DLS: The Nine Tailors 2

[truepenny]

Previous DLS posts: Concerning Lord Peter Wimsey, and Ralph Lynn, the Hon. Freddy Arbuthnot, Miss Katharine Alexandra Climpson, media whimsies, music, aspidistra & ampelopsis, Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 1 & 2, Strong Poison, The Five Red Herrings, Have His Carcase 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7, Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors 1.

I've really fallen behind with these (the last installment was on the seventh). I apologize. I've been fretting about things, and that's not a state conducive to either reading or thinking constructively about The Nine Tailors.

However, I do have this idea that's been buzzing around my head like a mosquito, and it doesn't fit anywhere into a logical progression of analysis, so I'm going to inflict it on you here.

Warning: spoilers for T9T. ALL of it.


As many of my Gentle Readers will already have noticed, I have an excessive fondness for picking out doubles in the stuff I read. I'm doing it to Hamlet; I did it in my posts on Have His Carcase. And apropos of T9T, a really appalling doubling occurred to me: Bunter and Deacon.

Both of them are Kentish by birth, but come "from London." Both of them are superior manservants--someone uses that word of Bunter (the Dowager Duchess?), but my mind is no longer what it was, and I can't remember where; it is, however, definitively the word Blundell uses of Deacon (T9T 99)--both uncommonly clever: note that Bunter identifies the stylistic source of Deacon's cipher as readily and accurately as Peter does:

I should say it was written by a person of no inconsiderable literary ability, who had studied the works of Sheridan Lefanu and was, if I may be permitted the expression, bats in the belfry, my lord.
(T9T 166)

And note, too, the cunning way in which Bunter's descent into vulgarity points us back at Fenchurch St. Paul's bell tower again.

Both Bunter and Deacon are oppressively correct in manner; we learn that Mrs. Venables is rather frightened of Bunter (T9T 186), and Deacon is censured by Hezekiah Lavender as "too soft-spoken" (T9T 88). Taking that in conjunction with Edward Thorpe's manifest approval of Deacon, I come to the conclusion that Bunter and Deacon presented very similar faces to the outside world. Both Bunter and Deacon are championed by younger sons: Peter and Hilary's Uncle Edward (T9T 107). Here it's also worth noting that Edward is specifically introduced as a foil to Peter (T9T 97-8). Bunter, not Peter, is the one who succeeds in wresting Suzanne Legros's letter from the Walbeach post office (by claiming it is for Peter, whom he identifies, in a neat reversal, as his own chauffeur (T9T 134)).

I'm certainly not arguing that the amoral heart of a Deacon beats beneath Bunter's invariably correct façade. But I think Sayers is playing with the idea that there is more to Bunter than meets the eye, just as there is to Deacon. We never learn very much about what parts of himself Bunter has had to repress to play the role Peter needs him to; his infrequent slips in language are revealing of nothing more than his class origins (Whose Body?, Busman's Honeymoon). His own desires and personality seem to have been entirely and perfectly sublimated in service to Peter. You can make a homoerotic reading if you like, although Bunter is far more like a mother than a lover, but the text itself dwells on Bunter's way with female servants at sufficient length that I think we are to understand him as heterosexual, even if rather undersexed.

Deacon offers us one possible scenario for what might lie behind a façade like Bunter's, an alternate history of Bunter's career. He is a twisted, darkened reflection of the persona Bunter has chosen to assume.


I shall press onward with T9T, hopefully soon.

---
WORKS CITED
Sayers, Dorothy L. The Nine Tailors. 1934. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., n.d.

Comments

[pameladean]

That's a lovely double. It's the kind of thing one might think, having read The Mind of the Maker, that Sayers did more or less unconsciously, but it casts some odd lights and shadows.

I'm not sure, she says, descending suddenly in tone, that Bunter is undersexed. I think he is circumspect and not prone to give way to feelings, but that's different. I'm thinking of such things as Wimsey's remark near the beginning of Clouds of Witness that "Bunter had a regular affair with a landlord's daughter in Corsica." In Corsica it is harder to hide such things; Lord knows what he got up to in London.

I'm thinking too of Wimsey's remark in Strong Poison that Bunter has been cultivating Hannah Westlock "almost to breach-of-promise" lengths, and a number of warnings Wimsey gives him in various books about depredations amongst the female staff. I don't think those are just fluff.

