of a Man Walking Down Steps’ by Francis Bacon (1972) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS / Artimage 2024. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Private Collection

I suppose it’s still disturbing for anyone who’s seeing them for them for the first time, and they do retain an unpleasant butcher’s shop ethos, and yet… It had become a habit and a routine. And the way he applied it to a tiny coterie of friends and lovers, as the show amply demonstrates, somehow neutralises the style even more, defangs it, makes it homely.

In the 1950s the wildest of his paintings seemed to say something searing about the entire human condition. By the 1980s they’re just stylised portraits of a handful of friends. Crudely, I thought: ‘seen one, seen ’em all’. The main interest for me in these studies for a portrait of George Dyer was the colour of his jumper. I used to have a jumper that colour once. I wonder where it’s gone.

Installation view of ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing ‘Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer’ (photo by the author)

I think this is really highlighted by the banality of the later settings or backdrops. The cage paintings take place in some eerie metaphysical space, like the void depicted by Milton between Hell and the universe. By complete contrast the clean steps and comfy sofas of the later works look like they come from Ikea. Clean the melted blob of flesh off them and they could go in the Habitat catalogue.

‘Henrietta Moraes’ by Francis Bacon (1966) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS / Artimage 2024. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

Styles 1 and 2

Days after visiting it dawned on me that the portraits from the 1950s – ‘Head 4’ and ‘Study for a Human Head’ – are figurative. They actually look in every detail like portraits of human heads, just smeared a bit and with more teeth than you’d normally see, in a spooky X-ray style. By startling contrast, all the faces from the 1960s onwards have been melted and remodelled to look like the Elephant Man.

So there might be micro-gradations and evolutions I’m missing but, fundamentally, the exhibition shows that Bacon had two completely different styles. And, I’m afraid to say, I much prefer the first one. The second style, the melted faces, are – once you get used to them – not very scary. After you’ve seen 10 you’re becoming blasé and after 30 you are, frankly, a bit bored. But this is not true of the portraits done in style 1 for a simple reason: they’re screaming and, to a lesser extent, trapped in those black cells, confined by some fine-wired cage.

I suggest that both conditions – the screaming and to a lesser extent the cagedness – trigger strong and primitive responses in the viewer, a sympathetic sense of extreme pain or entrapment, which is why you remember them. Whereas once you’ve gotten used to the Elephant Man vibe of the Melted Style and become a bit bored by it, then – as I’ve jokingly suggested – you’re more struck by the interior furnishings or what the sitter’s wearing. Certainly there is almost none of the intense response you have to the stricken, gripping first manner. The second approach is a style whereas the first one reflects a plight.

Well, that’s my view. What do you think?

Conclusion

If you have a particular interest in the history of portraiture and how Bacon placed a massive bomb under it in the 1950s and ’60s, opening doors and creating whole new worlds of distortion and terror, then this is a must-see exhibition.

If you’re a Bacon devotee then this exhibition contains much of interest, with lots of biographical information about his relationships with serial sitters, lovers and friends, and over 30 photos of the great man and his buddies.

But if, like me, you’re more of a general visitor, then the show lacks the real bite and edge you might have expected from it. I liked the screeching men in suits in the first and second rooms but then burst out laughing at how bad the Van Gogh sketches are in room 3 and after that, in the last room, was saddened by how the glorious energy of the early works had become surprisingly tamed, mannered and domesticated.

Merch

It always makes me smile the way the wall captions in so many exhibitions talk about questioning this social norm, subverting that societal expectation, interrogating stereotypes, about radical this and revolutionary that and just as they’ve filled you to the brim with revolutionary fervour… you emerge into the gallery shop where you can snap up some simply delightful tote bags, t-shirts, fridge magnets, throws and scarves and perfect gifts for all the family!

You wouldn’t really have thought it possible but the National Portrait Gallery has developed an entire range of Francis Bacon-themed products to accompany this exhibition, including prints and posters, postcards and fridge magnets, fashion products, accessories, scarves, t-shirts and tote bags, baseball caps, books, homeware, and the exhibition catalogue.

I think the Francis Bacon-themed checked socks are my favourite. It’s exactly what he would have wanted.

The promotional video

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by Simon on October 26, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 26, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/10/26/francis-bacon-human-presence-the-national-portrait-gallery/

By the Seaside @ the Photographers’ Gallery

The Photographers’ Gallery in Soho has a Print Sales Room downstairs, next to the book shop. Here they stage rotating exhibitions of works by the 40 or so photographers whose work they’re licensed to print and sell. Since their roster of artists includes some big international names, and because they always select the best of the best, it’s always worth paying a visit. Smaller and less pressurised than the main exhibitions in the galleries above, these discreet and petite displays regularly come close to pure visual pleasure.

Currently, they’re hosting photos by seven photographers, all on the theme of the English seaside. After the gruelling horrors of the Ernest Cole exhibition about apartheid South Africa and the strange and mysterious Mexican culture photographed by Graciela Iturbide (also currently on display and reviewed in forthcoming blog posts), it’s a relief to stroll into the ‘Carry On…’ simplicity of possibly the quintessential English subject.

