I recently completed a re-read of Dorothy L. Sayer’s Wimsey novels and decided to continue with Thrones, Dominations, which Sayers began, referred to in her letters many times, but never completed. After her death in 1957, she left behind some handwritten notes about the book, as well as a 179-page handwritten manuscript. There was an attempt to publish a collection of such fragments in the 1980’s, but when Sayers’ son, Anthony Fleming, died, it didn’t happen. In the 1990’s a typescript was found of the handwritten material. It had scenes not in chronological order, and was not complete. The Sayers estate contacted Jill Paton Walsh and asked her to complete the book. It was published in 1998 to mostly positive reviews.
Unfortunately, I’ve found it difficult to talk about the book itself. Many Wimsey fans make a sour face when asked if they’ve read any of the Jill Paton Walsh continuations, even the first two, which include material written by Sayers. Even those have read Thrones, Dominations tend to focus on who wrote which parts, and not the book itself. Hence, I’m writing this post to gather my thoughts on the book. The post will likely be a mishmash of recap, review, and related piffle.
The last Wimsey novel that Sayers completed and published before her death was Busman’s Honeymoon, which concerns the time just before, then during and after, the wedding of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. It’s a comedy in that it begins with a wedding, and parts of it are very funny and deliberately played for laughs. It’s a tragedy in that it ends with a death, and its hero in tears. It was a stage play before it was a novel. Sayers and her friend Muriel St. Clare Byrne collaborated on the script while Sayers was finishing work on Gaudy Night. Play and novel were completed about the same time and the play went into production in 1936, during which time Sayers adapted the play of Busman’s into a novel.
Peter and Harriet were wrestling with how to get married, whether they wanted to have children, and what their marriage would be like soon after the Church of England had been subject to some of these same questions. Changes to many parts of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, including the service for The Solemnization of Matrimony, were proposed in the late 1920s, and put to a vote in 1928, but Parliament voted no. One thing proposed and thus rejected was to remove the word “obey” from the woman’s wedding vows. In one of the dowager duchess’s diary entries from the novel Busman’s Honeymoon, she notes that Peter and Harriet were left to “wrangle over the word ‘obey'” (21, Bourbon Street Books). The traditional marriage service also notes that the first cause for marriage is the “increase of mankind,” which Harriet and Peter have not decided about by the end of that novel.
Lord Peter was a popular character. After Gaudy Night, and the Busman play and novel, fans clamored for more Wimsey. Sayers started Thrones, Dominations in 1936. She wrote about it to her friend Helen Simpson in a letter reprinted on the back of the hardcover edition from St. Martin’s Press.
What the reprint doesn’t include, though, is a sentence that reads, retroactively and prophetically, “I find this scheme so satisfactory that it hardly seems worth while writing the book, does it?…(395, Letters 1930-1936.)
In a 1937 letter to her publisher, she’s finished a story called “The Haunted Policeman” that takes place after the events in the unfinished book. (That story was published in a multi-author anthology in 1939, Detection Medley, and not again until 1972, when it was collected in both Striding Folly and Lord Peter.) A 1937 letter to a writer friend says that her novel “is suffering sadly from theatrical competition” because the stage version of Busman’s Honeymoon is doing so well. By 1938 she writes to her friend novelist Helen Simpson that she has “taken a dislike to the story.” In 1939 she writes to a fan that she may still work on what is likely Thrones, Dominations. But that, as they say, is all she wrote.
The collaborative novel opens at a restaurant, with Peter and Harriet being observed by Peter’s Uncle Paul and a friend, and compared to another couple, the Harwells, who are good looking and conspicuously in love. Peter, oddly to a modern reader, finds it gauche to reveal his love for his wife, and portrays detachment. It’s these two couples who are contrasted through the book. I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that Peter and Harriet’s marriage appears to best advantage.
