DLS: Freddy Arbuthnot

[truepenny]

Previous DLS posts: Concerning Lord Peter Wimsey, Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 1, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 2.

I'm feeling chatty today. Rather than merely spamming LJ with witterings and fluff-posts, though, I'm going to work it out on DLS.

In her reply to my post this morning, naomichana suggested devoting some time to Freddy Arbuthnot, the most faithfully recurring minor character in the series. I'd intended to give him a paragraph and move on, but then my paragraph kept getting longer and longer, and I've decided to give Freddy an essaylet.

Canon-wide spoilers behind the cut-tag.


Freddy is blatantly an escapee from P. G. Wodehouse; his presence in the plot is usually explained either by his mysterious financial acumen or by his status as friend-of-the-family. He serves as a foil for Peter; Freddy's "silly ass" act isn't an act. Also, since the question of what entails friendship is one the books spend a certain amount of time over, Freddy and Peter's friendship serves as the epitome of what Vera Findlater complains about in Unnatural Death:

     "Miss Climpson, you do believe, don't you, that a friendship ought to be 'fifty-fifty?"
     "That is the ideal friendship, I suppose," said Miss Climpson, thoughtfully, "but I think it is a very rare thing. Among women, that is. I doubt very much if I've ever seen an example of it. Men, I believe, find it easier to give and take in that way--probably because they have so many outside interests."
     "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. "THe don't make such demands on one another."
     "But a great friendship does make demands," cried Miss Findlater.
(UD 170-171)

Now, we know that Miss Findlater's ideas about friendship are excessively idealistic and wrong-headed (not to mention wasted on Mary Whittaker); also that "friendship" here is serving as a code-word for romantic love. But still, her description seems to apply with painful aptness to Peter and Freddy, who like each other, talk to each other, but show no appearance of having any deeper connection or even much in the way of common ground. Harriet reflects on this mystery in Gaudy Night:

A dim recollection of something Wimsey had once said lit up the labyrinth of Harriet's mind. Money. That was the connection between the two men. Mr. Arbuthnot, moron as he might be in other respects, had a flair for money. He knew what that mysterious commodity was going to do; it was the one thing he did know, and he only knew that by instinct. When things were preparing to go up or down, they rang a little warning bell in what Freddy Arbuthnot called his mind, and he acted on the warning without being able to explain why. Peter had money, and Freddy understood money; that must be the common interest and bond of mutual confidence that explained an otherwise inexplicable friendship. She admired the strange nexus of interests that unites the male half of mankind into a close honeycomb of cells, each touching the other on one side only, and yet constituting a tough and closely adhering fabric.
(GN 225)

And yet, even as this pitiless dissection is offered, Harriet is about to be ambushed by Freddy's concern for Peter:

Mr. Arbuthnot balanced his spoon across his coffee-cup in an abstracted way. "I'm damned fond of old Peter," was his next, rather irrelevant, contribution. "He's a dashed good sort. Last time I saw him, I thought he seemed a bit under the weather. . . . Well, I'd better be toddling."
(GN 226)

Sensitivity, affection, tact: not attributes readers are accustomed to associating with Freddy, but it does at least suggest why Rachel Levy might have married him--and furthermore offers a delayed refutation of Vera Findlater's idea that true friendship depends on baring one's soul. DLS does believe in that kind of soul-baring passion--witness Peter and Harriet in Busman's Honeymoon--but she also recognizes that it isn't necessary for friendship to be real and valuable to both parties. Peter and Freddy may not have long heart-to-hearts, but they are loyal friends, just as Peter and Charles Parker are. When Peter finally goes out and gets smashed at the end of Clouds of Witness, Freddy and Charles are the men he chooses to do it with. Peter and Freddy were never equally matched, so there's no sense, as there is with Charles, that the friendship is becoming too restrictive. Peter and Freddy's affection for each other seems to be largely without demands, without a need for common ground or agreement--exactly the sort of thing Vera Findlater deplores, but neither hypocritical nor unmeaningful despite its seeming shallowness.

Freddy is uncomplicated masculine friendship, the only example of the breed Peter seems to have access to. Freddy's purpose, if it ought to be dignified by such a term, in the novels is mostly that of comic relief, plus the occasional boost to the plot. Our only description of him comes also in Gaudy Night: "He was in the forties, going a little bald, with a smooth, vacant face and a dark moustache. For a moment she could not place him; then something about his languid walk and impeccable tailoring brought back an afternoon at Lord's" (GN 224), and I think that scene is the only time we see Freddy as someone actually separate from Peter's interests--as, that is, a friend rather than a convenience. Since Gaudy Night is on one level devoted to recreating Peter, rendering him as a three-dimensional character with a three-dimensional and fully realized background, that seems appropriate. And it makes Freddy a little more three-dimensional as well.


Next up, Strong Poison. [Well, actually, Miss Climpson. --Ed.]

---
WORKS CITED
Sayers, Dorothy L. Gaudy Night. 1936. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, n.d.

---. Unnatural Death. 1927. New York: HarperPaperbacks, 1995.

---. Whose Body? 1923. New York: Avon Books, 1961.

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Yay, Freddy!

Ahem. Nothing really to contribute here, move along, nothing to see.

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

I wonder about Freddy and Peter at school, when Peter's cricketing skills raised him from Flimsy to the Great Flim. Freddy will have known Peter in his beautiful frankness and when he became an ass at Oxford...