John Hinde (1916 to 1997)

Hinde is in a way the most interesting snapper in the show because he is a historical figure. Born in 1916, he developed an interest in photography at the start of the war, from which he was excluded as a Quaker conscientious objector. He had a big hiatus in his life between the mid-40s and the mid-50s when he worked in a circus (!). In 1956 he set up a company to take photos of Ireland where he’d settled. The company wasn’t about high art but a commercial operation designed to sell postcards wholesale to shops or resort owners who sold them onto tourists and visitors.

At the time most postcards sold to tourists were in black and white, since this was felt to convey the misty romance of the landscape and quaint village ways. Hinde set out to find a way of achieving the same effect in colour. His experiments led him to develop a stylised and distinctive approach. His shoots were carefully posed. Anything ugly was covered or moved. There’s a variety of colour in the shots but they feel, at the same time, somehow bleached or dated. Partly that’s due to the colour technology available at the time which played tricks with colour. I remember the holiday snaps my dad took which were converted into slides having the same effect, which I can’t quite put into words.  They looked colourful but faded at the same time. According to his Wikipedia article Hinde achieved a 1) idealistic and 2) nostalgic style, which can maybe be attributed to 1) the careful posing of the shot, and 2) the discreetly faded colouring.

His most famous set of images was from Butlins in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Billy Butlin hired Hinde to provide postcards for the hundreds of thousands of working class families who took advantage of his fun-for-all-the-family camps and low prices.

By this time, Hinde worked more as an art director than an actual photographer, so he hired two German photographers, Elmar Ludwig and Edmund Nägele, and one British photographer, David Noble. They toured Butlin’s camps and took great pains to compose and light each shot for best effect. The result is a peculiar combination of people in relaxed situations which somehow still feel formal. Apparently, Hinde enhanced the colours in post-production to give the shots a more vivid feel.

Despite the care he took, Hinde set no great store by the artistic value of his postcards and sold the company in 1972. But photography critics have taken them very seriously, and in 1993 Irish Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of his photos and postcards in Dublin. I love it that the show was titled Hindesight.

‘Butlins Bognor Regis, Lounge Adjoining Heated Indoor Pool’ by John Hinde (photographed by Edmund Nagele) (Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery)

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen (b. 1948)

Born in Finland, Konttinen moved to London to study film in the late 1960s at the Polytechnic in Regent Street. In 1968, she co-founded the Amber Film and Photography Collective, which moved to Newcastle in 1969. From 1969 Konttinen lived in Byker, an area of Newcastle, and for seven years photographed and interviewed the residents of this area of terraced houses until her own house was demolished. She became a real member of the community, capturing locals in all moods, before the entire area was destroyed to make way for the Byker housing estate, which was to become notorious.

This work resulted in the book, Byker, and, today, this body of work is considered by UNESCO to be of high national value as a profound account of the working class and marginalised communities in the North-East of England. In parallel she created a series depicting people on the chilly beaches of Whitley Bay and Tynemouth, titled Writing in the Sand (1978 to 1998) and it’s a couple of images from that album which are on display here.

‘Whitley Bay’ from ‘Writing in the Sand’ (1980) by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen – £3,000 + VAT (Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery)

These, to be a bit harsh, are good enough, but don’t have the same power as her urban shots, which are quite stunningly brilliant.

Martin Parr (b. 1952)

Parr has become very famous for capturing the ungainly, graceless aspects of everyday British life in big colour-saturated photography. In fact it was seaside photos that really brought him widespread recognition, namely the images in his breakthrough series ‘The Last Resort’ (1985), which captured the exploits of working class people on holiday in the seaside resort of New Brighton, Merseyside. The show features three prints from that project.

Whereas the human brain picks out only the leading actions in any scene, Parr’s photos show an immense attention to every detail in the frame, which is one source of their power and almost overwhelming impact. The gallery says this makes him a great satirical photojournalist and that’s true. But years ago I read a critic who described his capturing of the fat and ugly, the graceless and ungainly, the clumsy and awkward in British life, as ‘cruel’, and I’ve never been able to forget that word. If Parr’s work feels like this, it’s partly because the size and brilliant clarity of his images have a kind of unrelenting quality which, in me at least, creates a negative impact. They’re visually merciless.

‘Ice cream kids, New Brighton, England, 1983-85’ by Martin Parr – £2,750 + VAT (©️ Martin Parr, courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery / Rocket Gallery)

Anna Fox (b. 1961)

Fox is, apparently, known for her ‘combative, highly charged by the use of flash and colour’. According to Wikipedia she’s part of the ‘second wave’ of British colour documentary photography. Seeing her use of saturated colour to capture scenes of ‘ordinary people’ (meaning working class people) in a not totally flattering way, it comes as no surprise to learn that one of the tutors on her degree course was Martin Parr. He has, apparently, spawned a tradition.