Like many of the Wimsey mysteries (JPW did her homework) the mystery arrives late; on page 113 a dead body is announced. Up till then, we’ve seen Harriet suffering her sister-in-law Helen’s scorn and trying to find her way as a writer. She’s struggling with her book, just as Sayers struggled to write Thrones, Dominations. Being happy, she finds, isn’t as conducive to writing as being poor and hungry was. I was glad to read that Harriet, summoned by a guest later in the book “finished her sentence before going up to the drawing room herself.” So she found her priority as a writer again. (248)
Harriet is also asked separately by several members of the family as well as Peter’s nosy godmother if she’ll have children so there will be a spare heir to the estate of Denver beyond the reckless St. George. Understandably, Harriet finds their interest in her womb a little creepy. Peter assures Harriet, as he does about her writing, to not bow to the family pressure and to make her own choice. This is in stark contrast to the Harwells; he wants to have children and she adamantly refuses.
From Laurence’s point of view, “for Rosamund’s womanly dower of love and beauty, he could exchange the gifts proper to a man. He had protection to offer her as well as love, and all the luxuries of wealth and position to which beautiful womanhood entitled her. Theirs had been a true romance of that old-fashioned sort which never (no matter what highbrows say) grows old. Of all the fairy tales, one could count most confidently upon the evergreen appeal of Cinderella (56).
To Rosamond, Laurence Harwell “dominated her senses and at the same time infuriated her by his large masculine arrogance.” (60)
The descriptions of the Harwell marriage reminded me of two earlier Wimsey novels, Five Red Herrings, and Busman’s Honeymoon.
In Five Red Herrings, some details about the Farrens hint at Sayers trying to explore an unhappy marriage that is superficially enviable. Mrs Farren is, from Peter’s point of view, “a very beautiful woman, if you like that sort of thing, with her oval face and large grey eyes and those thick masses of copper-colored hair” (55, Avon) and is later described as having a “red-gold head” (164). Her husband, a tall handsome man, is jealous and a drinker. He’s suspected of murdering Campbell, who had been infatuated with Mrs Farren before he turns up dead. Mrs Farren’s desire to be perceived as a perfect homemaker and wife, and Mr Farren’s frustration and jealousy when men like Campbell visit her results in a marriage that is tense and unhappy, focused more on the appearance of being a beautiful couple rather than the reality of being happily married. Each is locked in a gender role that precludes equality and shared power.
In Thrones, Dominations, Laurence Harwell is large and handsome, while Rosamund is described as beautiful. Her “two thick plaits of red gold drew him as with a cart rope” (58). Both are jealous of the other, and they have established a romantic dynamic wherein he attacks and she retreats then surrenders. Harwell is known as an “angel” investor, backing plays in London. He rescued his wife from poverty when her father went to prison and she had to work as a dress model. Like the Farrens, they each embody a gendered role that is occasionally satisfying, physically or emotionally, but doesn’t result in happiness.
In Busman’s Honeymoon, after they discover the body and begin to investigate, Harriet realizes that one of these funny, charming, odd people must be the murderer, and if she and Peter continue, the murderer will die. Peter says, “Whoever suffers, we must have the truth. Nothing else matters a damn.” and Harriet responds, “But must it be your hands–?” (329, Bourbon Street Books). He suggests they run away, or that he stop investigating. Harriet realizes, though, that this would be wrong. “What kind of life could we have if I knew that you had become less than yourself by marrying me?” (330) Peter notes that most women would have taken the concession as a triumph.
“I know. I’ve heard them.” Her own scorn lashed herself–the self she had only just seen. “They boast of it–‘My husband would do anything for me…’ It’s degrading. No human ought to have such power over another.”
After subsequent interruptions, Peter and Harriet return to the topic. She regrets her moment of possessiveness, while he affirms, “for God’s sake let’s take that word ‘possess’ and put a brick round its neck and drown it. I will not use it or hear it used–not even in the crudest physical sense. It’s meaningless. We can’t possess one another. We can only give and hazard all we have–Shakespeare, as Kirk would say…” (347).
These two exchanges in Busman’s Honeymoon set the challenge Sayers set for herself in Thrones, Dominations, of portraying a marriage that defied traditional gender dynamics of who had power in the relationship, and showed a marriage renegotiated as it went along. And yet Sayers did not complete the challenge she set out for herself. Wherever the seams in the collaboration are, Jill Paton Walsh is the one who took up the details, arranged them, and created a book around the outline. She did to Sayer’s draft what Sayers herself did with the playscript by herself and Byrne. So while some Sayers fans don’t bother to read this book, and others spend time criticizing what parts they perceive were written by Walsh and not Sayers, I find the contrasting marriages to be of a piece with the seeds she planted in Busman’s Honeymoon, and perhaps the seeds she planted all the way back in her first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Whose Body? where the only happy marriage that’s portrayed is the Levy’s, one that was unconventional in class and religion. I think Sayers, from the start of the series, was asking what makes a good romantic partnership, and her answer, throughout these novels, and even beyond the ones she herself finished, is that its something new, different and unconventional.
