In this instalment of the Australasian Blog Takeover, we hear from Dr Anne Rogerson, Charles Tesoriero Senior Lecturer in Latin, University of Sydney. Anne works on the Aeneid and its reception from late antiquity to the present day. Here she shares her innovative work in Classical Reception and the detective fiction of the English novelist and poet, Dorothy L. Sayers. Anne recently presented some of her research – ‘Home is where the Harpies are: Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night and the Aeneid – in the Reception panel, ‘Artists and Academics: some modern receptions of Catullus and Virgil’ at this year’s Australasian Society for Classical Studies Conference at the University of Otago.
Fits of classical quotation
The detective fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) bristles with classical allusion. Flicking through The Complete Short Stories, you may, for example, come across ‘The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will’ (1928), in which a vital missing document is discovered and an inheritance secured by solving a crossword puzzle calling on knowledge of classical mythology, languages, literature, history and philosophy among a wide and erudite range of cultural references. A solution to the problem is provided, along with notes to some of the more demanding clues – Latin and ancient Greek wordplay, a knowledge of scansion, and familiarity with classical allusion in revenge tragedy are among the areas that seem to have been deemed more challenging for the average reader.
A later story, ‘The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey’ (1933), has Sayers’ aristocratic, bibliophile detective posing as a magician, quoting Homer and fragments of Virgil to lend weight to the impressive hocus-pocus of his performance, e.g. “‘Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amores,’[1] said the wizard, with emphasis. ‘Poluphloisboio thalasses.[2] Ne plus ultra. Valete (‘farewell’). Plaudite (‘applaud’).’” etc. As Wimsey says while explaining how he solved the case, “the remnants of a classical education” come in handy to provide atmosphere and mystique. But the remnants of Sayers’ own classical learning, displayed in the allusions that pepper her Wimsey novels, are much more than decorative, and I believe are put to greater use in her novels than has been previously appreciated. I have been working recently on an article on Gaudy Night (1937), the novel in which Peter Wimsey finally becomes engaged to Harriet Vane, the detective novelist whom he saved from the gallows in Strong Poison (1930). Here, I present some thoughts on the role of classical allusion and quotation in Sayers’ Wimsey novels more generally, suggesting not only that they are important but also that Sayers left clues in her novels to encourage us to engage in detective work of our own to uncover their significance.
Lord Peter Wimsey, who we are told read History at Balliol College, Oxford, just before the First World War, is practically incapable of speaking without an allusion or clever piece of wordplay. As he himself jokes in Have His Carcase (1932):
I always have a quotation for everything – it saves original thinking.
His love interest, Harriet Vane, also a former student at Oxford (where she gained a first in English), is similarly well-read; both share this trait with Sayers herself, who began learning Latin at the age of six, was fluent in French and German and formidably widely read by her teens, and one of the first women to graduate at Oxford, after taking a first in medieval French in 1915.
Sayers’ career after university was one of distinguished and varied literary output. She published twelve detective novels in the 1920s and 1930s, while working for an advertising agency. At the same time, she was writing review articles and critical work about crime fiction, including a piece first delivered as a lecture at Oxford arguing that Aristotle – 2000 years before its time – produced “a theory of detective fiction so shrewd, all-embracing and practical that the Poetics remains the finest guide to the writing of such fiction that could be put… into the hands of an aspiring author”. From the mid 1930s she wrote for the theatre, and perhaps her best known work from that period was a series of radio plays for the BBC on the life of Christ, The Man Born to be King, broadcast during the Second World War. In the 1940s she turned to Dante, and was working on the third volume of a verse translation of the Divine Comedy for Penguin when she died. She wrote essays on theology, on Dante criticism, on the role of women in modern life, on what universities ought to offer society, on women at Oxford, and on Latin teaching among many other topics. Her correspondence was also voluminous and varied; it includes lengthy exchanges with several prominent Classicists: W. H. D. Rouse on translation and Colin Hardie on the interpretation and scholarship of Dante and of Virgil alongside other academic questions.
Sayers’ undoubted erudition and voracious intellectual curiosity should, I think, weigh very heavily in the balance against the tendency among literary scholars not to take her detective fiction very seriously, and against Sayers’ own tendency to treat the learning on display in her novels as more decorative than meaningful. Her characters speak flippantly of “the habit of quotation”, and while an interest in literature and reading often form bonds between them, this “habit” is also presented as something that gets in the way of the expression, if not the feeling, of genuine emotion. But we ought to pay more attention to the snippets of and references to literature, both ancient and modern, that Sayer’s novels contain. Barbara Reynolds, Sayers’ biographer, noted that “the literary clues in [Sayers’] novels are always subtle” (she gives an example from Sayers’ first Wimsey novel, Whose Body (1923), in which a murder victim’s Jewish faith is alluded to by reference to the Epistle to the Galatians, which talks about circumcision). There are hints in the novels, too, which suggest we should be more alert to Sayers’ (and her characters’) habits of allusion. As Harriet Vane remarks in Have His Carcase, “When Lord Peter gets these fits of quotation he’s usually on to something.” And when Lord Peter gets fits of quotation, Dorothy L. Sayers was usually up to something as well.
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[1] ‘They [shades in the underworld] were holding out their hands, lovers of the other shore’ (from Virgil’s Aeneid Book 6 line 314).
[2] ‘Loud-resounding sea’ (from Homer’s Iliad passim).