Similarly secondary was her decision to spend two years photographing Butlins Bognor Regis. Surprising really. Wouldn’t it be a tad more modern to cover somewhere like Center Parcs, let alone acknowledge that anyone who can these days, and for some time past, goes on holiday abroad? Brits made 55 million holidays abroad in 2023, mostly to Spain, with 17.8 million trips. Sun, sand and sangria long ago trumped the sad holiday camp. Not to be too critical, the choice feels a bit retro and, if it was chosen in order to capture proles at play, a bit patronising.

‘Hair and Make-up Shop, 2010’ by Anna Fox – £2,200 + VAT (Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery)

Simon Roberts (b. 1974)

Roberts is known for his interest in identity as the titles of his books – Motherland (2007), We English (2009), Pierdom (2013) and Merrie Albion (2017) – suggest. Pierdom, as the name suggests, is a comprehensive survey of Britain’s pleasure piers, contrasting their historical significance with their modern contexts. For me, the widescreen, long-distance nature of his shots here made them feel flat and empty. I think I can see the effect he’s striving for, but the architectural features of Blackpool Pier just aren’t distinct or striking enough to justify the treatment.

Blackpool South Pier, Lancashire, 2008 by Simon Roberts (Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery)

Rob Ball (b. 1977)

Ball has been photographing the coast for fifteen years, viewing the coastline as an intrinsic part of British identity. He examines the rhythms of seaside resorts and the changes that arise from seasonal and generational shifts. I found his images of just buildings, bereft of the people who give them meaning, sad and depressing. They have a kind of stark power, maybe, and usually I like photos of bleak architecture, but for some reason found these soulless.

‘Slots of fun, Blackpool, 2022’ by Rob Ball – £600 + VAT (Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery)

Luke Stephenson (b. 1983)

Stephenson records the quirks of the British character. He combines demotic i.e. popular subject matter, with the studied formality of not just studio portraiture but a fine art approach. 99 x 99s does what it says on the tin, being a collection of formal portraits of the legendary 99 whipped ice cream, complete with Cadburys flake and a variety of colourful sauces, which he took on an extended road trip round the seaside resorts of England. Part of the culinary heritage which explains why 70% of British men and 60% of British women are overweight, and about a fifth of British children are obese. Taste yummy though, don’t they?

#97 Dawlish Warren, 2013 by Luke Stephenson – £850 + VAT (Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery)

In the studied isolation and formality which converts them from real life objects to icons, they reminded me of Andy Warhol’s Campbell soup tins or Coca Cola cans. You can easily imagine them being arranged as grids of images, maybe given the Warhol silk screen treatment, and sold to adorn board rooms and meeting rooms or, like one TV company I worked for, the canteen. Or, for a joke, placed next to an actual Mr Whippy machine with racks of cones and flakes in some cool advertising or tech company.

Other seasides

To give this fun little display more seriousness than it intends, it made me realise that there are plenty of other kinds of English seaside. A friend is a naturist so I immediately thought of nudist camps, not so much for the bare bodies but the joie de vivre she always glows with. Another friend works for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and he spends a lot of his time at the coast counting seabirds. Twitchers, they’re everywhere. There’s a lot of nature-watching goes on at the British coast, and not just birds but pond-dipping and rock-pooling for, crabs and such, and spotting the dolphins and seals and whales which are sometimes visible. At Croyde in Devon my son and I learned to surf and there are surfers and windsurfers all round the coast. We admired the rock climbers we saw ascending the perilous cliffs. And of course, sailing. Lots of sailing. The English coast is littered with docks and quays and marinas and all manner of pleasure boats from humble dinghies to swanky yachts.

So I enjoyed this little display, and I know it’s only meant to be a piece of light-hearted summer fun, but it triggered thoughts of how much more varied, active and interesting our engagement with the coast is than when John Hinde made his postcards of Butlins in the 1960s. Although there are seven photographers in this show they have, I think, been curated to depict a very narrow and rather dated vision of ‘the seaside’. Surely there’s a lot more to it than chilly beaches, shabby piers and amusement arcades.

For sale

All the prints are for sale, at prices starting from £600 + VAT but quickly rising to the thousands. If you could only have one, which one would you choose? For me it would be a toss-up between the Butlins lounge and the old lady on the beach with a dog.

All profits from print sales support The Photographers’ Gallery public programme.

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  • By the Seaside continues at the Photographers’ Gallery until 8 September 2024

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by Simon on August 18, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 18, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/08/18/by-the-seaside-the-photographers-gallery/

Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories by Oscar Wilde (1891)

This is a collection of four short comedy mystery stories that Oscar Wilde wrote and published in magazines from 1887, before bringing them together in this volume in 1891. They showcase:

  1. Wilde’s favoured milieu and subject i.e. the upperest of the English upper classes
  2. whose conversation is littered with smart, politely cynical banter and witty bons mots
  3. his aptness, given half a chance, to slip into the purplest of purple prose, likely to reference precious jewels and the pink fingers of dawn and the glories of Greece etc
  4. his just-as-frequent tendency to slip into the over-egged tones of Victorian melodrama

1. Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime

This brilliant comic story exemplifies all four aspects of Wilde’s fiction.

