Chapter 51 She fell in love with the man she created - Sayers and her Lord Peter Wimsey

"Lord Peter Wimsey, thirty-two years of age, unmarried; unemployed; address: first floor; hobbies: meddling in other people's business." This infuriatingly handsome profile isn't about Dorothy Sayers, of course, but it's her own, and it's about the most important detective she's ever created, Peter Wimsey. Let's see, the profile clearly stated the age, thirty-two years old, which is very interesting.Think back carefully, how old is Sherlock Holmes?How old was Hercule Poirot?How old is Ellery Quinn?And how old is Agent 007 James Bond?We don't even remember saying that, do we?I only know that the old ones are always very old, the young ones are always young, the middle-aged ones are always middle-aged, and the handsome ones are always handsome. At the beginning of "Love Letter", there is a scene where KGB consults James Bond's personal files), and occasionally, the writer himself realizes and even uses the fact that people will age with the passage of time to add flavor to the plot, but in general, these The celestial characters of genre fiction are privileged escapees from the reign of the gods of time, especially Bond, the most successful transition from book to film, who saved us all for half a century, and his reward was never Aging coupled with a never-fading exuberance.

The reason why this is possible is that the answer does not lie in the writing side, but we should ask our reading side, or at least it is a matter of mutual consent.It is we who do not want them to age and become strange and difficult to understand. After all, in real life, we are greeted and sent to the sun. This is one of our eternal sorrows, and it is probably the most serious and fatal among them. One of those, therefore, "you are wonderful, please stay", we are in fact always seeking this atemporal rarity, whether it is hallucinatory or not, whether it is too expensive for us to pay, like Plastic surgery, placenta injections, falling in love, buying diamonds, and so on. In the book "Faust", Goethe told us that when Faust couldn't help calling for time to stop, this moment was the moment when the devil Mephistopheles appeared, and he came to take away Faust's soul as promised It's time.

So to have Holmes, Poirot, Quinn and Bond always be that Holmes, Poirot, Quinn and Bond is our safest and cheapest compensation. And yet Dorothy Sayers throws her charming detective back down the river of time—Peter Wimsey, thirty-two years old, only his age at the time of the "Rat Hole" case, He was younger and more vigorous before, and he will also age and restrain himself in the future, which means that not only his age and appearance will change over time, but his life situation will also change, and his mind and temperament will also change, so that when he reaches When Lord Peter Wimsey was forty years old, Sayers himself would receive a letter from an angry woman who was obsessed with the creamy little boy of the past, saying how Peter Wimsey could no longer be as ghostly and mischievous as before Sayers only replied flatly, "If anyone reaches forty-five and still maintains the so-called ghostly, little rascal charm, he should be sent to the gas chamber." ".

Sayers, we give to those horrible people who think they'll never be thirty. Sayers doesn't have any grievances or hatred for her Peter Wimsey the way Conan Doyle hated and at one point murdered Sherlock Holmes, in fact quite the opposite - if we say, Raymond Chandler For Philip Marlowe, the tough guy private detective in his works, he was carefully crafted like a sculptor to become the real hero in his mind, and to create the most noble person in the sinful end of the world. Sayers is soft and gentle. Desperately and desperately, she is creating her own perfect lover in the last days.This creation is not a pure fantasy, it must maintain its authenticity and practicability, and it must also maintain the texture of a dream come true and in case it is possible, so it cannot be combined out of thin air with all the non-existent and absolutely perfect details (this becomes On the contrary, Sayers, who is emotionally vicissitudes in the real world, uses basically all existing materials in reality. Peter Wimsey, from the physical appearance of the body to the visible The behaviors and language she sees, and even the inner thoughts and emotions have real sources, which are collected and filtered by Sayers bit by bit from the men she has met, gotten along with, and even fallen in love with, and added fantasy These materials are perfected like a sculptor who carefully and gently handles every part of the details. In the end, she combines these details with fantasy. This is another spelling of the name Wimsey Whimsy, which means fantasy, an absolute fantasy. .

Lord Peter Wimsy, revealing the emotional gap in Sayers' tough rational armor, her Achilles' heel.She desperately falls in love with the man she created. Such a realistic plot is like a fairy tale, and we can easily smell the danger, or even the tragedy that is about to emerge.Here, let's stop here first, we have to follow Sayers into her real world at that time, into the river of time where she can't stretch her feet twice, we have to know some more blunt and uninteresting things first . Let’s first look at an almost eternal fact—reviewers always like to classify, sacrificing some specificity to achieve universals or general principles; A certain era, a certain geographical space, or a certain genre of art, etc., think that those that cannot be classified and should not be deleted are his signature and his unique mark.Because this conflict is not just a personal sentiment and grievance that came out after the fact, but a fundamental difference in the way of inner thinking, and the resulting difference in the way of discussing problems in a professional way, so the conflict has to continue until where There is no hope of reconciliation, and there will be no end of the day.

