Novel Readings

Now for the things I don’t love about Busman’s Honeymoon. [If you missed it, Part I, “Love with Honour,” explains the things I do love.] Some of these I’ve always noticed, some stood out particularly on this reread; some are small irritations, and some make me uneasy that, in spite of them, I still love the book. In the discussion that followed my earlier post about making excuses for Gaudy Night I suggested that some books are “like a slightly embarrassing relative you still adore.” I think it’s not just loyalty that keeps Busman’s Honeymoon in my good books (so to speak!): I think the good in it really does outweigh the bad. But I can’t deny that it has some real problems.

Worst is the novel’s off-hand antisemitism, which surfaces in the context of not one but two “financial gentlemen” who get involved in squabbling over the victim’s estate. The first, Mr. MacBride, is anticipated as “an inquisitive Hebrew”; he turns out to be”a brisk young man, bowler-hatted, with sharp black eyes that seemed to inventory everything they encountered, and a highly regrettable tie.” He also has “a trifling difficulty with his sibilants.” The second, Mr. Solomons, is “a stout, elderly Hebrew” with a pronounced lisp (“Very thorry to intrude . . . I have here a bill of thale on the furniture . . .”). They are both presented as slightly comical figures and treated with perfect, if faintly condescending, amiability by our main characters, but there’s no doubt that they are meant to represent an exotic and not altogether desirable genus characterized by money-grubbing and sharp dealing. This is the kind of thing that could be shrugged off as “a product of its times” but is more appropriately pointed out as a symptom of what was wrong with those times, or at least with too many people living in those times. In Gaudy Night villainy is strongly associated with Nazism, but antisemitism and fascism had a pretty strong hold in 1930s England too: Mr. MacBride and Mr. Solomons could come across as quaintly offensive anachronisms, but they are also salutary reminders of the conditions that made Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts possible.

Next up is the novel’s snobbery. In Gaudy Night, where so much of what matters is educational and intellectual, I tend to think in terms of elitism instead, and to see Oxford as a place that (in Sayers’s admittedly idealized version) renders class barriers, if not irrelevant, at least less relevant. But in Busman’s Honeymoon you really can’t ignore the power of class hierarchies. Though there are references to Harriet’s past life as an ordinary person (you know, the kind who buys tea biscuits in a shop and so knows which ones from the package have the cheese in the middle), she’s living in Peter’s world now, and she adapts with discomfiting ease. It takes no apparent effort at all for her to refer to the gardener simply as “Crutchley,” to accept Bunter’s deferential services, or to be high-handed with the (admittedly dreadful) housekeeper Mrs. Ruddle.

In taking on Peter’s rank, Harriet is taking up a new place in a strictly ordered world, one the novel portrays with more nostalgia and idealism than mistrust or critique:

Whatever fantastic pictures she had from time to time conjured up of married life with Peter, none of them had ever included attendance at village concerts. But of course they would go. She understood now why it was that with all his masquing attitudes, all his cosmopolitan self-adaptations, all his odd spiritual reticences and escapes, he yet carried about with him that permanent atmosphere of security. He belonged to an ordered society, and this was it. More than any of the friends in her own world, he spoke the familiar language of her childhood. In London, anybody, at any moment, might do or become anything. But in a village — no matter what village — they were all immutably themselves; parson, organist, sweep, duke’s son and doctor’s daughter, moving like chessmen upon their allotted squares. She was curiously excited. She thought, “I have married England.” Her fingers tightened on his arm.

It’s one thing to be “immutably yourself” when you’re the duke’s son (or his new bride), but it’s another if you are a struggling mechanic or anyone else who might like to “do or become” something else. Even though Harriet’s own story could be read as one of disruptive social mobility (and that’s exactly how she is seen by the more hidebound of Peter’s family and aristocratic peers), in Busman’s Honeymoon social aspiration is cause for ridicule (the absurdly pathetic Miss Twitterton, for instance, who gives herself airs because her mother was a school teacher) or a sign of villainy; the cynicism of a world in which Mrs. Ruddle initially suspects Harriet and Peter of being film stars and “no better than they should be” is contrasted unfavorably with the noblesse oblige that requires dutiful attendance at village concerts and the vicar’s sherry party.

Peter is often a bit awkward or apologetic about the anachronism of his aristocratic identity, but he’s also profoundly attached to the continuity it represents, and Busman’s Honeymoon really indulges that feeling, particularly when he brings Harriet at long last to visit the family “pile,” Duke’s Denver, with its antiques and its peacocks and its well-mannered ghosts. The tour of the family portrait gallery brings to mind Trollope’s remarks about the wealth of the church: “Who could lie basking in the cloisters of Salisbury, and gaze on Jewel’s library, and that unequalled spire, without feeling that Bishops should sometimes be rich?”

The afternoon sun slanted in through the long windows of the gallery, picking out here a blue Garter ribbon, there a scarlet uniform, lighting up a pair of slender hands by Van Dyck, playing among the powdered curls of a Gainsborough, or throwing into sudden startling brilliance some harsh white face set in a sombre black periwig.

We are all, in some ways, beneficiaries of such privilege: shouldn’t we be glad that some people have, historically, been able to collect and preserve so much beauty, to patronize artists and commission great buildings? But while it’s true that Busman’s Honeymoon does include reminders that democratic forces are at work — that in London, as Harriet observes, for instance, this “ordered society” is in flux — there’s something conservative about its yearning to keep those forces at bay and to protect “impeccable Inigo Jones staircases” from the encroachments of modern life. Along with the novel’s other nastier prejudices, this raises questions about just what kind of England Harriet has married: it doesn’t seem an altogether welcoming or progressive place.

Finally, there’s the crime itself, which Chandler was quite right to point to as contrived. The Golden Age aspects of the mystery are mostly good fun. I especially like Peter’s self-consciously Holmes-like reading of the vicar:

 “This is magnificent,” said Peter. “I collect vicars.” He joined Harriet at her observation post. “This is a very well-grown specimen, six foot four or thereabouts, short-sighted, a great gardener, musical, smokes a pipe — “

“Good gracious,” cried Miss Twitterton, “do you know Mr Goodacre?”

” — untidy, with a wife who does her best on a small stipend; a product of one of our older seats of learning — 1890 vintage — Oxford at a guess, but not, I fancy, Keble, though as high in his views as the parish allows him to be.”

“You know my methods, Watson,” he says self-deprecatingly to Harriet when she exclaims that “to the best of my knowledge and belief you’re right.” Unrealistic as they may be, too, the array of clues including clocks and cacti and wireless settings make for a good puzzle, Inspector Kirk is excellent, and the subplot with Constable Sellon adds a nice human touch. But it all feels like a puzzle set up to be solved, not (as Chandler wanted) a story of a murder by “the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.” Our killer does have his reasons, but given them, and given his character, there are much simpler, more obvious methods he’s more likely to have resorted to. There’s also the typical Golden Age implausibility of a body turning up on the sleuth’s honeymoon in the first place, not to mention in his own home. These are, of course, the kinds of things about which this subgenre of crime fiction requires suspension of disbelief, but there’s too much genuine human drama and feeling in Busman’s Honeymoon for them to sit quite right. While Gaudy Night elegantly fuses its mystery plot with its other elements, Busman’s Honeymoon feels like a mish-mash, an uneasy and ultimately unsuccessful compromise between two kinds of books.