DLS: HHC 5: Peter Wimsey and Paul Alexis
May. 14th, 2003 10:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyPrevious DLS posts: Concerning Lord Peter Wimsey, the Hon. Freddy Arbuthnot, Miss Katharine Alexandra Climpson, Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 1, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 2, Strong Poison, The Five Red Herrings, Have His Carcase 1, Have His Carcase 2, Have His Carcase 3, Have His Carcase 4.
In the last post, I started to distract myself by a consideration of Paul Alexis as a doppelganger of Lord Peter Wimsey. Consider, therefore, this post as a kind of intermission in the narrative progression through HHC, while I pursue my self-afflicted chimera.
Indiscriminate spoilers for all of Have His Carcase, again including the identity of the murderer. Also assume spoilers for the rest of the canon. Specific mentions of Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors, and Gaudy Night.
Every mystery novel involves a triangular relationship between murderer, victim, and detective. As I remarked in my fourth HHC post, the murderer, Henry Weldon, is set up in opposition to both detective and victim, his aggressive, anti-intellectual machismo opposed to their varying portrayals of sensitivity, refinement, and imagination. Mr. Morecambe, it seems to me, is a necessary appendage to Henry for the purposes of the plot: an external brain. He himself is a cipher, one mask layered on another mask layered on a third mask, and down at the bottom apparently nothing but Avarice. Henry is the foe in each case, disapproving of Alexis, disapproving of Peter, in competition with both of them, with Alexis for Henry's mother and her money, and then with Peter for Harriet. It is true that the "competition" for Harriet is never very serious, but that's because Harriet is an independent agent. The competition for Mrs. Weldon, in which Henry's true character is revealed is extremely serious--deadly, in fact.
The obvious next step, having identified the triangle and observed some of the ways in which it works with Henry as the apex, is to forget about Henry (happily!) and look at the two base angles, in this case Peter and Alexis. (And here, without regret, I shall abandon my geometrical metaphor.)
First off, because DLS does play with names, their christian names are Peter and Paul, names which have a traditional association, not only via the Apostles, but also through common idioms (also presumably apostolic in origin, but further distanced from their religious source) like "robbing Peter to pay Paul," which she has St. George pun on in Gaudy Night. Also two of the three Fenchurches in The Nine Tailors are Fenchurch St. Peter and Fenchurch St. Paul, and "Paul" as a name gets a great deal of play. It isn't what I'd call a strong connection between the two characters, Peter and Alexis, but it is a connection nevertheless.
And then, Alexis believed himself to be a duke; Peter is a duke's second son. Alexis wanted to be a gentleman (class-wise); Peter, who is one, can point out every single detail that marks Alexis's attempts to pass as an imposture:
And a couple pages later, he nails the lid on the coffin:
Peter is what Paul Alexis dreams of being, a fact which irritates Harriet on and off throughout HHC ("'It's all very well for Lord Peter,' she grumbled to herself, 'he's never wanted for anything.' Why Lord Peter should be brought into the matter, she could not explain ..." (HHC 227). But the horrific, malicious snobbery evinced in Peter's reaction to Alexis's clothes is offset by his tribute to Alexis's character:
Alexis is a shadow of Peter, but a shadow is meaningless if it is distorted out of all recognition. He isn't a parody of Peter, either, but he is--if y'all will indulge me in a flight of fancy for a moment--the sort of person who would dream up a detective like Peter. Peter himself says of Alexis, "Romantic fiction should have been his line" (HHC 491), and in a book which is so concerned with detectives and heroes and stories, I think the fact that the victim is the sort of person Alexis is, a person whose near-ultimate wish-fulfillment (leaving aside being the Tsar of All the Russias) is represented by the detective, makes another piece of the pattern of meta-commentary on detective fiction which underlies much of HHC.
We have, then, the gentleman and the would-be gentleman. We also have the detective hero and the would-be hero. This comparison also looks forward to Murder Must Advertise where Peter behaves in a manner worthy of Lord Humphrey Chillingfold throughout and frequent references are made to Sexton Blake, whose adventures are clearly the sort of literature of which both Leila and Alexis were fond. Alexis dreamed of being a hero, a vocation from which he was barred by his haemophilia; Lord Peter is a hero, sometimes more plausibly than others.