Brazil's generation of football king Pele, of course, belongs to the creator's side. He has to deal with the annoying question of who is next for him all his life. Pele", Pele's answer was: "He is Cruyff, a genius who plays football in his own way." Good answer, we remember this quote to read Dorothy Sayers novels.Mystery fiction reviewers tend to stick her name with Agatha Christie (who wants to try and help us find an article that talks about Sayers without mentioning Christie?), A first place and a second place together represent the dream-like golden age of mystery novels that will never come again. Of course we outsiders know that this is an honor and the highest praise, but Christie may not appreciate it, and Sayers even more Wouldn't be happy, so we'll borrow Bailey's words for the front, in case we also have to mention Christie -- Dorothy Sayers, a golden name in that golden age of Paradise Lost, a A genius who writes mystery novels in her own unique way.

Dorothy Sayers, three years younger than Christie, is within the error range of the time identification of literary history, and the time of becoming famous is about the same time, all in the mid-1920s, but Sayers only lived to be in his sixties , she lost most to the long-lived Christie. The creators are not happy with the degeneracy of others, but what is interesting is that sometimes they are not opposed to coming by themselves, they form factions and groups to protect righteousness, and even issue a joint statement or declaration to fight against a common crisis, Marking or confirming a certain creative form, intention or identity, and even seizing power—the so-called second golden age of mystery novels in the 1920s came to such an era, when a mystery novel had to reflect on itself, sort out and It is a critical time to confirm who you want to be and what you want to do.Judging from the appearance of creation, this is the era when novels were established as the main form of writing. However, from short stories to long novels, this is not just a physical change of writing more characters, but more fundamentally, it represents Mystery novels have been written spontaneously for more than half a century. From the past half-puzzle half-literary short stories, they have formally entered the mainstream of novels to gain a place in the novel. Officially registered as a fiction writer.Therefore, the reasoning writers at that time became more busy. In addition to conspiring behind closed doors and plotting how to kill people, they also talked about it openly with enthusiasm, serving as creators and critics, and taking guest missionaries.The most familiar example is SS Van Dyne, the chief reasoning master of the United States at the same time, and his "Twenty Rules for Mystery Fiction". In this regard, the same is true for Sayers, who is a heroine and has a formal higher education degree. Write novels, write reviews, and edit. It is interesting but not entirely coincidental that the original appearance of the great detective Philo Vance in Van Dyne’s novels and Lord Peter Wimsey in Sayers’s novels is also strikingly similar. Elegant, full of aristocratic atmosphere and posturing, same love to talk endlessly, especially when encountering literary and artistic topics that have nothing to do with the case, we readers who are concerned about the murder case have to wait patiently for several pages, and therefore, Renowned mystery historian Julian Simmons says the two are "cousins"—except that American cousin Philo Vance is a statue of reason, forever.

On the contrary, Christie is much quieter. This female writer who has no formal education and has a shy nature with Neptune in Pisces, even though she joined the reasoning club at that time like Sayers (the first chairman was Chesterton, and the reasoning identity was Father Brown's author, whose orthodox literary identity was the sacrificial wine of the British literary world at that time), basically, Christie only wrote her own novels, and lived a life that was quite isolated to the point of mystery.And the old lady Jane Marple in her works is also a listener, a listener who doesn't let the people around her feel that she exists, almost transparently blending into the background so that others can speak freely; the bearded Poirot is more talkative, But he will first apologize to everyone, "You are so kind, I am a long-winded little old man".

Moreover, Marple and Poirot are outsider intruders for the reasoning detectives ruled by the upper class at that time.Poirot is Belgian, Marple is from another world of the lower classes. From here, we are introduced into a small "Sayers/Christy" controversy.In the vast secular world of reasoning and pleasure reading, it is generally easy to equate the huge name Christie with her golden age, but there are quite a few people who are not easily awed by Christie's prestige and various shocking statistics (including nearly a hundred. The number and total number of novels are hundreds of millions, and the marketing volume is second only to the "Bible"). They talk about knowledge and reason, and actually enter the content of the novel and discuss the facts. They firmly believe that Sayers' novels undoubtedly convey the era more accurately The true description and message of the book, including the polite, elegant, a bit hard-edged old British atmosphere that has been running down from the Victorian period, and always puts on a bunch of poems and anecdotes and a bad joke when you don’t speak well, There is also, no doubt more to be concerned about, the mystery novel itself, a certain genuine example of classical English reasoning.

