Novel Readings

I’ve written at length about my love for Gaudy Night, but I have never really tried to sort out my views on its sequel, Busman’s Honeymoon. As I have owned and loved Busman’s Honeymoon as long as I have Gaudy Night (I have them in matching editions, inscribed to me on my 13th birthday), I thought it would be an appropriate book to write on for my 1000th post here at Novel Readings! But it turns out that I have so much to say that I’m going to do it in two posts.

I think the general consensus, even among Sayers fans, is that Busman’s Honeymoon is a bit of a let-down, not just as a detective story but for the ways it carries forward the relationship between Peter and Harriet — though I may be extrapolating much too far from the dismissive comments of critics like Julian Symons, who complained about the ‘dismal sentimentality’ of Sayers’s later novels. Still, it seems to be Gaudy Night that’s usually cited as the pinnacle, not of Sayers’s whole oeuvre necessarily, but of the four that make up the Harriet Quartet. I actually used to prefer Busman’s Honeymoon, which makes sense given how much more abstract some of the issues are in Gaudy Night, and how cerebral its romance. Busman’s Honeymoon has more going on right on the surface: both emotionally and criminally, it has more blunt objects! I don’t know quite what my 13-year-old self made of some of its details, such as the discussions of “shabby tigers,” or Peter’s “fits of exigent and exhausting passion” during the agonizing wait for the killer’s execution. There weren’t many limits on my youthful reading, so my guess is that these allusions to Harriet and Peter’s sex life raised fewer questions for me than their struggles to define their marriage as a relationship of equals. Rereading the novel now, it’s those struggles that stand out, and that remind me why Peter and Harriet have so long seemed to me one of the most interesting and important literary couples I know.

Gaudy Night makes a powerful case for finding a balance between head and heart – but accepting that as the ideal isn’t the same as living up to it in perpetuity. Busman’s Honeymoon is the next step: what does this really look like in practice? One thing I really liked about Busman’s Honeymoon this time (in my next post, I’ll get to the things I really disliked) is that we see these two fiercely independent and highly intelligent people trying very self-consciously to make sure their romantic relationship reflects their principles, not just their passions. The personal equality they value isn’t an easy thing to achieve in a world that is otherwise defined by inequalities — not least of wealth and power, of which Peter has a disproportionate share. Once they are married, of course, Harriet enjoys much of the same privilege (about which more next time), but Sayers is savvy about the challenges she faces to both her finances and her pride as she prepares for the wedding. “Oh, Mr. Rochester!” she says to Peter on receiving his extravagant gift of a mink coat, while she earns the money for the Donne manuscript that is her gift to him by writing “three five-thousand-word shorts at forty guineas each for the Thrill Magazine.” At Oxford, in Gaudy Night, none of that mattered: the interchangeability of their academic gowns stands for the meeting of their minds, for the freedom to face and love each other as peers. It’s very clear in Busman’s Honeymoon that they aren’t at Oxford any more.

Neither Harriet nor Peter wants marriage to mean compromise. After their first real disagreement — which arises when Harriet questions whether Peter needs to get involved in investigating the sordid murder that turns out to have taken place in their honeymoon home just before their arrival — she backs off quickly when faced with his argument that he shouldn’t “pick and choose what I’ll meddle in” to suit his own convenience. “This business of adjusting oneself was not so easy after all,” she thinks, and she can’t smooth things over with girlish ploys:

He wasn’t the kind of man to whom you could say, ‘Darling, you’re wonderful, and whatever you do is right’ — whether you thought so or not. He would write you down a fool. . . . He wanted you to agree with him intelligently or not at all.

Imagine that! Later, when the argument recurs, with the added stress that now there are real suspects who stand to pay the price for Peter’s “meddling,” Harriet rejects the power she wields because of his love for her, scorning to be the kind of woman who boasts “My husband would do anything for me.” “What kind of life could we have,” she demands, “if I knew that you had become less than yourself by marrying me?” “Love with honour” is their goal, and they know it’s not a conventional one: “If you go on behaving with all this reason and generosity,” Peter says admiringly to Harriet, “everybody will think we don’t give a damn for one another.”