Alexis is marrying Mrs. Weldon for money; Peter is driven by Henry Weldon "to the indescribable vulgarity of reminding him who I was and why I did not require anybody's money" (HHC 159). Alexis is delicate; Peter "strips better than [Harriet] would have expected" (HHC 106) and, as she says to him scathingly, "You needn't fish. ... We all know that your appearance of languor is assumed and that you are really capable of tying pokers into knots with your artistic fingers" (HHC 333). Which (aside from possibly being a distant and veiled allusion to "The Speckled Band") is exactly the sort of thing that probably gets written about Lord Humphrey Chillingfold in The Trail of the Purple Python. Again, Peter embodies Alexis's roseate vision of himself.
That, then, suggests what Peter might mean to Alexis (if Alexis weren't dead), but what does Alexis mean to Peter? Why does our detective hero need this shadow? One reason, it seems to me, is precisely to keep him tethered to the rather sordid, dreary reality of Wilvercombe instead of floating away like a beautiful balloon into the realms of Lord Humphrey, the Purple Python, and their obelisks. (Which is kind of what happens to him in Murder Must Advertise, to be honest.) Peter's assumption of heroism never lasts long in HHC; he's always swung straight back around into the facts of the case: a day-dreaming gigolo, a foolish old woman, and her incredibly unpleasant and venal son. Alexis is also, of course, a "there but for the grace of God" double, someone whose "noble" birth means absolutely nothing, but is merely a pipe-dream, a castle in the air without furnishings or food. There is also a faint gender-reversed reflection of Peter and Harriet in Alexis and Mrs. Weldon. Peter, like Mrs. Weldon, is older and much wealthier than his beloved (although those attributes are exaggerated to an extreme in Mrs. Weldon); he, like she, is also in a relationship where the power lies, not with the older and wealthier party, but with the other. Alexis had Mrs. Weldon wrapped around his little finger, but the evidence of all his acquaintances suggests that he did not care very deeply for her. Harriet does care for Peter (I'm not sure whether "love" is yet the right word), but she refuses to allow him close to her, and by that refusal holds power over him. So the comparison of Alexis serves to reinforce our (and Peter's own) awareness of his ludicrous situation.
There are probably other things, too, but at the moment that's what I can think of.
HHC walks a constant tightrope between romance (in all that word's meanings) and realism, and the two stanchions of its rope are Peter Wimsey and Paul Alexis.
Next up, Have His Carcase 6.
---
WORKS CITED
Sayers, Dorothy L. Have His Carcase. 1932. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, n.d.
In the last post, I started to distract myself by a consideration of Paul Alexis as a doppelganger of Lord Peter Wimsey. Consider, therefore, this post as a kind of intermission in the narrative progression through HHC, while I pursue my self-afflicted chimera.
Indiscriminate spoilers for all of Have His Carcase, again including the identity of the murderer. Also assume spoilers for the rest of the canon. Specific mentions of Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors, and Gaudy Night.
Every mystery novel involves a triangular relationship between murderer, victim, and detective. As I remarked in my fourth HHC post, the murderer, Henry Weldon, is set up in opposition to both detective and victim, his aggressive, anti-intellectual machismo opposed to their varying portrayals of sensitivity, refinement, and imagination. Mr. Morecambe, it seems to me, is a necessary appendage to Henry for the purposes of the plot: an external brain. He himself is a cipher, one mask layered on another mask layered on a third mask, and down at the bottom apparently nothing but Avarice. Henry is the foe in each case, disapproving of Alexis, disapproving of Peter, in competition with both of them, with Alexis for Henry's mother and her money, and then with Peter for Harriet. It is true that the "competition" for Harriet is never very serious, but that's because Harriet is an independent agent. The competition for Mrs. Weldon, in which Henry's true character is revealed is extremely serious--deadly, in fact.
The obvious next step, having identified the triangle and observed some of the ways in which it works with Henry as the apex, is to forget about Henry (happily!) and look at the two base angles, in this case Peter and Alexis. (And here, without regret, I shall abandon my geometrical metaphor.)
