DLS: Clouds of Witness

[truepenny]

Part 3 in the ongoing critical edda. (Can I have a critical edda? Does anybody mind? I think it's a cooler word than "saga" or "epic," and something around those synonyms is what I want.)

Part 1: Concerning Lord Peter Wimsey.

Part 2: Whose Body?.

Spoilers for the DLS canon behind the cut tag.


Okay, I admit it. Clouds of Witness is my least favorite Wimsey novel. I skip huge chunks of it rereading: the Grimethorpe subplot bores me, as do the details of Denis Cathcart's decline and fall. And much of Denver's trial is over-written. As with Whose Body?, it feels less like a novel to me and more like a series of set-pieces, some successful, some not.

But what I do find interesting in it is this question of love vs. marriage vs. sex. Let me lay out the parallels.

• Lady Mary, engaged to Cathcart, believing herself to be in love with Goyles.



• Cathcart, engaged to Lady Mary, obsessed with Simone Vonderaa. (I'm not sure if I'd call Cathcart's feelings "love" or not. Actually, I'm quite sure I wouldn't.)



• Gerald, Duke of Denver, married to his appalling Duchess, having an affair with Mrs. Grimethorpe. (And it does truly, truly bug me that DLS didn't see fit to give the poor woman a Christian name. I'm going to call her Medusa, because it's less trouble to type.)



• Medusa, married to her even more appalling husband, having an affair with Denver.



• Charles Parker, falling goopily in love with Lady Mary and Lady Mary returning the favor. (They deserve each other.)
  
  
• And Lord Peter, realizing from his reaction to Simone that he's gotten over his ill-fated love for Barbara.

Of these relationships, only Parker and Mary have any genuine mutual attachment--and it won't actually emerge into the open for another two books. All of the others--Cathcart & Mary, Cathcart & Simone, Mary & Goyles, Denver & Helen, Denver & Medusa, Medusa & her husband--are either marriages of convenience (Cathcart & Mary, Denver & Helen) in which no great affection is felt, relationships in a terrible imbalance (Cathcart's obsession with Simone, Mr. Grimethorpe's pathological jealousy--one wonders if that's how Heathcliff would have turned out if he and Catherine had actually gotten married), or relationships which are entered into for reasons of desperation and desire for escape, and which lead nowhere: Mary's "love" for Goyles is clearly much more about his politics than his personality, and Medusa's feelings for Denver are brilliantly anticlimactic: "... on this occasion, the whole business fell flat. The lady was not interested" (CW 245).

Sir Impey Biggs is introduced in this book, of whom "the Dowager Duchess had once remarked: 'Sir Impey Biggs is the handsomest man in England, and no woman will ever care twopence for him'" (62). We also get the story of Mr. Murbles's very odd old client who preferred fantasy to reality: "People used to say that the dream-lady had not always been a dream, but that he could never bring himself to propose" (148). This is in many ways a loveless book, just as Cathcart's was a loveless life.

And of course the book's persistent intertext is Manon Lescaut (a story of a mutually-destructive passion) and "those odd French novels ... frightfully hot stuff, but absolutely impersonal" (134). Sexuality runs rampant through the novel, but love is in dreadfully short supply. Peter doesn't get over Barbara by falling in love again (that, like the declaration of Mary and Parker's love for each other, won't happen until Strong Poison) but by being exposed to the bewitching beauty of Simone Vonderaa. Simone and Medusa, in fact, seem to have comparable effects on the men they come in contact with, but it is also perfectly clear that their beauty traps them in loveless relationships, whether they are aware of it (Medusa) or not (Simone).

Romanticism also takes it on the chin, parodied in Mary and Goyles's failed elopement, revealed as self-destructive pathology in Cathcart's fate, simply inapplicable to Medusa's choices. Mary's facade of romanticism in the wake of Cathcart's death is (a.) unconvincing ("Peter thought, 'She's talking like somebody in a blood-and-thunder novel'" (72)) and (b.) completely exploded. Nothing could be less romantic than ipecacuanha. Also, as we know from what Peter tells Harriet in Strong Poision, his love for Barbara was of the most exaggeratedly romantic kind possible, and it too does not survive this book.