1. It is set among the highest of high London Society, opening at a wonderful party being given by Lady Windermere at her London mansion, Bentinck House, which gives Wilde the opportunity to introduce a series of caricatures of the upper classes, but also the ‘straight’ hero of the story, dashing young Lord Savile.

2. The tone of frivolous banter, elegant badinage based on paradox and wit is established right at the start:

‘But surely that is tempting Providence, Gladys.’
‘My dear Duchess, surely Providence can resist temptation by this time.’

‘No one cares about distant relatives nowadays,’ said Lady Windermere. ‘They went out of fashion years ago.’

3. After having his palm read, Lord Arthur wanders the streets of London till dawn, when he encounters carters coming in from the countryside piled high with fruit and veg for Covent Garden:

and the great piles of vegetables looked like masses of jade against the morning sky, like masses of green jade against the pink petals of some marvellous rose. Lord Arthur felt curiously affected, he could not tell why. There was something in the dawn’s delicate loveliness that seemed to him inexpressibly pathetic, and he thought of all the days that break in beauty, and that set in storm…

After several attempts to carry out the pre-destined murder fail, a gloomy Lord Arthur:

wandered down to the Thames Embankment, and sat for hours by the river. The moon peered through a mane of tawny clouds, as if it were a lion’s eye, and innumerable stars spangled the hollow vault, like gold dust powdered on a purple dome. Now and then a barge swung out into the turbid stream, and floated away with the tide, and the railway signals changed from green to scarlet as the trains ran shrieking across the bridge. After some time, twelve o’clock boomed from the tall tower at Westminster, and at each stroke of the sonorous bell the night seemed to tremble. Then the railway lights went out, one solitary lamp left gleaming like a large ruby on a giant mast, and the roar of the city became fainter.

At two o’clock he got up, and strolled towards Blackfriars. How unreal everything looked! How like a strange dream! The houses on the other side of the river seemed built out of darkness. One would have said that silver and shadow had fashioned the world anew. The huge dome of St. Paul’s loomed like a bubble through the dusky air.

Like a painting by Whistler, isn’t it? If only London was actually like that.

And then there’s Wilde’s tendency to reference all things Greek as a marker of beauty. Here’s a description of Sybil Merton:

The small, exquisitely-shaped head drooped slightly to one side, as though the thin, reed-like throat could hardly bear the burden of so much beauty; the lips were slightly parted, and seemed made for sweet music; and all the tender purity of girlhood looked out in wonder from the dreaming eyes. With her soft, clinging dress of crêpe-de-chine, and her large leaf-shaped fan, she looked like one of those delicate little figures men find in the olive-woods near Tanagra*; and there was a touch of Greek grace in her pose and attitude.

4. And closely related to the passages about rose-coloured dawn are the equal and opposite passages of over-ripe melodrama which thrill themselves with big words like Murder and Horror and Fate and Destiny and Doom!

Looking at him, one would have said that Nemesis had stolen the shield of Pallas, and shown him the Gorgon’s head. He seemed turned to stone, and his face was like marble in its melancholy. He had lived the delicate and luxurious life of a young man of birth and fortune, a life exquisite in its freedom from sordid care, its beautiful boyish insouciance; and now for the first time he became conscious of the terrible mystery of Destiny, of the awful meaning of Doom.

The plot

As to the plot: Lord Arthur Savile is a young, rich man about town (‘he was very wealthy himself, having come into all Lord Rugby’s property when he came of age’). He is engaged to the fragrant Sybil Merton. At Lady Windermere’s party he has his palm read by her latest discovery, a cheiromantist, a short, fat, sickly man named Septimus Podgers. (Wilde’s astonishing snobbery is on such open display that many readers fail to even notice it.)

It was Mr. Podgers, the cheiromantist! No one could mistake the fat, flabby face, the gold-rimmed spectacles, the sickly feeble smile, the sensual mouth.

Stunned by what he hears he stumbles out of the party and spends the night’s wandering the streets of London in horror, for Mr Podgers has predicted that Lord Savile will commit a murder!!

The joke, the comic conceit of the whole story, is that Lord Savile is made to (ironically) decide it is his Duty to commit this murder and so get it out of the way before he can marry his fiancée. It is a suave and satirical inversion of what most people would regard as their ‘duty’, characteristic of Wilde’s love of inverting conventional values or sentiments:

Many men in his position would have preferred the primrose path of dalliance to the steep heights of duty; but Lord Arthur was too conscientious to set pleasure above principle…he recognised none the less clearly where his duty lay, and was fully conscious of the fact that he had no right to marry until he had committed the murder…For a moment he had a natural repugnance against what he was asked to do, but it soon passed away. His heart told him that it was not a sin, but a sacrifice; his reason reminded him that there was no other course open…and he felt no hesitation about doing his duty.

Since Duty compels him to murder someone he sets to the task with energy and makes a list of possible victims:

He accordingly made out a list of his friends and relatives on a sheet of notepaper, and after careful consideration, decided in favour of Lady Clementina Beauchamp, a dear old lady who lived in Curzon Street, and was his own second cousin by his mother’s side.