As an example, one of my favorite parts of this book is Harriet’s scheme to enable Bunter to marry. “Peter, look, all these traditions, all these rules that say a servant can live in and a non-servant can’t, and they must use pseudonyms, and so and so on—do we have to be bound by them? Can’t we change anything? (259-60) I’m reminded of Prince Harry in Henry V: “We are the maker of manners.”
On the next page, I think Harriet identifies the crux of the book: “Couldn’t we reign co-equal? There doesn’t seem to be enough disagreement between us to justify revolutions and abdications.” (261) Harriet asks Peter if men and women are at war (271) and then he notes the power differential in the Harwell’s marriage: It’s a dangerous game; it contaminates love with power.” (272) and he goes on to note that he doesn’t play those games: “I could never storm a citadel, however ill-defended. The only thing that tempts me is a wide-open gate, and the trumpets sounding welcome.” (273)
What Harriet is proposing, for her and Peter, and for Bunter and Hope Fanshawe, is that the old rules don’t apply. The Great War chipped away at traditional expectations, and the looming threat of a second world war is likely to further tear them down. What Harriet and Peter exemplify is a marriage of equality and shared power, for themselves and by setting up the Bunter household, for others.
The Dante epigram is (as I understand it) about the fallen angels, and what they will call themselves and how they will negotiate power now they are no longer in heaven. Should they replicate the old ways, just because? Or should they do things differently, in a less-than-divine manner? Sayers, and Walsh, and Peter and Harriet all suggest the answer is not in thrones or dominations, or war between heaven and hell. It’s in the awkward, human, embodied existence filled with mistakes and course corrections. This expansion, on the themes Sayers was exploring all along, and most explicitly in Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon, is why I think Thrones, Dominations is worth reading and considering more deeply than it has been.
Some miscellaneous bits and bobs:
On p 18 Helen says Peter “hates women with green fingernails” What did it mean? My best guess was that fashionable women of the moment were indulging in green nail varnish, as in Picasso’s 1936 work “Dora Maar with Green Fingernails.” Several Google searches turned up nothing but articles on nail fungus, but when I searched for this image, I found this at the New York Times, which hints at a WWII trend of green fingernails because of fusilage paint!
This book feels racier in content that previous ones, yet Busman’s Honeymoon had its share of eyebrow-raising passages, including when Peter is basking in post-coital bliss the morning after their first married night together, and shocks Mrs. Ruddle by appearing “Mother-naked” in the upstairs window. The Harwells have a “night of stars and love” after the death of the king is announced. “A whole epoch was collapsing about the, while at the core of darkness they lit their small blaze of life and were comforted. It is a pity that reality can never be content to keep the curtain down on a climax.” (58)
St. George says he hopes Harriet will be procreating, though he wonders if his uncle Lord Peter “might be past it,” (111)
When Peter is back from a diplomatic trip, he “celebrated his return in the fashion of the Duke of Marlborough” (185) which I learned means more than once and with his boots on, but its apocryphal so who really knows. I took the boots to be figurative, though.
There’s a tunnel chase in chapter 17 reminiscent of one of my favorite movies, The Third Man. It also calls to mind the long section about sewers in Les Miserables.
On p 255, there’s a broad hint that a character is gay and was using an actress friend as a beard: “we weren’t exactly love’s young dream. Just very good pals. “But a young man in my position can find it useful to have a girlfriend too. It looks better. It allays certain fears.” This reminded me of some of the male entertainers in Have His Carcase, like the guy Paul Alexis’s ex started dating, and of Antoine, who said love was a privilege for most people. He was perfectly happy to marry for money and security.
In the end, the murderer is given the choice between suicide and a trial, another feature of many previous books.
K.J. Boldon 