It's kind of appalling if you look at it too closely. There's at least one place -- it might also be in Strong Poison</>, though I don't believe so -- when Wimsey says that in case of action for breach of promise, costs will be borne by the management. And what ABOUT Hannah Westlock's feelings? In a different context Sayers would deal with them far more tenderly, but Bunter in these circumstances is almost always cast in a comic light where such things are not central.

I'll stop rambling now.

Pamela

Bunter as Lothario

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure, she says, descending suddenly in tone, that Bunter is undersexed.

I agree totally with you there.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yeah, "undersexed" was not the word I wanted. What I meant--and what you pointed out--was that Bunter doesn't CARE about his amorous escapades. He may be libidinous, but he's not passionate. In fact, except for Peter and Harriet, there's very little passion in any of the characters in the canon; considered as a three-dimensional, psychologically realistic individual, of COURSE Hannah Westlock would be upset when Bunter dumped her like a hot rock. But the Hannah Westlock we see in Strong Poison doesn't seem like she'd mind. Mrs. Grimethorpe certainly doesn't care about Denver, and Denver doesn't care about her. Crimes in DLS are about money; people who commit crimes for what might loosely be called "love" are depicted as being unhinged, killing out of their particular mania and not really for love. Thus I think the very cerebral character of her mysteries. So Peter can be passionate and fallible, but Bunter has to take up the slack.

The Dark Bunter Saga

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Deacon offers us one possible scenario for what might lie behind a façade like Bunter's, an alternate history of Bunter's career. He is a twisted, darkened reflection of the persona Bunter has chosen to assume.

Another bit to add--Bunter was in the Army and was apparently exemplary in his role. Deacon kills a soldier and steals his uniform, ending up in the Army against his will when his stolen papers are examined.

Re: The Dark Bunter Saga

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ooh, yes, good point. Deacon's army career is darkly parodic (especially as relayed through Nobby Cranton), but I hadn't thought of linking that to Bunter. Thanks!

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

Also, Bunter in Whose Body? wins the confidence of Freke's manservant by pretending to exploit his employer; Deacon really does it (and how).

I don't think we know anything about Bunter's sex-life, btw, and I don't think anyone Lord Peter mentions in that connection is anywhere near an accurate depiction; one is supposed conventionally as a master to control the sex lives of the servant class (and boy, can you imagine Helen doing it) but I imagine what LP does is cast a sympathetic smokescreen over whatever he knows or surmises, for the benefit of the outside world, and lets Bunter have his privacy.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Another good point about Bunter in Whose Body?.

Bunter's sexuality is clearly a whole huge can of worms, which I probably shouldn't have opened. The textual evidence is absolutely noncommital; Bunter could be going out for orgies on his half-day, or he could wear a hair shirt and take cold showers daily. We don't know. It's true that Peter tactfully never alludes to Bunter's private life, but it's also true that from the evidence of the novels Bunter has no private life.

Even Jeeves went on vacation occasionally.

I personally have no idea. Bunter seems to exert a remarkable fascination on women of the servant-class, but we never witness him in action except for some moderate flirting in Clouds of Witness--although I do always wonder what he found to say to "the young person Elizabeth" in The Five Red Herrings. I admit, I've never put much credence in the Corsican affair; it sounds more like Peter trying to wind Helen up to me.

But Bunter's sexuality or lack thereof does seem to be a sort of weird, uneasy running joke in Busman's Honeymoon: Harriet saying she wishes she could have married Bunter, Bunter's speech at the wedding dinner, the object Peter doesn't fling at the cat and Bunter does, "prompted by God knows what savage libido" (BH 307). I don't know what to make of that, either.

[redbird]

From what we see of them, Sir Reuben Levy and his wife (whose name I can't recall just at the instant) in Whose Body? were genuinely in love, though the murderer in that book is more obsessive than lover.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I'd have said heterosexual and homophilic, a stunningly normal state of affairs for men of his time and place.

He quite clearly despises the women he flirts with to get information, and equally clearly he's very good at it. I'd see his sex life as either with women of his supposed class who he despises for weakness or -- because the dangers of matrimony would be ever present -- with prostitutes, whom he'd despise even more.

His passion, quite clearly, is for Peter.

We know what he was doing when Peter and Harriet went to bed in BH, he sat down and wrote to his mother about what a lovely wedding it was and then he threw something at the cat. I bet he was worrying about Peter's performance, because he's relieved when he sees Harriet serene the next morning.