From this point onwards the text revels in the multiple paradoxes thrown up by a charming gentleman having decided that Duty obliges him to murder a relative. For example, he disdains to do it by hand, being both a gentleman but also wishing to avoid the publicity attendant on such an act, and definitely not wanting to be lionised at one of Lady Windermere’s parties.

So he consults some textbooks on poison at his club then strolls down St James’s to a famous chemists who he easily persuades to make a pill of aconitine, a strong poison, claiming it is to put down a dog with rabies. Then he visits Lady Clem and gives her the pill as a gift, contained in a charming silver bonbonierre, claiming it will cure her heartburn. She is touched and promises to take it next time she has an attack.

Proud of having done his duty, Lord Savile goes abroad till Lady Clem dies, holidaying with his brother Lord Surbiton in Venice (of which Wilde takes the time to show off his knowledge, specifically of the top hotels and restaurants).

When he gets news that Lady Clem has died he feels the warmth and pride of a man who has Done His Duty and returns to London to resume his engagement to Sybil. Lady Clem has left Lord Savile her house in Curzon Street and, when he is clearing it out along with Sybil, she comes across the bonbonniere! Disaster! Lady Clem died a natural death, he did not murder her at all! He is back to square one in his plan to fulfil Mr Podgers’ prediction.

Recovering from his bitter disappointment, Lord Arthur determines to act like a man and so decides to blow up his uncle, the Dean of Chichester. He goes to see a Russian he’s met, a Count who’s over here researching Peter the Great’s spell in England, who writes him a letter of introduction to a famous bomb maker who specialises in making explosive clocks. The comedy derives from the extreme politeness and formality of the conversation between the lord and the bomb-maker.

‘The clock is intended for the Dean of Chichester.’
‘Dear me! I had no idea that you felt so strongly about religion, Lord Arthur. Few young men do nowadays.’
‘I am afraid you overrate me, Herr Winckelkopf,’ said Lord Arthur, blushing. ‘The fact is, I really know nothing about theology.’

Arthur duly sends an ornate clock containing a timed bomb to his uncle (anonymously, of course) but then hears nothing on the day it’s due to go off and a few days later his mother receives a letter from the Dean’s daughter describing the funny little present they’d been sent which gave a funny fizzing then a little pop, prompting the statue of freedom on its top to fall off and break its nose in the fireplace. So much for explosives!

A note on Ian Small’s annotations

I read the stories in the Penguin Complete Short Fiction volume, which is edited by Ian Small. Unlike the feminist academic who edited the OUP’s edition of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Small doesn’t take every opportunity to tick off his author for being a member of the patriarchy who erases female presence, or scold his male readers for their toxic masculinity, which is a refreshing change.

Instead, Small writes a sensible introduction which places Wilde’s shorter fiction in the overall context of his career, and his notes are lovely: he chooses just the right words and phrases to annotate and the notes themselves are useful and informative. He is particularly illuminating about recurring themes of Wilde’s; for example, the minor detail that Wilde repeatedly has his characters mock American novels. In other notes he points out that:

Names

Wilde had to be careful about names so as to avoid libel; this meant he often recycled fictional names, most obviously in Lord Savile’s Crime which a) features a Lady Windermere, later to be used as the central character of the play, and b) names the protagonist’s fiancée Sybil, just like the fiancée in Dorian Gray.

Jokes

Wilde recycles not just names but jokes, one liners from these stories reappearing in the plays.

Cosmopolitan

Late-Victorian High Society was characterised by easy movement between the worlds of high politics, high society, the arts and so on, something any reader of the fiction of the period notices.

The geography of London

was highly meaningful in Wilde’s fiction: the kind of High Society Wilde depicts lived in Mayfair or St James’s (Lord Savile lives in Belgrave Square, Sybil lives at her father’s house in Park Lane): all other parts of London were less high class and carried meanings, thus Bayswater was a newly built neighbourhood aimed at the new middle classes, Soho was associated with prostitution, the East End was universally associated not just with poverty but with violent crime and even, down at the waterfront docks, drugs i.e. opium dens set up by Chinese sailors.

Meals

In the same spirit, meals are an important indicator of class in Wilde: for Lord Arthur ‘tea’ denotes high tea, taken at 4pm and consisting of tea and, maybe, cucumber sandwiches; he humorously turns down an invitation from some Russian anarchists to a meat tea, which, as the name suggests, involved cold or hot meat and was a much more lower class habit.

The Morning Post

The Times may have been the British Empire’s newspaper of record, but the Morning Post contained all the Society gossip and so was the newspaper most of Wilde’s characters read, in order to read about themselves, their parties and their affairs; it features in Lord Arthur Savile and the Sphinx.

Cigarettes

Smoking cigarettes was a marker of modern ‘decadence’: smart young men and ‘fast’ women smoked cigarettes, by contrast with their parents who didn’t smoke at all, or reassuring uncles who smoked trusty old pipes:

After breakfast [Lord Arthur] flung himself down on a divan, and lit a cigarette.

The telephone

Incidentally, speaking of ‘modern’ I was struck that Lord Savile telephones to his stables to have his hansom prepared; impressively hi-tech for 1887.

