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Dorothy L. Sayers, the Great War, and Shell Shock

2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/intelitestud.15.1.0103

1524-8429

Monica Lott,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Dorothy L. Sayers is one of the most well-known writers from the golden age of detective fiction, an author whose longevity is rivaled only by that of G. K. Chesterton and of Agatha Christie. Her main character, the aristocratic Lord Peter Wimsey, has become a blueprint for the seemingly inane man of leisure who sharpens his intellect through detection, an inspiration for Margery Allingham's Albert Campion and Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn. In the character of Wimsey, Sayers creates a transition from the logic-based detective story to a model that incorporates detectives as characters with actions and emotions that may not necessarily further the act of puzzle solving, but do contribute to fleshing out a character. From his opening statement in Whose Body? (1923), Wimsey's irritated "Oh, damn" at the realization of having forgotten his auction catalog shows a complex, though occasionally petulant and foppish, character whose experiences beyond solving mysteries make him more well rounded than previous literary detectives. What truly separates Lord Peter Wimsey from his counterparts, the popular detective fiction heroes of the late Victorian and early modern period, becomes apparent in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) when Sayers demonstrates the effects of his war service on his psyche. As a major in the army, Wimsey saw a great deal of battle during the war; was nearly buried alive in the trenches; and suffered from flashbacks and anxiety, particularly in situations in which he was responsible for the lives of others. Sayers uses his shell shock from this incident to create a new kind of hero, not the emotionless Sherlock Holmes or the asexual Miss Marple, but a man who has known the pain of war and has been able to address the effects of it. Wimsey was a character that sought a respite in rational and logic-based detection. Through detection, Wimsey regains the masculinity that had been wounded by his experiences in the war. Sayers creates a character whose detection activities provide a treatment for shell shock that enables him to recoup his masculinity, thus fitting him for an idealized marriage at the end of the series. Lord Peter encapsulates the burgeoning modernist movement through his frustration with authority, particularly that of the police force; his sense of loneliness and alienation when solving a case; and his nostalgia for a simpler time before his war experiences. Flourishing in this time period, detective fiction shows itself to reflect the growing modernist movement in its questioning of governmental authority, emphasis on the motivation of the individual, and challenge to social customs. These hallmarks of modern literature demonstrate the trauma felt by society that had been ripped apart by World War I. The detective fiction novel thrived because it brought a sense of comfort to readers, reassuring them that within the confines of several hundred pages someone was keeping order and making sure justice was administered and a peaceful equilibrium restored by the last page. Through the act of detection, Lord Peter is able to take on authority that enables him to provide justice and closure to other characters, particularly in saving both his brother and his future wife from execution for crimes they did not commit, respectively, in Clouds of Witness (1926) and Strong Poison (1930). Lord Peter's self-awareness of the weaknesses brought upon him by his war experiences introduces a character whose emotion and detective abilities create an antirationality that redefines post-war masculinity. The effect of the battlefield on the soldiers is a motif that Sayers revisits in most of her novels, particularly in Unnatural Death (1927), The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), Gaudy Night (1936), and Busman's Honeymoon (1937). In the medium of detective fiction, Sayers explores issues of crippled masculinity in postwar Britain and offers detection as a treatment for shell shock, making a strong claim for the power of the genre.A closer examination of the issue of war in Sayers's writing, both fiction and nonfiction, reveals that her attitude is far more complex than most scholarship indicates. Critics claim that Sayers uses shell shock as a social critique in her earlier novels1 or as an opportunity to demonstrate the mutability of gender.2 However, no scholarship has unified Sayers's use of shell shock as an attempt not only to identify with the war experiences of her husband, Mac Fleming, but also to understand his experiences and cope with the disruption that shell shock created in their lives. Fleming had fought in World War I and, according to biographer James Brabazon, "had taken to the bottle and … was often very bloody-minded."3 When