In Gaudy Night another sign of their equality is their collaboration on solving the mystery. It’s true that in the grand reveal it’s Peter who dominates, and the attack on Harriet could be seen as marking her as a victim in need of rescue (and there’s the whole dog collar thing too). Harriet works on her own at first, though, and prepares the dossier on which the solution depends. That they work so closely on the mystery reinforces both the novel’s overall theme of balance and its promise that the two of them are truly partners. In Busman’s Honeymoon the investigation is more clearly Peter’s turf: in those quarrels, he’s the one insisting that detection is his work, his vocation; it’s Peter who really puts the pieces of the puzzle together and who carries the guilt, in the end, of having brought the criminal to justice and thus (after due process) to his own violent death. Harriet still has a lot of input, though: it’s not the case that she simply stands by and observes. I don’t think she needs to get redefined as a sleuth herself to sustain the balance of their relationship: she has a career, as a writer, and that’s the expertise she brings to the case.

Something else Harriet’s presence does in Busman’s Honeymoon that has real generic significance, particularly for a novel that belongs to the “Golden Age,” is galvanize Peter’s transformation from sleuth into complex, flawed, and intensely vulnerable human being. This is a process Sayers herself undertook deliberately once she’d introduced Harriet into her novels. I don’t much like the early Wimsey books, as Peter’s such a chattering fop in them compared to the layered character he eventually becomes (he does still play the part of upper-class twit occasionally). Sayers knew he had to become someone Harriet could say yes to; that’s only accomplished by the end of Gaudy Night (in Have His Carcase, there are moments, but overall he’s not quite there). The implications of that for him as a detective are particularly interesting in Busman’s Honeymoon, as the ending of the novel is anything but triumphant for Peter even though he has solved the puzzle. Instead of this “success” setting him up as a heroic avenger, it brings back all the trauma of his wartime experience and leaves him broken and weeping. In “The Simple Art of Murder” Raymond Chandler quite reasonably mocks the artifice of English puzzle mysteries, including Sayers’s — in fact, he singles out Busman’s Honeymoon for its admittedly absurd scenario (“a murderer who needs that much help from Providence must be in the wrong business”). It’s interesting that he doesn’t comment on the novel’s conclusion, which could surely be read as a repudiation of the entire form of the book itself, or at least of the type of mystery it sort of is, which as Chandler noted, could force “real people” (which he admits Sayers could create) to “do unreal things in order to form the artificial pattern required by the plot.”

With all this attention on reason and intelligence and principles and genre, I don’t want to miss the one other thing I have always loved about Busman’s Honeymoon, which rather pushes against the more intellectual merits I’ve been highlighting: it is utterly sentimental, full of declarations of love, some playful, some breathtakingly sincere. How wonderful to be caught up in these moments with Harriet and Peter, to be in a world, and a relationship, and a novel, in which the demands of reason and intelligence, and the conflicts that inevitably arise between two strong wills, don’t rule out the emotional abandonment — the ecstasy –of love. Peter and Harriet are both ever-ready with literary quotations, a game that’s played perhaps to excess (and sometimes to comic effect) in Busman’s Honeymoon. But it’s also here that poetry becomes, at last, the truth of their experience. “How can I find words?” asks Peter, in frustration at his own struggle to articulate his feelings on his own behalf. “Poets have taken them all, and left me with nothing to say or do — ”

“Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.”

He found it hard to believe.

“Have I done that?”

“Oh, Peter — ” Somehow she must make him believe it, because it mattered so much that he should. “All my life I have been wandering in the dark — but now I have found your heart — and am satisfied.”

“And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? — I love you — I am at rest with you — I have come home.”

It seems fitting that Donne (that most cerebral of love poets) is always their touchstone. “This is joy’s bonfire, then,” reads his “Eclogue for the Marriage of the Earl of Somerset,” which ends the novel,

where love’s strong arts
Make of so noble individual parts
One fire of four inflaming eyes, and of two loving hearts.