I personally think that this distinction is basically fair, and it also has a certain degree of reminder—we see, in the maze of murders that are also arranged with a bunch of words and details of life that women can better grasp, Sayers’s The murderer's tricks and the reasoning process of solving the case are undoubtedly relatively "hard", even scientific. As pointed out by Julian Simmons, who is not so supportive of her, her tricks are relatively original and hammered through intellectual research in advance ( I’m sorry that we can’t give examples like Simmons here), inheriting the characteristics of the original classical reasoning that is inventive, pioneering, and discovering new worlds, new things, and new properties; in contrast, Christie has little physicality, and her best tricks It is always situational, hiding in the blind spots of people's habits, life, and common sense. This aspect makes her novels present a different style of wisdom from the past. Pulling down to the common people's broad life insight and sophistication, on the other hand, her novels also turn from the outside to the inside, with a certain stage flavor of psychological drama.Just as Miss Marple can use the functions of the few neighbors in her village to correspond to the hundreds of millions of people in the outside world, but to put it bluntly, there are only a few types of people, Christie herself also abides by the same cognition in her novel writing Created her unique mode of closed human nature, this mode runs through almost all of her novels either explicitly or implicitly, but most of the time they only changed their names and costumes, and the original cast appeared again and again, for example, a little rebellious, A smart girl with a wild horse feel, a charming prodigal handsome guy, an honest and boring middle-aged man with a special profession (lawyer, pharmacist, accountant, farmer, etc.), a neutral woman with some kind of maternal love or sexual desire, a full-fledged woman The freckled face or the gluttonous stupid girl with the straw messy hair who is always deceived, each type can be good or evil, and they take turns as murderers.This mode allows Christie to produce a large number of formulas quickly, but if it is only regarded as a professional writer's writing technique, it is too small and too wronged Christie. This is her unique worldview, her unique ethnographic taxonomy , the previous reasoning tradition was not like this, and no one will really inherit it in the future.