Russian revolutionary politics

A hot topic in the 1880s; Wilde dealt with the subject at length twice, once in his essay on The Soul of Man Under Socialism which takes as its starting point the writings of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin; and once in his early and unsuccessful play, Vera or the Nihilists (premiered New York 1883) which is entirely about Russian revolutionaries.

The French revolution

was in the news because of its centenary in 1889, to commemorate which France had just sent the United States the Statue of Liberty.

Tanagra

Small explains the reference to Tanagra in the passage about Sybil Merton by explaining that in the last decades of the 19th century small and beautifully proportioned statuettes from the 4th and 3rd centuries BC were found at Tanagra, a village in Greece.

2. The Canterville Ghost

A brilliant comedy ghost story, it is also about the contrast and/or culture war between Americans and English, specifically American millionaires buying up Britain. In this case it’s the American Minister, Hiram B. Otis, who buys Canterville Chase, ancestral home of the Canterville family. Lord Canterville warns him about the family ghost to which Otis replies with American can-do confidence aka money:

‘My Lord…I come from a modern country, where we have everything that money can buy; and with all our spry young fellows painting the Old World red, and carrying off your best actresses and prima-donnas, I reckon that if there were such a thing as a ghost in Europe, we’d have it at home in a very short time in one of our public museums, or on the road as a show.’

Ian Small has a useful note pointing out that Americans are in several places in Wilde’s writing described as ‘natural’ or ‘painfully natural’, by contrast with the fastidious European super-sophistication which he thinks of himself as representing.

Mrs. Otis, who, as Miss Lucretia R. Tappan, of West 53rd Street, had been a celebrated New York belle, was now a very handsome, middle-aged woman, with fine eyes, and a superb profile. Many American ladies on leaving their native land adopt an appearance of chronic ill-health, under the impression that it is a form of European refinement, but Mrs. Otis had never fallen into this error. She had a magnificent constitution, and a really wonderful amount of animal spirits.

So it’s a story of other-worldly spirits versus animal spirits. So Mrs and Mrs Otis, their eldest son Washington, 15-year-old Miss Virginia E. Otis and the twin boys catch a train to Ascot, are transported the seven miles to Canterville on a waggonette and are received by the family housekeeper, the lugubrious Mrs Umney, who they have agreed to keep on.

The animal spirits are almost immediately on display as Mrs Umney points out in a solemn whisper the patch of red on the library carpet which is:

the blood of Lady Eleanore de Canterville, who was murdered on that very spot by her own husband, Sir Simon de Canterville, in 1575.

Taking no nonsense Mr Otis whips out a stick of Pinkerton’s Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent and after a few moments of hard rubbing, has completely removed the centuries-old stain. Mrs Umney faints with shock, There is a loud burst of thunder overhead. Mr Otis lights up a long cheroot. The Yanks are here.

But the blood stains keep returning, day after day, despite being cleaned away, despite Mr Otis locking the library door and taking the key to bed with him. A few nights later he is woken by the clanking of chains and opens the door to find a ghost clanking along the hallway. Mr Otis’s phlegmatic response is to ask him to keep the noise down and, indeed, has brought from his beside a bottle of Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator. Outraged, the ghost storms off down the hallway, only to be ambushed at the top of the great oak staircase by the twins who throw a pillow at his head.

The Canterville ghost is outraged. He reviews the great achievements of his career i.e. scaring various housemaids and visiting clergy out of their wits before deciding:

It was quite unbearable…no ghosts in history had ever been treated in this manner. Accordingly, he determined to have vengeance, and remained till daylight in an attitude of deep thought.

But all his attempts to scare the natural Americans fail, even when he decides to emit his ‘celebrated peal of demoniac laughter.’ All that happens is Mrs Otis rushes out into the hall offering him a spoonful of Mr. Dobell’s tincture, which is a great cure for indigestion.

Mortified he makes up his mind to put on a truly terrifying display and Wilde describes his preparations with ironic humour. However, the ghost, dressed to horrify, has barely turned the corner into the Otis family’s sleeping quarters before he spies a truly terrifying sight, turns tail and flees. It is, in fact, a fake ghost knocked up by the incorrigible twins.

Sir Simon is a very conscientious ghost and he is obliged to make certain appearances at certain times and places, so he continues to do so but he finds himself so frightened of the Americans that he willingly uses the Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator to silence his squeaking chains and takes to wearing slippers so as not to wake anyone. In a final attempt to scare the twins, the ghost dresses up in yet another costume and in the middle of the night slowly pushes open their bedroom door – only for a jug full of water balanced on top of the door to fall on his head, giving him a nasty chill.

One afternoon the quiet and soulful daughter, Miss Virginia E. Otis, comes across the ghost alone and sad in the Tapestry Chamber. He doesn’t even try to frighten her but pours out his troubles and woes and she is touched and moved to tears. Isn’t there some escape from this job, she asks. Only if you help me fulfil the prophecy carved in the library window, which is 6 lines of verse effectively saying the ghost can only be saved by a golden girl who gives away her tears.