her husband's shell shock became so crippling that it threatened their lifestyle and her livelihood, Sayers took the topic of shell shock and incorporated it into Lord Peter's recovery, making detection a panacea for the pain of the war. Its inclusion in her work offered Sayers not only an escape from her husband's illness but also an opportunity to manipulate shell shock's effects on Wimsey. Through Wimsey, Sayers creates an idealized view of a soldier who uses detection to cope with the trauma of the war. This empowers her because she can empower Wimsey by coping with shell shock and finding a treatment in detection. Sayers represents detection as offering a rational escape from the effects of war into a narrative that follows the practical conventions of the detection novel as defined by the Detection Club.In 1940, she writes in "Begin Here: A War Time Essay," "We are lost and unhappy in a universe that seems to make no sense, and cling to science and machines and detective fiction, just because, within their limited fields, the problems do work out, and the end corresponds to their intention."4 This statement comes after the bemoaning of a society in which critical thinking and reasoning skills are abandoned by many people and, feeling that lack, some turn to science and detective fiction in an attempt to make up for that dearth. Her works and those of her Detection Club colleagues offer her audience a whetting stone for their wits; however, she criticizes the realization that society demands less from people and that, feeling that lack, her audience turns to fiction in an attempt to keep its mental acuity. Fiction becomes a poor substitute for an active engagement and questioning on the part of her readers. As a writer of detective fiction, she appreciates the fact that she has an audience but realizes that, in comparison with readers of more sentimental novels, her readership is smaller because fewer people are willing to seek opportunities to exercise their abilities to reason and make up for the mental laziness that grows more and more prevalent in society. However, it is through that challenging of her readers that the audience is able to trace Sayers's growth as a writer, particularly through the thread of shell shock in her Wimsey stories.Contemporary critic Gill Plain follows Lord Peter's evolution throughout the stories "into a more complex and less superhuman character" who starts as a "collection of clichéd surfaces" and achieves, by Gaudy Night, "a balance between his still remarkable outer strengths and his manifold inner weaknesses."5 Sayers's experiences with her husband's shell shock enable her to create a hero who is multifaceted and realistic because of his complexity. When Wimsey marries in the next book and their honeymoon mystery results in his sending someone else to be executed, he makes himself vulnerable, for the first time, by breaking down into tears and letting his wife comfort him. He has never sought comfort before; when an execution has been mentioned, novels have described him lapsing into either catatonia or manic activity. Plain argues, "As a body of texts, the Wimsey novels chart a progress from an outward-looking but selfish denial of the private, through a more inward acknowledgement of personal need, to the recognition and submission to the law of public service—represented here by the duty of war."6 Tracking Wimsey's shell shock becomes a way to follow Sayers's recognition of the practical necessity of war, which comes through in her later propaganda works on behalf of the British government during World War II.In her 1943 essay "They Tried to Be Good," Sayers blames World War II on the ineffectualness of the British character. She claims, "There are days like that in the nursery, when, inexplicably, nothing one does can please the grown-ups. The Twenty-Years' Armistice was just one of those days. We tried to do as we were told, and blundered from one catastrophe to another."7 It is far too simplistic to claim that Sayers's use of shell shock indicates a distaste for war. She understood that war was often an essential and not necessarily unchristian part of nation building. She shows a willingness to fight and an awareness of the paradox of war, that "in a world full of conflicting interests and jarring ambitions, power might be needed to keep the peace. But power in itself was naughty."8 It is wrong to have power and exert force. It is also wrong to have power and do nothing while people die. That is the state that England found itself in and the combined feelings of powerlessness and blame would leave their imprint on the British psyche.Ariela Freedman's 2010 article "Dorothy Sayers and the Case of the Shell-Shocked Detective" examines Lord Peter's shell shock and suggests that Sayers proposes detection as an initial cure before incorporating marriage as a cure as Sayers's Lord Peter narratives end with his marriage.9 This article disagrees with her argument and suggests that though detection has provided a way of dealing