Purely in terms of the writing tradition of classical reasoning, Sayers is indeed more "rule-abiding" than Christie, and even rationally or a little self-warning. She also emphasized that the element of love should not be placed in reasoning novels, but she and Christie The exception is her Lord Peter Wimsey of Fair and May fair, a "crime" hidden outside the plot of her novel, which ultimately caused Wimsey to leave us early. Sir Peter Wimsey, real time, was born in 1923, which was Sayers' first novel Whose Body, but love hadn't happened at that time, and Wimsey was not the protagonist of the case yet.It means that besides being an elegant, intelligent, and well-fed duke's youngest son, he has to wait quietly for the various emotional setbacks and wanderings of Sayers in reality, and use these unforgettable pains to transform bit by bit. His wonderful content. Peter Wimsey was 33 years old when he was born, and Sayers himself was 30 years old. This strange couple kept a three-year gap and walked hand in hand. By 1943, Wimsey was 53 years old. Sayers until the age of fifty. Lord is not a formal title, but a social honorific title, especially used to refer to the children of noble families who have not inherited or received another title, the young master of the noble family, and the like.Sayers skillfully uses the ambiguous identity of this special era and special country to give Wimsey detectives all the freedom they need or can imagine-in terms of economy, he doesn't have to do anything; in terms of status, everyone has to respect and buy , entering and leaving places where ordinary people are forbidden to enter at any time, especially murder scenes and judicial institutions at all levels; in terms of time, he is too much 24 hours a day; in terms of knowledge, he has received the most complete and noble education that the British Empire could provide at that time; Moreover, with all the advantages of these aristocratic status, in the end without the corresponding aristocratic obligations and constraints of his father and elder brother.Lord Peter Wimsey is the most free detective in the history of human reasoning, like fluid, or even air, everywhere. Wimsey had his Dr. Watson too, but he was far more useful than Watson, except that he didn't help him record the great achievements of detective crime-this was his butler Bunter, a respectful, loyal, professional servant of all kinds. A servant who has perfected his skills, he can be ordered to go at any time. No family can resist such a good servant. Therefore, Wimsy wanted to find out which secrets, and Bonte went undercover like a well-known secret agent. , but what is more special is that his deadly weapon does not have any high-tech components, but coffee, bath water, tie socks, and kitchen knives, forks, cups and plates, etc., like a master in a martial arts novel, turning decay into magic. In fact, Bunter is not the only agent of Wimsey. He also paid for it (money is not a problem) to build a secret base, which is hosted by the old lady Catherine Collinson.The female army under Miss Collinson has a wider range of work than Bunter. From the family to the company, all positions such as typists, employees, secretaries, and helpers are everywhere. Wimsey calls it "my cat lover's garden"; Wenxi still has a bunch of friends at his disposal, all kinds of friends with strange skills who lead cars from all over the world to sell chickens and dogs, and take on special tasks for one-time use. Wen Xi is an ancient one-man ranger who is independent with a sword, but also a modern network, an underground gang leader. There is a novelist in mainland China who put it very well, saying that verbs are words and language is the "bones", which bring strength to words and languages, making words and languages ​​stand up and even come alive.The strange army under Wimsey is the verbs in her novels. They make up for the shortcomings of classical reasoning, which advocates thinking, and the four bodies are so lazy that they often become still life paintings. They endow the novel with the necessary concrete action and sense of speed, and together Introduce the unique time thrilling effect of thriller novels, as well as people's alertness and random response. But even better is the whole world they bring with them, the whole lower class world that the great men on the ladder of classical reasoning used to rule hard to reach, a novel rich world of trifles and empirical details.We often hear and say that there is no such thing as a great man in the eyes of servants, because they look up from the bottom up, see the nostrils of the great man, and see the appearance of a great man who is not a great man after get off work.Indeed, no matter in fictional novels or in the true reality of life, servants and children are close to transparency, so they are the best observers, but the eyes of children are unkind and without special opinions, and their meaning is close to God; Servant, from bottom to left, subversive, critical and disenchanted. There is a very good movie that should be watched, that is "Gosford Manor" by the old American director Altman. Altman uses two worlds to watch a high-society murder, half of which is the dining room and living room of the aristocrats. , and the other half is the kitchen and maid's room just like the control group.You guessed it right, the latter is more beautiful, the real things happen here, and the key to dispelling the fog is also here. These two honorable ladies in the golden age of reasoning, Christie created Marple, and Sayers smuggled a whole row of Marples, men, women, young and old, tall, short, and thin. As far as the rigorous classical reasoning tradition is concerned, this is an act of destruction. But how can it be destroyed carelessly and rationally?It is precisely because of the addition of these heterogeneous things that the golden age was abruptly uprooted at that time, otherwise the 1920s would be just the so-called pyrite age, wouldn’t it?Pyrite is to gold what zircon is to diamonds. It is very similar but a fake. Its other cursed name is "fool's gold". By the way, when exactly did Sayers officially fall in love with her detective?It's hard to pinpoint the exact math, but roughly, we can take 1930's "Mighty Poison" as a more formal turning point because of her own magical jump into the world of the novel. , this masterpiece she let herself go directly to the murder dock, that is, the reasoning female writer Harriet Vann who was accused of poisoning her former cohabiting boyfriend with arsenic in the book.Sayers put himself to death, so he met with Winsey. The crazy Winsey decided to find out the real culprit to clear her of the suspicion, and proposed to her the first time they met (about feelings, don't ask why), but Seyes Jess herself was still traumatized and had a certain sense of guilt. Of course, it is also possible that she was not sure what Wimsey wanted to do, so she declined him "temporarily". But it started anyway, and something was secretly growing of itself, which inevitably changed Peter Wimsey, who was still in his