Women are not punished for infidelity (a refreshing change from most Western literature). Medusa is liberated by the chain of events begun by her affair with Denver; Simone comes out entirely unscathed. Marriage is an imprisoning institution (Medusa and Grimethorpe, Denver and Helen--also what Mary's life would have been like if she had married Cathcart).

If DLS has a thesis here, I'd argue that it's the same idea which the Vane quartet goes into at great length: love and passion must go together, and the combination is the only proper basis for a marriage.

I think there's something allegorical about Peter and Bunter wandering through the fog and getting trapped in quicksand, but I can't quite tease it out. And, of course, there's a whole class-based deconstruction of the presentation of Goyles and the Soviet Club and Mary's fling with communism. But that seems obvious enough that it isn't necessary to go into it. I quite like the Soviet Club, but it is a place where DLS's biases persistently show up.

Like Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness is an uneven book--also the last time DLS has to rely on a confession to make her plot come out right. Her mastery of her form is improving, but she's not all the way there yet.


Next up, Unnatural Death.
---
WORKS CITED
Sayers, Dorothy L. Clouds of Witness. 1927. New York: Perennial Library-Harper & Row, 1987.

Comments

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

It's right, also, I think, to consider the Pathetic Fallacy in relation to Clouds of Witness; weather, mostly bad, is practically a character in its own right. It's the storm on the night of Cathcart's death which leads Denver to wedge the window-frame, it's the fog that leads Lord Peter to the Grimethorpes, and so on.

I must, by the way, take this opportunity to flag up in relation to Sir Impey Biggs the tendency of DLS, however scholarly she may have been in other areas, to perpetrate absolute howlers in respect of legal procedure and etiquette. A barrister simply cannot turf up and have breakfast with a whole host of potential witnesses, discussing the case with them throughout. Nor is it proper for him to dine with the prosecution's key witness, and coach her in how to deal with the cross-examination she will get once she turns hostile. He commits worse howlers in later books (what he does in Busman's Honeymoon is spectacularly unethical)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And now that you tell me that, I go, Oh, yes, of course! CLEARLY no member of the legal profession can behave like this and expect to get away with it, and a big cartoon lightbulb goes on over my head. But I'd never noticed it for myself. For which I could excuse myself on the grounds of not being a lawyer, but I think it's more the case that I read like a trusting lamb. I'll follow an author anywhere. Although I do always wonder whether Peter had that collarbone replaced with titanium.

You're right about the weather, too. The storm the night of Cathcart's death, the fog, the storm that attends Peter's Atlantic crossing: bad weather all over the place. Partly the pathetic fallacy--the storm the night of Cathcart's death reflecting his own gothic feelings, the fog as an externalization of Peter's bewilderment wrt the true events of the night--although the third storm does seem a little more like a cheap generator of suspense. Which works, I have to say, and it is interesting that Peter's experience of the weather system is intermixed with his memories of Simone, who also inspired terrible weather in Cathcart's mind. It's only appropriate, I suppose, since Simone is treated by the narrative as a force of nature.

Weather

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I like that weather idea.

I can't think of another of the Wimsey books in which it plays so vital a part, unless we count the snowstorm at the beginning of The Nine Tailors.

Re: Weather

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And the flood! Don't forget the flood.

Okay, now I'm intrigued.

Whose Body?: Weather irrelevant, except for the fact that Sir Julian's traces on the roofs of Queen Caroline Mansions are mostly eradicated by ordinary London November weather.

Clouds of Witness: See above

Unnatural Death: Weather again irrelevant.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club: Weather irrelevant and might not even exist--except for Lady Dormer dying of imprudent over-exposure to the cold.

Strong Poison: Weather irrelevant.

The Five Red Herrings: Weather irrelevant.

Have His Carcase: The weather prevents the recovery of Paul Alexis's body for a good long while.

The Nine Tailors: See above.

Gaudy Night: Weather irrelevant. GN is very much a book about interiority: the life of the mind, the life of the college, the psyches of Harriet, Peter, and Annie.

Busman's Honeymoon: Weather irrelevant. Again v. much about the interior life.