And the ghost takes Virginia through a secret passage in the wood panelling. With the result that she is late for dinner and then doesn’t appear all evening. Increasingly worried, Mr Otis remembers he gave some gypsies permission to camp on his land. When they go to check the gypsy camp they find it hurriedly vacated and this triggers them sending telegrams to all the local police offices and riding to Ascot station to ask the stationmaster to send messages all along the line asking if a 15-year-old American girl has been seen.

All a wild goose-chase, because later that night with a crash and bang Virginia emerges from the secret panelling to the huge relief of her family (and her young boyfriend, the little Duke of Cheshire). She explains that the ghost is well and truly dead, that he repented his sins, and that she wept for him and that saved his soul. Now all that remains is a skeleton in a secret dungeon.

The final section of the story describes the grand formal burial of Sir Simon’s skeleton in the Canterville plot, and the discussion between Otis and the Lord about who should have ownership of the casket of jewels the ghost gave to Virginia. Lord Canterville insists it is here. And so she wears them at her wedding to the young Duke of Cheshire and when the happy couple are presented to Queen Victoria in 1890.

Commentary

The central gag is drawn out, namely the notion that the ghost does its best to scare the Yanks who remain perfectly indifferent and only promote wonderful American products. This scene or motif is repeated about six times, the essential repetition of the ghost’s attempts and the Americans’ debunking of it concealed by the brio with which Wilde comes up with identities and disguises which the ghost adopts.

The end passages become sentimental. Young Virginia really is close to becoming an angel. And when she attributes the ghost’s ultimate atonement and salvation, nobody questions her.

And then it ends, as almost story ever told, with the happy marriage of Virginia and her Duke. Those damn Yanks, coming over here, stealing our most eligible bachelors. This also is a recurring motif and joke in Wilde’s plays.

3. The Sphinx Without a Secret: an etching

Very short, barely 6 pages in the Penguin edition. Ian Small’s notes tell us that The Sphinx was 1) a nickname Wilde gave to his friend Ada Leverson; 2) was the title of one of his best poems; 3) the sub-title was an example of Wilde’s habit of sub-titling texts or poems in terms of other art forms, generally art or music, very much in the manner of Whistler who called his paintings after genres of music, for example, nocturnes etc.

The plot

The narrator is sitting in a cafe in Paris watching the world go by when he is hailed by Lord Murchison, a good friend from years ago at Oxford. But the man seems anxious and harried. They hail a horse-drawn cab and go to a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne. After they have eaten, Lord Murchison tells his story.

He shows the narrator a photo of an attractive woman with large vague eyes and wrapped in rich furs. One evening he was walking down Bond Street when he glimpsed a beautiful face in a carriage window. Her beauty haunted him. Next day he walked up and down Rotten Row seeking her, to no avail.

A week later he is dining at Lady Rastail’s when to his utter amazement the woman arrives as a guest and is introduced as Lady Alroy. Murchison takes her into dinner and tries to make conversation, but she is timid, almost anxious. When he mentions having seen her in Bond Street she tells him to hush. He asks if he may pay a call on her next day, she agrees, but when he does so the butler informs him she has gone out. Puzzled, he writes her a letter from his club and she replies agreeing to another meeting, at which she begs him not to write to her at her home.

What the devil is going on? It has the claustrophobic, gnomic secrecy of a Sherlock Holmes story (this story was published in the same year as the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, 1887).

He is taking a short cut between Regent’s Park and Piccadilly when he spots her in a rough quarter of low streets, veiled, hurrying along to the last house in a shabby row and letting herself in with a key. When he calls on her that evening, he explains that he saw her but she refuses to explain her strange behaviour. He had nerved himself to propose marriage, he had become so infatuated by her, but instead finds himself becoming angry and eventually raging at her, before storming out and then going abroad with a friend.

A month later he returns and reads in the Morning Post that she caught a chill at the opera and died. So he goes along to the house he saw her enter; he quizzes the landlady, who simply replies that Lady Alroy had indeed rented the drawing room, liked to arrive wearing a veil and… ‘met someone?’ cries Murchison, anxiously. ‘Not at all,’ the landlady replies. She simply sat and read books and occasionally had tea…

So, back in the present, this is the story he tells the narrator and asks what the devil it all means? The narrator calmly tells him: nothing. She had a fondness for melodrama. She read novels. She liked to fancy herself the heroine of one of them, dress up, slip around the shabbier streets of central London. She was acting in a play of her own devising. There was no secret. She was a sphinx without a secret.

4. The Model Millionaire

A charming little short story about philanthropy and love. It opens with a little flurry of Wildean epigrams. Having read Ian Small’s introduction I now know that Wilde’s texts sometimes actually began as sets of epigrams on a particular topic which he then set out to link together with argumentation or fictional narrative. Thus the painter character pronounces:

Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow.

Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed.

The poor should be practical and prosaic.

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

After this brief flurry of apothegms, the text settles down to be a sort of fairy story. Young Hughie Erskine is ‘wonderfully good-looking, with his crisp brown hair, his clear-cut profile, and his grey eyes’ but absolutely hopeless at finding a job or a career with the result that he is practically penniless (apart from the two hundred a year that an old aunt allowed him.)