blood, and changed Sayers himself. Let's jump directly to the second turning point, 1935.In the history of reasoning, this is Sayers' most controversial and polarizing book, because it is not like a mystery novel, or correctly said, it is not just a mystery novel-in this book In the book, Harriet Vann returns to Sayers’ alma mater, Oxford University, where the case unfolds, but for Harriet Vann, the journey of life in Oxford itself is more important. In essence, it is reinvention, making her believe that she can stand shoulder to shoulder with Winsey in terms of psyche and even a certain sense of identity, but for Sayers himself, this is a return, reflection and cleansing, and a new start.Through the strange magic of the novel, let myself stand back before the starting point of this journey of love, before everything happened, as if I was still the girl who looked at the vast world outside with eager and clean eyes, irreversibly reversed, Omar ·Hayam's "Drinking Song" said that "all the tears in the world can't wash away a single line" of life. Now it has been wiped as new again.Underneath the long and messy exterior, which makes unsympathetic reasoning fans angry and impatient, there is Sayers's whimsical heart that is close to dementia but really brave in love. Rationally, she is fully aware that she is taking risks, and when she takes herself Joking about the glorious reputation and the good future that has been paved, but this respectable lady who was willing to violate the society and her own religious family at a young age said: "This is what I want to write, and I will write it It's..." Of course, such courage must have a process of cultivation, a time pressurization process like inflating a balloon, which is exactly what she did in the six years between "Strong Poison" and the middle.During these days, she really tried to write an autobiography for the first time, and handed over three years of Wimsey's books. Among them, the best is undisputed. It is not only hailed as the pinnacle of Sayers' life, but even represents the entire second golden period. Without reading this book, it is not enough to get a glimpse of a masterpiece that reasoned about the true beauty and mystery of the golden age.What's more special is that this is the only one of the four books that Harriet Vann does not appear, so it is like a parade and arrangement on Wimsy's side, where Harriet Vann (or Thayer Under the action of the force field of love, Wensey in the book presents an unprecedented sense of depth and maturity, and it seems that he is slowly getting ready; some people can see that the more excellent Revereus Theodore Venables in the book The couple are exactly Sayers' own parents—"If you don't turn back into a child, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." One of the trembling effects of facing love is to make people recall childhood and talk about childhood.All kinds of clues point to the same point to tell us that Sayers' strangest love is for real (she even ruined her real married life because of it), but this love that will not have a real form after all can only be fully developed. The metaphysical world, it has become the comprehensive confession, purification and redemption of man himself, and has to evolve into a moving journey of a perfect heaven, but not like "Revelation", but like "Song of Solomon" The chapters are unknown, timid, heartbroken but sweet, and it is difficult to tell the loneliness to anyone in the world. Most people think that this is selfish harm to the public, and Sayers' weird love obsession will hinder her writing of rational reasoning, but what we really want to say here is that this ultimately saved Sayers' writing and made She's not just one of the dutiful, taken-for-granted ones in the reasoning-writing relay race—we said that.Sayers was far more disciplined than Christie in the orthodox atmosphere of reasoning at the time, which made her give herself more writing restrictions and sacrificed particularity, so she would inevitably become mediocre (Borges once pointed out, Sayers is better as a critic and speculative historian than as a creator).Even in this agreed type of literature, where the writer and the reader have limited sympathy, if one really wants to write a work of a certain height, a certain unforgettable work that will be recognized as a new milestone in the future, the writer still has to take He is not afraid to show such a sharpness if he produces something special that he believes to be true and spends his life with him for a long time, which will inevitably force him to go to an ambiguous area beyond the established rules, so the first to get is always dangerous.And there are two kinds of danger: one is failure, regardless of the safety net of rules, the probability of failure is always much higher than success as Hemingway said, so it even requires luck; The sleepy readers in the world are not so sharp and not so brave. They need to get used to and learn for a long or short period of time, and they need enough people to go first and be bold.Both writing and reading have to wait. Borges once interestingly pointed out in an article on classics that it is strange that the works and writers who will be regarded as representative classics by a certain country in the future will not always conform to the general character, temperament or personality of this country. Say impression.In a country as gloomy as Germany, their national poet is Goethe, who is naive and often out of control; while in a country as rigid and polite as Britain, their representative poet is as hot as a fox, as pungent as a fox. Shakespeare. In fact, the same is true for Pushkin in Russia. Things are not easy to understand, and the reason is not easy to understand. To a certain extent, the creators have to believe in the universality and integrity of human nature (even if the accident of history makes people of a certain country, a certain time and space emphasize a certain aspect and suppress it. Other aspects), and trust in the goodwill and justice of time, even if he has no form of religious belief, he still has to defend this dubious optimism with some kind of ultimate belief in life, so as to dare to offend the current society. No such offense, Peter Wimsey will be just a perpetually spooky dandy, just another immobile statue of Philo Vance, and we'll never see this fantastic work that is finally admittedly representative of the Golden Age , we never had the chance to witness this soul-stirring love that lasted for twenty years. In 1937, Sayers turned her successful play back into a novel and published it as her and Lord Peter Wimsey's sweet end, Happy Ending. After the age of 40, Wenxi still made two comebacks, but they were all short stories, so they were not so formal.The first time was when he and Vann's firstborn son was born; the second time when it was seven years after marriage, the number of children had increased to three. We have reason to believe that Sayers hid him. She has finished sculpting him and possessed him, and she is no longer willing to share him with the world.