So, yes, Clouds of Witness and The Nine Tailors are the only Wimsey books in which the weather plays an important role (with an Honorable Mention for Have His Carcase). Both of these perceive weather as the enemy: destructive, dangerous, reflective of emotional turmoil. This is even more true in The Nine Tailors than in Clouds of Witness, as the guilt and anger and desperation in Fenchurch St. Paul seem to get sucked straight up into the clouds. The Nine Tailors always feels to me remarkably apocalyptic, and I think the relationship of weather to plot may be part of the reason why.

Re: Weather

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Apocalyptic.

Apocalypse and bells ringing.

Clangor and blizzards.

Re: Weather

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not certain that weather is completely irrelevant in The Five Red Herrings; there's something about those big white puffy clouds. But it's harder to see good weather as important to a plot or theme.

Bad weather does show up in some of the short stories, IIRC: the stolen stomach one and the one where Peter dresses up as a wizard to save Mrs. Wetherall, if I'm not hallucinating, and possibly others. Harder to come up with a coherent theme in short works, though.

Erica, popping in from anonymous commentary at ajhall's journal and thoroughly enjoying these analyses

Re: Weather

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

You're right. I was completely forgetting about the short stories. Silly me.

*gets out Lord Peter to scan down the table of contents*

"The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers," which has an ongoing joke about fate and coincidence, is enabled largely by a torrential downpour. There's rather a lot of rain in "The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention." As you say, there's a storm in "The Piscatorial Farce of the Stolen Stomach," and "The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey" opens in a storm. My memory of "Striding Folly" (my favorite of the short stories) includes a storm, but I think that's just because the story itself is so thunderous. (Also, to refer ahead to another post, another example of DLS's curious brand of magical realism.) So, no, not much in the way of a coherent thematic structure.

And I was forgetting the thunderstorm in Gaudy Night, which is a deliberate invocation of the pathetic fallacy.

Re: Weather

[(Anonymous)]

And yet the author of GN didn't think the weather was irelevant at all:

"[Readers] must not be querulously indignant because [...] I have arranged the weather and the moon's changes to suit my own fancy."

A closer reading is undoubtedly needed to see what DLS's fancy had in mind.
--John Cowan

[oracne.livejournal.com]

What I learn from this book is how to reinforce one's theme; I've been working on that lately. I was amazed, on my recent reread of this book, by how many parallels Sayers created.

The mysteries themselves are less interesting to me than how she reveals character.

Another point--Peter goes from the "wilds" of Corsica where he feels intellectual clarity to "civilized" Paris for the comforts of the body, then home to England, into a situation completely tangled and emotionally complex. At the end, he journeys to America, to a big city, to find clarity as far as the mystery goes. Or prove his solution; he might have been wrong in his supposition that Cathcart had sent Simone a suicide note. I'm not quite sure if this all means something or not, but I've been thinking about it.

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

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<<Peter doesn't get over Barbara by falling in love again (that, like the declaration of Mary and Parker's love for each other, won't happen until Strong Poison) but by being exposed to the bewitching beauty of Simone Vonderaa>>
isn't it not that Simone cures him but the experience of meeting Simone shows him that he's cured? It's been one of his self-definitions and he's slowly learning other ones...

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes. You said what I meant, and I didn't. Thank you.

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

here's my chance to say how much I'm enjoying your analyses, as well ;-)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I'm glad you're enjoying them.

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

Okay, just finished this one now and arriving late to the party again. Clouds of Witness is a much better mystery than Whose Body? Peter and Parker get most of their clues in a glorious jumble and use those to piece together the overlapping events of that night. It's a little like peeling back the layers of an onion; it's only when they have their facts straight about all the known players actions that they can deduce the existence of Simone (because Mary no longer has any reason to lie about the jeweled cat).

I think the episode at the Soviet club is another case of Romanticism taking it on the chin too, all those bright young things with stars in their eyes about the wonders of socialism, still happy to live on 'unearned increment'. Goyles' rationale for shooting Peter can also be seen as a romantic folly on Goyles' part.