with shell shock that makes him fit for marriage, detection is a treatment, not a cure. Unlike Freedman, I theorize here that detection remains the treatment throughout the stories and his breakdown in the arms of his wife shows that he has been made able to share his weaknesses. Lord Peter's sobs show him opening up to his wife, instead of relapsing into the internal catatonia that had marked the end of his earlier adventures. Freedman glosses over Sayers's background and briefly mentions that Sayers's husband's shell shock informed her writing, but does not, as this article does, theorize that Sayers's writing about shell shock is her attempt to cope with its effects by finding a treatment within her character's adventures in detection that helps move him past the trauma.In her book Trauma: A Genealogy, Ruth Leys recounts the symptoms of shell shock—"stupor, confusion, mutism, loss of sight or hearing, spasmodic convulsions or trembling of the limbs, anesthesia, exhaustion, sleep-lessness, depression, and terrifying, repetitive nightmares"10 and their link to female hysteria as described by physician William Brown at a meeting of the British Psychological Society in 1920.11 Brown also stated that the inability to respond to trauma resulted in repression of memories and that discussing the memories through the use of hypnosis would help alleviate the symptoms of shell shock.12 Tracey Loughran in her summary of the history of shell shock treatments in Britain discusses the cures proffered by asylum owner Lionel Weatherly: "iron, arsenic and Ovaltine," which he claimed "could work wonders for 'mild mental disorders.'"13 The idea of talk therapy was a popular one, though it was not often put into practice, according to Loughran. She further states that there was "little evidence of widespread, in-depth intellectual engagement with psychoanalysis. Although the word 'psychoanalysis' was bandied about with increasing frequency from 1918, in many cases this was little more than lip service to the talking cure. Most often the term only connoted a conversation with the patient about his war experience and, despite adopting the language, doctors were keen to stress their distance from Freud's theories and techniques."14The attempts at re-creating talk therapy in encouraging the shell shock victim to discuss war experiences would be a less invasive method of treatment than others practiced. Sayers's incorporation of detection as therapy would be among the gentler methods of treating victims of shell shock. Eric J. Leed recounts in No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I that in the British army, the difference between soldiers who were malingering and those who were suffering from shell shock was found in their submission to "disciplinary treatment," which included electrical shock, isolation, a restricted diet (whose restrictions would be eased if the victim stopped suffering), and a period of being shouted at.15 Leed further details the pride felt by Lewis Yealland, a British supporter of "disciplinary therapies," who claimed he could "cure cases of hysterical mutism that had lasted for months in a matter of minutes."16 Leed cites a twenty-four-year-old private who had been mute for nine months; at one session, the private "had been strapped to a chair for twenty minutes at a time while strong electricity had been applied to his neck and throat: lighted cigarette ends had been applied to the tip of his tongue and 'hot plates' had been placed at the back of his mouth."17 When that treatment failed to work because, as Yealland claimed, the treatment had not been "applied with thoroughness and consistency,"18 the private received electrical shock for one-hour and half-hour sessions until he could whisper. Comparatively, modern treatments for victims of trauma focus on talk therapy, which call upon the listener to participate in the cure by becoming "a participant and co-owner of the traumatic event."19 By participating in hearing the narrative of the traumatic event, the listener "comes to feel the bewilderment, injury, confusion, dread and conflicts that the trauma victim feels."20 In writing of shell shock, Sayers is calling upon the reader to participate in the cure by bearing witness to the pain felt by Wimsey and veterans like him. In this way, Sayers is participating in the cure as well.Sayers's experience of living with the effects of shell shock informed her writing. In 1934, after finding a letter her husband had lost several weeks before, Sayers wrote to her cousin Ivy Shrimpton, who was taking care of Sayers's son: "'Mac is getting so queer and unreliable that it is not safe to trust him to do anything at all, and if he is told that he has forgotten anything, he goes into such a frightful fit of rage that one gets really alarmed. The doctors say that he is getting definitely queer—but there doesn't seem to be much that one can do about it.'"21 Martin Stone's seminal essay "Shellshock and the Psychologists" discusses the medical profession's difficulties