He is in love with Laura Merton, ‘the daughter of a retired Colonel who had lost his temper and his digestion in India’.

They were the handsomest couple in London, and had not a penny-piece between them.

The colonel refuses to consider Hughie as a son-in-law unless he can rustle up £10,000 to support Laura, which he hasn’t the slightest chance of doing. One day Hughie drops in to the home of his friend, Alan Trevor the painter. Alan is painting a beggar, a strikingly picturesque old man.

He was a wizened old man, with a face like wrinkled parchment, and a most piteous expression. Over his shoulders was flung a coarse brown cloak, all tears and tatters; his thick boots were patched and cobbled, and with one hand he leant on a rough stick, while with the other he held out his battered hat for alms.

They discuss painting and Alan says he’ll get 2,000 guineas for his painting. When Alan is called out of the room Hughie is so overcome with pity for the knackered old man that he goes over and gives him the last sovereign in his pocket. The man smiles strangely and says thank you. When Alan returns to the room, Hughie, by now embarrassed at his own generosity, takes his leave.

That evening Hughie bumps into Alan at his club, the Palette Club and they get talking about the old tramp. Alan says he asked lots of questions about Hughie so Alan told him all about his beloved Laura Merton, about the obdurate colonel, the £10,000 requirement and all the rest of it.

It’s only now that Hughie reveals that he slipped the old man a sovereign which prompts Alan to burst out laughing. For ‘the old beggar’ is really Baron Hausberg, the richest man in Europe.

‘He could buy all London to-morrow without overdrawing his account. He has a house in every capital, dines off gold plate, and can prevent Russia going to war when he chooses.’

He asked to be painted in the guise of the poorest of the poor and so Alan, to indulge the whim of a multi-millionaire, lent him a ragged old suit he picked up in Spain. Hughie is mortified to realise what a fool he’s made of himself.

Next morning his servant announces a visitor. Monsieur Gustave Naudin, de la part de M. le Baron Hausberg. Clearly a notary or lawyer, this visitor hands Hughie an envelope containing a cheque for £10,000. His generosity of heart has been rewarded. The story cuts to a swift two-line conclusion. Hughie and Laura are married. Alan Trevor was the best man, and the Baron made a speech at the wedding breakfast. And concludes with a Wildean mot.

‘Millionaire models,’ remarked Alan, ‘are rare enough; but, by Jove, model millionaires are rarer still!’

More Ian Small insights

In his introduction, Ian Small points out that the 1880s saw a great widening of the reading public as a result of 1) new developments in print technology which made printing books and magazines cheaper 2) an explosion in the size of the reading public due to increased education, crystallised by the 1870 Education Act. One of the consequences was a dramatic growth in genre fiction, most notably ghost stories, detective stories and fairy tales. He then shows how Wilde, still desperate to make a living, lost no time in trying at his hand at each of them, fairy tales in the volume titled The Happy Prince, a ghost story in The Canterville Ghost, a murder story in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.

Parody

But what is immediately obvious is that Wilde tried his hand at all these genres in the form of parodies. He elegantly inverts the fictional values associated with each genre. Thus the fairy tales are not very reassuring and tend to highlight people’s greed. The ghost in Canterville completely fails to scare the Americans. The murder in Savile is not committed at the start of the story, but forms the ironically logical conclusion of the story.

Small thinks the stories ‘subvert’ Victorian morality but that’s not quite right. At the end of Savile and Millionaire the young lovers get happily married. In Canterville the only sensitive, imaginative member of the Otis family saves the soul of a sinner and reconciles him with God. In Millionaire a spontaneous act of kindness is handsomely rewarded. Surely nothing could be more conventional or piously Victorian than these outcomes?

Inversion of values

It’s more accurate to say that the journeys to these conclusions are unorthodox. They turn the conventions of their genres, especially Canterville and Savile, on their heads. Not only that but the inversion tends to be at the expense of social values. In Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime the joke is that Arthur feels duty bound to commit the murder the cheiromancer has predicted for the sake of his fiancée. The moral inversion at the centre of the story mocks society’s values. And it foregrounds the conflict between Morality and Social Convention which is a, arguably the, central theme of Wilde’s works.

Disguise

Parody of genres and inversion of social values are joined by a third recurring theme, which is disguise and concealment. This is the theme of the two short and slight stories in the volume. In Sphinx Lady Alroy maintains a secret, wears a veil, whips up an air of melodrama around herself, which turns out to be utterly baseless and empty. It is not the ‘secret’ that matters: there is no secret; it is the performance, it is the play-acting which matters, which gives her her identity.

Millionaire is a lesser example, although it still centres on the figure of a fabulously rich multi-millionaire masquerading as a homeless beggar. Putting the actual plots to one side for a moment, both stories share the same fundamental structure whereby the majority of the narrative is driven by a subterfuge, a disguise and a bit of play-acting, which is then revealed.

Related links

Oscar Wilde reviews

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by Simon on August 5, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 5, 2024

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