I'm not sure there's much point in taking exception to Mrs Grimethorpe not getting a Christian name, it's not like she's alone in this fate. Nor do Colonel and Mrs Marchbanks, the Pettigrew-Robinsons, Inspector Sugg or Mr Grimethorpe. Hell, I'm not even sure that the Dowager Duchess has had her given name vouchsafed to the reader yet. It's not a unquely Sayers trait; English people just didn't use Christian names that much except among intimates (and even then, you'll note that Mary is addressed as Polly.) Even many people of Gill's generation (she's 55) don't like to be addressed with their Christian name by 'strangers'. (There's a beautiful example of this style of thinking in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads monologue A Cream Cracker Under The Settee). It's often seen as a dreadful 'American' innovation. One could almost read this impersonal way of dealing with Mrs G as a deliberate drawing of a veil over the woman's privacy. (BTW: I'm not at all sure how they could have legitimately called her as a witness in the case, given Denver's refusal to offer the alibi and counsel's duty to take instruction from his client).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I agree, it would be completely inappropriate for anyone in the book to USE her Christian name--except for Denver. One hopes he doesn't call her "Mrs. Grimethorpe" in the throes of passion. But there's something painfully ironic, for me, about the narrative asserting she is "her own woman at last" (246) when the only name we have for her is her loathesome husband's. Which is really what I meant by that, but neglected to say. Sorry.

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

Deliberate irony do you think? I wouldn't put it past DLS.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Maaaaaaaaybe.

But I don't see why she would. There's no hint that Mrs. Grimethorpe ISN'T her own woman at this point, since she's just turned Denver down flatter than a bedsheet, and she isn't enough of a character to be worth the subtlety. So I don't know.

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

I meant the irony in the fact that, despite Mrs Grimethorpe becoming her own woman at last, she was still seen by society as the 'property' of her late husband by virtue of the fact that she is stuck with his name. Sayers seems to be pretty good at pointing up some of the idiocies and discrepancies between public and private personae.

Peter's mother's name

[(Anonymous)]

"I'm not even sure that the Dowager Duchess has had her given name vouchsafed to the reader yet."

Her name is Honoria. In 'The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question', Peter compares the Dowager Duchess of Medway to his mother, and she replies, "Dear Honoria is the merest child." Also, her maiden name is Delagardie, as given in the 'biographical note' at the front of _Unnatural Death_.

Rich Rostrom <rrostrom.21stcentury@rcn.com>

Names

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Do you think it is in any way significant that Sayers uses two English names that generally have pronunciations different from their spellings, but twists them? Marchbanks is the pronunciation of Marjoribanks, and other than in CoW I've never seen it written Marchbanks. The other one is Featherstone, which is almost but not quite Featherstonehaugh, pronounced (of course) Fanshaw. I was wondering if, with the evocative meaning of Grimthorpe, or at least the grimness of it, she might have been doing some playing with names in general.

Re: Names

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Huh. I didn't know about Marjoribanks/Marchbanks, although I had noticed that she calls attention to the pronunciation of "Featherstone": "[her] violently compressed figure suggested that she was engaged in a perpetual struggle to compute her weight in terms of the first syllables of her name rather than the last" (SP 114, emphasis mine).

And Peter and Harriet both have punningly allegorical surnames: Wimsey/Whimsy (which also gets attention drawn to it) and Vane/Vain. Harriet is also linked by her name to Miss de Vine in Gaudy Night, who herself has a pun with de Vine/Divine. Sir Julian's last name is likewise a pun (although I don't know about pronunciation): Freke/Freak. Deacon's surname is heavily ironic. And of course Denver's subsidiary title being St. George has an allegorical freight all its own.

And, in general, her secondary characters have distinctive surnames: Ingleby, Meteyard, Hankin, Puffett, Fentiman, Venables (and all the other East Anglian names in The Nine Tailors), Gowan, Farren, etc.. Which makes the utter prosiness of "Charles Parker" all the more pointed.

So, yes, I think there's adequate evidence that she was doing something with the names. Not quite sure what, though.

Gotobeds

[(Anonymous)]

All very well for DLS to think that "Gotobed" was a cool surname, but to use it twice in the canon, once for the sexton in TNT and once for the victim in UD, seems to carry the joke a bit too far.
--John Cowan, grumpily

P.S. "freke" is an old word for "hero, warrior", and is surely ironic.