in coping with post–World War I veterans as shell shock patients. He states that "traditional neurological and psychiatric doctrines" accorded the symptoms of some victims to hysteria, while others "appeared to be suffering from severe forms of 'neurasthenia.' These were two conditions which at the time were held in low medical esteem."22 This "low medical esteem" is exemplified in psychologist William McDougall's 1926 Outline of Abnormal Psychology statement that the neuroses were "especially perhaps in Britain … neglected and despised" by neurologists and psychiatrists alike" because medicine's dogged focus on a search for structural anomalies could not account for psychiatric issues.23With medicine unable to offer any answers for Sayers, she pressed to find her own treatment for shell shock. Her letter to her cousin continues and she expresses impatience about the impotent position in which the lack of knowledge about shell shock has placed them. Although shell shock is not explicitly named by Sayers, it is strongly suggested: It is all very worrying, but only part of the major worry which is caused by the mental trouble of Mac's, which is due to some kind of germ or disease or shock or something—probably the result of the War. Doctors don't seem able to do much about it, and it makes everything difficult, and explains a lot of what you must have thought slackness and queerness on my part. It also makes the financial position very awkward, as he can't earn any money, and what with his illness and the difficulty of managing his odd fits of temper and so on, it isn't easy for me to get any work done regularly and properly. Don't refer to this too openly when you reply, in case he should see your letter.24The dearth of resources available to victims of shell shock (and their families) means that Sayers cannot even be sure that what her husband is suffering from is shell shock, or is even a direct result of the war. Her letters suggest deep unhappiness within her marriage; however, Sayers's life with Fleming is considered by many of her biographers to have been somewhat happy, though uneven, with "a deep underlying affection for the other; and on her side there was, in addition, a sympathetic understanding of his troubles, on his real respect for her qualities and a pride in her achievements."25 Her marriage and that of Peter and Harriet inform each other, with Peter and Harriet's idealized model of coping and Sayers and Mac's more realistic struggles with the reality of postwar life. Their marriage in 1926 provided her with a model for Lord Peter's recovery, the agonizing process of understanding that, as she stated in a letter to her mother shortly after their marriage, "when one has been so badly gassed one cannot expect to go on quite as usual."26 Sayers cared deeply for her husband, but often commented in her letters how ill he was, how badly his stomach pained him, and how fits of rage or forgetfulness would overcome him. Sayers's letters provide little clue to her inspiration for her novels; rather they dwell more on the financial needs that her books took care of, needs that were particularly pressing in light of her husband's sketchy patterns of employment. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club displays, more than any other of Sayers's works, a sense of guilt and responsibility as though she, simply by being a British citizen, is responsible for the consequences of her husband's service. Even though this sense of responsibility, a need to make sure innocence is kept pure and the guilty are punished, is a general characteristic of works from the golden age of detective fiction, its pervasiveness in this story shows an idea of guilt, a sense of a desire to participate in the war. Because Sayers did not undergo great hardship during the war, her writing becomes an attempt to understand the experiences her husband lived through that caused his shell shock and affected their life together. Though written two years into their marriage, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club's scene of marital strife between an out-of-work shell-shocked veteran and his wife presaged, as suggested by Brabazon, the tumultuous arguments between Sayers and Fleming. In incorporating shell shock into her stories, she also includes treatment for it in the act featured in the stories themselves: detection.Sayers makes a powerful statement on detective fiction's behalf. Detecting becomes Lord Peter's cure for his shell shock. Sayers is making the claim on behalf of detective fiction that sleuthing offers a therapeutic approach in the treatment of shell shock. She has lived with its effects, and it has disrupted her work. She was, albeit temporarily, conquering its hold over her life by escaping into her work. When its presence seeped into her stories, she used the power of detective fiction to deal with it and help her character gain some sense of peace, a temporary cure that she was unable to offer her husband.Dorothy L. Goldman suggests in Women Writers