First off, because DLS does play with names, their christian names are Peter and Paul, names which have a traditional association, not only via the Apostles, but also through common idioms (also presumably apostolic in origin, but further distanced from their religious source) like "robbing Peter to pay Paul," which she has St. George pun on in Gaudy Night. Also two of the three Fenchurches in The Nine Tailors are Fenchurch St. Peter and Fenchurch St. Paul, and "Paul" as a name gets a great deal of play. It isn't what I'd call a strong connection between the two characters, Peter and Alexis, but it is a connection nevertheless.
And then, Alexis believed himself to be a duke; Peter is a duke's second son. Alexis wanted to be a gentleman (class-wise); Peter, who is one, can point out every single detail that marks Alexis's attempts to pass as an imposture:
Hat fair to middling, but not exclusive ... Last year's hat, reblocked, with new ribbon. Shape, a little more emphatic than is quite necessary. Deduction: not wealthy, but keen on his personal appearance. ... The case is pukka, all right. Probably a gift from some wealthy female admirer. ... Handkerchief--silk, but not from Burlington Arcade. Colour beastly. ... Now the shoe. Oh, yes. Nearly new. Thin sole. Foul colour and worse shape. Hand-made, so that the horrid appearance is due to malice aforethought.
(HHC 58)
And a couple pages later, he nails the lid on the coffin:
Consider first of all the anomaly of the man who buys his razor from Endicott's and yet wears the regrettable shoes and mass-produced millinery found on the corpse. Mind you," added Wimsey, "it is not a question of expense, exactly. ... But could a man who is shaved by Endicott possibly order--deliberately order--shoes of that colour and shape? A thing imagination boggles at.
(HHC 61)
Peter is what Paul Alexis dreams of being, a fact which irritates Harriet on and off throughout HHC ("'It's all very well for Lord Peter,' she grumbled to herself, 'he's never wanted for anything.' Why Lord Peter should be brought into the matter, she could not explain ..." (HHC 227). But the horrific, malicious snobbery evinced in Peter's reaction to Alexis's clothes is offset by his tribute to Alexis's character:
although, before all this Russian business started, Alexis had Mrs. Weldon completely under his thumb, he apparently always refused to take any large sums of money from her--and that, I think, is greatly to his credit, and shows that he had the instincts of a gentleman, if not necessarily of a prince.
(HHC 403)
Alexis is a shadow of Peter, but a shadow is meaningless if it is distorted out of all recognition. He isn't a parody of Peter, either, but he is--if y'all will indulge me in a flight of fancy for a moment--the sort of person who would dream up a detective like Peter. Peter himself says of Alexis, "Romantic fiction should have been his line" (HHC 491), and in a book which is so concerned with detectives and heroes and stories, I think the fact that the victim is the sort of person Alexis is, a person whose near-ultimate wish-fulfillment (leaving aside being the Tsar of All the Russias) is represented by the detective, makes another piece of the pattern of meta-commentary on detective fiction which underlies much of HHC.
We have, then, the gentleman and the would-be gentleman. We also have the detective hero and the would-be hero. This comparison also looks forward to Murder Must Advertise where Peter behaves in a manner worthy of Lord Humphrey Chillingfold throughout and frequent references are made to Sexton Blake, whose adventures are clearly the sort of literature of which both Leila and Alexis were fond. Alexis dreamed of being a hero, a vocation from which he was barred by his haemophilia; Lord Peter is a hero, sometimes more plausibly than others.
Alexis is marrying Mrs. Weldon for money; Peter is driven by Henry Weldon "to the indescribable vulgarity of reminding him who I was and why I did not require anybody's money" (HHC 159). Alexis is delicate; Peter "strips better than [Harriet] would have expected" (HHC 106) and, as she says to him scathingly, "You needn't fish. ... We all know that your appearance of languor is assumed and that you are really capable of tying pokers into knots with your artistic fingers" (HHC 333). Which (aside from possibly being a distant and veiled allusion to "The Speckled Band") is exactly the sort of thing that probably gets written about Lord Humphrey Chillingfold in The Trail of the Purple Python. Again, Peter embodies Alexis's roseate vision of himself.