and the Great War that women wrote about the Great War as a way not only to identify with the men who had seen battle but also to participate in the war for themselves.27 This theory is echoed by Sandra M. Gilbert, in "Soldier's Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War," who suggests the war "was the first historical event to allow (indeed, to require) them to use their abilities and to be of use, to escape the private 'staves' of houses as well as the patriarchal oppression of 'high towers' and to enter the public realm."28 Gilbert goes on to describe how the male bonding that occurred among soldiers would be echoed by the liberatory bonding that women felt when they were called upon to play important roles during the war.29 Sayers had had a relatively easy time during the war, most of which she spent at Oxford. She was not called to play anything that could be considered an important role; in writing about shell shock, Sayers creates a character who had had an important role and, through him, she can try to understand her husband's illness and depict a relationship in which a wife helps her husband cope with trauma.Changing social conditions and sudden imbalance between the sexes affected Oxford greatly. Mitzi Brunsdale states that the male population of Oxford dropped from three thousand to one thousand between 1914 and 1915 and of the "eight scholars and exhibitioners who came up to Balliol … in 1912, only two were alive at the end of the war."30 Somerville was emptied of its students after the 1915 term and used as a military hospital. The Somerville women were moved to Oriel College an, apparently conducted themselves with decorum, even with residual males attempting to carry on flirtations.31 The women were attempting to be taken seriously as scholars, with fewer restrictions on their library access at Oxford. Through this, Sayers and the other female Oxford students had learned to live without men and create their own kinds of amusements and employment opportunities. Even though the passage in 1919 of the Sex Qualification Act made gender discrimination in employment illegal, Sayers and other women found it difficult to find jobs because of the influx of employable soldiers and lack of change in attitudes of employers.32 She considers nursing during World War I and tells her parents in a 1915 letter, "Of course, in one way I should hate nursing—hard labour and horrors—but I should be frightfully glad to have done it, and to have done something real for the first time in my life.33 These feelings of excitement and fulfillment that women felt when they were called upon to be useful have been examined in the nonfictional products of women writers during and after World War I. The liberatory nature of women's war work has been observed in the works of Vera Brittain, Rebecca West, and Mary Borden,34 but the impact of war in the fiction of female detective fiction writers has not been studied. Sayers's work offers the opportunity to study the aftermath of war in a fictional setting, though the realism of her husband's plight after the war seeps into her work.The motif of life after the terrors of war runs throughout the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. Sayers created in Lord Peter a character that would rediscover his capability through detection. Lord Peter had ostensibly taken up the hobby of detecting to ease the broken heart caused by his fiancée's ending their engagement. In fact, "Wimsey returned to the Western Front with 'the fixed intention of getting killed, but all he got was his majority and his D.S.O. [Distinguished Service Order] for some recklessly good work behind the German Front.'"35 Although this hobby served to distract Peter from his broken heart and help him to heal, there would be many reminders of the war in his cases. Freedman suggests that Lord Peter "recovers through his discovery of detective work. It gives him new vigor, purpose, and interest in life, and an accidental hobby develops into vocation. This hobby seems at once an antidote to the war and an extension of the war's concerns. Detective work serves as both disease and cure."36 Freedman's argument that detection is a temporary cure for shell shock, with marriage being its ultimate cure, differs from my claim that detection as cure allows for marriage. She sees marriage as the ultimate treatment for shell shock while here I theorize that a productive marriage becomes possible for Peter only after detection has helped him deal with his trauma. Peter has not been cured, as Freedman claims. Detection helps him deal with the trauma, but its cyclical nature that leaves him in the position of authority over someone else keeps reinjuring him and reviving the memories of sending his men to their deaths. Simply the act of detecting would be linked with heartbreak and his attempt to exert some sort of control over his life. Detecting served to distract his mind not only from the terrors of war but also from his broken heart. Although he had led troops in