That, then, suggests what Peter might mean to Alexis (if Alexis weren't dead), but what does Alexis mean to Peter? Why does our detective hero need this shadow? One reason, it seems to me, is precisely to keep him tethered to the rather sordid, dreary reality of Wilvercombe instead of floating away like a beautiful balloon into the realms of Lord Humphrey, the Purple Python, and their obelisks. (Which is kind of what happens to him in Murder Must Advertise, to be honest.) Peter's assumption of heroism never lasts long in HHC; he's always swung straight back around into the facts of the case: a day-dreaming gigolo, a foolish old woman, and her incredibly unpleasant and venal son. Alexis is also, of course, a "there but for the grace of God" double, someone whose "noble" birth means absolutely nothing, but is merely a pipe-dream, a castle in the air without furnishings or food. There is also a faint gender-reversed reflection of Peter and Harriet in Alexis and Mrs. Weldon. Peter, like Mrs. Weldon, is older and much wealthier than his beloved (although those attributes are exaggerated to an extreme in Mrs. Weldon); he, like she, is also in a relationship where the power lies, not with the older and wealthier party, but with the other. Alexis had Mrs. Weldon wrapped around his little finger, but the evidence of all his acquaintances suggests that he did not care very deeply for her. Harriet does care for Peter (I'm not sure whether "love" is yet the right word), but she refuses to allow him close to her, and by that refusal holds power over him. So the comparison of Alexis serves to reinforce our (and Peter's own) awareness of his ludicrous situation.
There are probably other things, too, but at the moment that's what I can think of.
HHC walks a constant tightrope between romance (in all that word's meanings) and realism, and the two stanchions of its rope are Peter Wimsey and Paul Alexis.
Next up, Have His Carcase 6.
---
WORKS CITED
Sayers, Dorothy L. Have His Carcase. 1932. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, n.d.
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no subject
Date: 2003-05-14 08:48 am (UTC)...instead of floating away like a beautiful balloon into the realms of Lord Humphrey, the Purple Python, and their obelisks.
ROFL! The mental image this invokes is rather amusing.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-14 09:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-05-14 09:10 am (UTC)Practically all of the "sympathetic" characters in HHC are overt entertainers. Doris, Charis, Antoine and Alexis himself are professional dancers; Olga Kohn is a model and would-be actress (and one of the most charming Jewish characters DLS ever allowed herself, though that boorish boyfriend of hers spoils the picture); the sympathetic theatrical agent (Simons?) who worries about people recruiting goodlooking girls without talent, and idiot management typecasting; Harriet herself with her selection of a room "because one mustn't let one's public down" and the wonderful theatrical landlady, who almost (but didn't quite) succeed in putting me off lobsters for life.
One of the key moments I think (though I still maintain that the plot is jawdroppingly ridiculous) is where Lord Peter is offered the part of the Worm that Turned in the play - a sort of quasi-acceptance of him into the "entertainer" class also. And where he manages to bring off "a good curtain" as he turns it down.
The unsympathetic characters are covert actors - they all play part after part - both Morecambes, Weldon, Mrs Weldon throwing herself into the role of bereaved widow/distraught fiancee (she's borderline sympathetic, but it's telling that she's more so when Harriet wipes the "greasepaint" off her, and she's brought out of her role back to naturalism).
The covert actors despise the overt entertainers, but are morally less worthy than they are. Charis, Doris and Antoine between them give Harriet a far more interesting and intelligent evening than Henry Weldon could manage.
This is characterised by Mrs Morecambe having left the stage only to sink lower - she stops being an overt actress and becomes a murderous deceiver.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-14 09:21 am (UTC)The theatrical agent is Sullivan (Simons is the boorish boyfriend), and you're right--absolutely, stunningly right--that he and the other professional entertainers are where the novel's sympathies lie. Harriet is an entertainer herself, as a popular novelist, and I think, too, that she is at her least sympathetic when she is either using that role artificially or taking on a different role (vamping Henry, for instance). And Peter and Harriet both perform detective-ness, but they both also ARE detectives. In their case, the role is also the truth, whereas for the Morecambes, there is no truth behind the role. And their best scenes are when they've forgotten the role and are just after the truth.