his capacity as a major, he had still been responsible for carrying out the orders of his superiors. Detecting was a hobby that provided him with autonomy. When faced with lighter, less serious cases, he could choose to pursue the puzzles that interested him. Taking on the cases that threatened those he loved, as when both his sister and brother are accused of the murder of his sister's fiancé in Clouds of Witness (1926) or when Harriet Vane was tried for the murder of her lover in Strong Poison (1930), gave him the ability to defend people who were dear to him. He did not have a great deal of control during the war, but ensuring the safety of his loved ones proved to be therapeutic in his recovery.Although the character of Lord Peter seemed to have led a charmed life before the war—wealthy, handsome, well educated, with a first in history at Oxford's Balliol College, and an excellent cricket player—the charm of his "silly-ass" manner after the war served to isolate and insulate him from the emotions of others. However, a pattern emerges at the end of each case whereby Peter must understand that a culprit he has discovered must face some sort of justice. It is this responsibility for the fate of others that brings on Lord Peter's lapses into depression, immobility, and a return to the near-catatonic state he was left in after the war. In particular, the final solutions of Unnatural Death and The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club cause Peter to relive his most terrible memories of the war, often through horrific flashback nightmares. During Unnatural Death, Lord Peter's "investigations cause two new murders, as well as some attempted murders and finally the suicide of the killer. Wimsey tried to relieve some of his guilty feelings through a conversation he holds with a kindly vicar, during which Wimsey admitted that he acted from a sense of duty and curiosity."37 This sense of responsibility for the criminal, first appearing in Unnatural Death that often causes Peter so much angst, is a recurring theme throughout the novels. He even goes so far, as with the villain in Busman's Honeymoon, to hire the brilliant Sir Impey Biggs to defend the culprit. This is the same lawyer he had hired previously to defend Harriet Vane, with whom he had fallen in love. His response is the same whether he is trying to save a man he has found responsible for a horrific murder or the wrongfully accused woman he loves. Choosing an excellent lawyer to defend a man he knew to be a murderer is a way of attempting to expiate his guilt and also continues his war-honed sense of noblesse oblige, impelling him to believe that he needs to look out for other men.Lord Peter knows he has the right culprit because the evidence has led to the villain—who has confessed, but shown a significant lack of remorse—but he still wants to be sure that the murderer has every chance at justice. He has problems sending men to their death, even those he has found responsible for murder(s). This dislike for authority over the lives of other men is a holdover from his days as a major in that even "the condemnation of an unrepentant and amoral villain cannot come without ambivalence, since his unmasking and discovery will result in the taking of his life—a consequence Lord Peter must face seriously because it means that he continues in a death-dealing profession."38 The detection hobby he had turned to for relief from his shell shock keeps him paradoxically responsible for others. One aspect of his shell shock is seen after he returns from the war in his unwillingness to make even the simplest of decisions. As his mother explains, in a later novel, to Harriet, whom he has courted and married over the course of the series: "He doesn't like responsibility, you know…. There were about eighteen months … I don't mean he went out of his mind or anything, and he was always so perfectly sweet about it, only he was so dreadfully afraid to go to sleep … and he couldn't give an order, not even to the servants, which made it really very miserable for him, poor lamb! … I suppose if you've been giving orders for nearly four years to people to go and get blown to pieces it gives you a—an inhibition, or an exhibition, or something, of nerves."39His inanition regarding decision making stems from the consequences that his previous choices had caused. After his being forced to send men to their deaths, even his choice of what to eat for breakfast or what to wear becomes too much responsibility to bear. At the conclusion of one case and its subsequent nightmare, he even frankly remarks to his wife that it was "only the old responsibility dream, and a mild one at that."40 The consequences of shell shock and the idea of personal responsibility would come to great prominence in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club reflects Sayers's attempt to understand shell shock and explore society's reaction to those who have been damaged by the war and the way perceptions of masculinity were affected by victims of