You can tell I'm working on my dissertation this morning, because the Elizabethan puns are starting to crop up.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-14 09:23 am (UTC)more on Peter and Harriet as entertainers
Date: 2003-05-14 11:38 am (UTC)We don't see Peter play the piano in this book (do we?) but we-the-readers know he does so--difference between him and others being that he's most often seen playing piano at home for himself and/or Bunter; for the gently-bred, that is permissible (I am reminded of scorn heaped on female actors in Regency novels). In GAUDY NIGHT he plays and sings in the antique shop, and Harriet even sings with him, until they are squashed by Mr. Jones of Jesus.
And then there's the more obvious connection, that Peter often wears a performer's mask, the "silly ass" act. Which by this book is beginning to be less obvious. He's been an actor all along.
And Harriet, in this novel and in STRONG POISON, of necessity adopts a mask to protect her inner self from the public.
Re: more on Peter and Harriet as entertainers
Date: 2003-05-14 07:35 pm (UTC)And consider, also, the role of the press. Both Peter and Harriet actively court and use the press to their own ends -- Harriet immediately rings up the Morning Star once she's reported the body to the police, and then there's the long sequence where Peter and Salcombe Hardy write up the bit about the razor, for example. Using the press is, in its way, another bit of theatre, but one which trades on Peter's and Harriet's reputations (his as noble detective, hers as mystery writer and accused murderess).
Actually, the role of the media in Sayers' books would be an interesting study in and of itself.
Re: more on Peter and Harriet as entertainers
Date: 2003-05-14 08:28 pm (UTC)But, yes, Peter is, among his many other roles, the proto-type of the spindoctor.
Music
Date: 2003-05-14 08:33 pm (UTC)Re: Music
Date: 2003-05-14 08:55 pm (UTC)As for the dancing, it reminds me of Austen, where one dances so that one might have private conversation with a partner. Harriet dances with M. Antoine so she can talk to him; she dances with Peter for similar reasons.
I also keep remembering the part in GN where Harriet watches Peter listening to a Bach concert, and notes that music is his language more than hers -- describes him as being able to unwind all the tangled skeins of melody, or something like that.
Sorry. Late night. Lots of good ideas and discussion. Babbling.
Re: Music
Date: 2003-05-14 09:02 pm (UTC)No, really. You're making smart points and convincing me that a canon-wide post on music would seriously have stuff to say.
I may never hit the end of these Sayers posts. And I'm okay with that.
Re: Music
Date: 2003-05-15 02:21 am (UTC)Not to mention the set-piece with all the others, birds in the wilderness, which both emphasises the artificiality of it ("Everybody suddenly burst out singing") and the social connections that bind them together, their precise relationships ("Miss Twitterton looked at Frank anxiously to see if he showed any signs of joining in, but he seemed to have dissociated himself from Puffett's company"). And Harriet and Peter trying to be bystanders, caught between London and the country (echoing back to Gaudy Night where she thinks of him as an invader to Oxford but he "walks quietly into the room as if he'd never belonged anywhere else") but in fact they *do* join in, and end up going back there (to Tallboys) for the crisis.
I suppose I ought to do a post on that.
Please do - and/or on music in Sayers in general.
"Singer. Music's his line."
Re: Music
Date: 2003-05-16 05:58 am (UTC)Selfishly, I say, "Goody!"
Clothes
Date: 2003-09-18 04:05 am (UTC)I wanted to comment on the notes around Peter and Alexis' clothes. I read those not as snobbery, as Peter's rejection isn't of the cheap stuff Alexis' was wearing, but of the potentially good quality items, ugly handmade shoes and the silk handkerchief of hideous colour. I think its about Alexis' judgement - deliberately choosing items which Peter judges to be ugly, probably faux gentile.
Clothes are of vital importance in DLS, as well as music, she goes into great detail about Harriet's clothes, often in vivid wine colours. Apparently DLS was an eccentric dresser herself who was criticised for odd choices.
Caroline