Choose Your Own Adventure (Authors Edition)

[kalichan]

Item: Lord Peter Wimsey.

Sadly Dorothy Sayers wrote Lord Peter mysteries of a finite number, and then moved onto religious plays, and Dante of all things...[and I say, wasn't one infernal poet enough??? I ask you. When the world could have been blessed with tales of Lady Peter (nee Miss Harriet Deborah Vane) and the Wimsey sproglets in WWII to say

Comments

[copperbadge]

Tennant would look fine with a deep gold blond, as long as they did his eyebrows and paled him out a little with makeup. He has the nose for it, and Peter's actually quite manic at times. And anyway, if history has taught us anything in re: people playing Peter, it's that the persona is more important than the appearance.

I mostly read for the piffle too, but I think we CAN do that because the mysteries are so tightly-done. Sayers couldn't get away with that much piffle if she didn't have a solid plot bedrock.

I read Thrones Dominations, but not the second Walsh book. I just found her far too predictable. I can send you the notes I made on the original MS, if you want, I transcribed quotes and things I think. And I'll dig out the TW crossover sometime this week, not sure I'll get to it tonight.

I am team whatever, there is nobody in the Wimseyverse I truly dislike. I think Harriet is a great addition (even though I dislike Have His Carcase) and I love the arc of their romance. It rings very honest to me. I also adore Bunter, you know how I am about servants, but I think it highly unlikely that Bunter and Peter would ever form any kind of sexual relationship (except perhaps during the war). Peter would see it as chasing the help, and Bunter would see it as putting on intolerable airs.

I actually quite like Peter/Charles, as a sub-ship. I did a fanfic-secret once as Charles, where he admits he married Mary so that Peter would never leave him. :D

[ophymirage]

And anyway, if history has taught us anything in re: people playing Peter, it's that the persona is more important than the appearance.

Two words: Ian Carmichael.

Okay, maybe it's just me, but I just COULDN'T get into his Wimsey AT ALL. He looked so wrong that it distracted me every minute he was on screen.

Your characterization of why Peter and Bunter wouldn't slash, though, both is perfect and completely made me LOL. :D

[copperbadge]

Ian Carmichael was brilliant in the radio plays, though. Perhaps because I'd heard those first I was able to ignore the total lack of physical resemblance to Peter, especially in the awful adaptation of Murder Must Advertise, which is my favourite of the books :D

[kalichan]

I look forward to your notes and the rec'd fic whenever ;-) Anticipation lends flavor, or so I'm told.

I haven't read the 2nd walsh book yet, but if I find it in a bookstore, I've no objection to sitting down and bulling on through.

The interesting thing to me about the mysteries in Sayers is they're far more procedural than "who-dunnit" with the exception of Gaudy Night (which makes sense because it's Harriet investigating, not Peter). I really love watching the way people's minds work when they're doing stuff, and I appreciate her attention to the nitty-gritty. Like the cipher scene in Carcase. Why don't you like that one, btw?

I'm with you on the Wimseyverse. I'm fond of everyone; this is my favorite thing in books or tvshows, where I'm actively interested in all & sundry. One of my favorite things in Busman's Honeymoon is Bunter and Harriet carefully treading so as to share the man in their life. I don't slash Bunter/Peter sexually for much the same reasons you do, but its existence doesn't offend me, and I do see a fair amount of UST there. Also the image of Bunter nursing Peter through his ptsd is, well, pretty gorgeous.

Charles has a tendency to be stodgy which I deplore, but I'm fond of him as well. It is funny that when he's falling for Mary, Sayers keeps telling us about their "family resemblance." *g*

[copperbadge]

Okay, I looked at my notes and decided it wasn't really worth sending you the document itself, so I thought I'd just C&P them here. I got through I think about 60 pages before the library closed.

***

There's a lot in the original MS that's missing from the final book. There was a HUGE chunk in Paul Delgardie's POV, reminiscing about Peter as a young man, which I think was in a letter to Harriet. He talks about how Peter comes to him as a student and is agonised over what to do about sex, because of his father and brother's indiscretions.

Paul mentions Peter is a virgin - even avoiding "the grubbier manifestations of schoolboy sexuality". *eyebrow* pretty sure this, like "beastliness" in Kipling, means homosexuality.

Paul offers Peter four options as a man: chastity, debauchery, adultery, or discretion.

Christmas 1907 - Paul takes Peter to Paris. Peter begins an affair with a Parisian woman that lasts until his last year at Oxford. "If it could not be an idyll, it must at least be an adventure in the gallant manner."

I have a note that Paul seems to trouble Harriet, but I'm not recalling why I wrote that.

The dinner scene with the Duke and Duchess of Denver was much longer and included a wicked satire of society types. There's a longish bit in the Duke's pov, which includes a blatant sizing up as Harriet, both objectively sexual - curious what she was like in bed - and personally sexual - curious what she'd be like in HIS bed. It was omg creepy.

Sayers took the opposite view of the passage of time as Rex Stout -- Stout's Nero&Archie are timeless and never age. Peter lives almost in realtime, and his personal life is documentable. A quote not from the book but written on a blank page in the MS, probably about the short story she wrote about St. George as a boy:

"Peter Wimsey is, I believe, unique among detectives of fiction in possessing an elaborate and fully documented private life. The older he gets (and, like the rest of us, he alters a good deal with the passing of years) the more shamelessly does he expose his family history and personal folly to the public gaze. He is anything but a "perfect thinking-machine". He solves his problems rather by the poet's knack of seeing suddenly a relation between presently unrelated phenomena. I have chosen a story that shows him as he was about ten years ago, in a very human mood as an uncle and in a rather irresponsible mood as a detective."

These are general quotes:

"To lay claim to power was to confess the lack of it."

Peter, hastening to open the door, threw his wife a glance which plainly said, "I can't help it! Don't beat me." *double eyebrow*

(I'm hoping to get a proper weekend in Wheaton sometime to study the Sayers collection there, but it's hard -- it's a tiny college town and the metra doesn't run there often, and there's no good close-by place to stay.)

As for the rest...I'm not sure I could put a finger on just why I don't like Carcase, but I think because there's just so much unpleasantness in it. It's a necessary part of the arc, I just don't like to read it. And it feels too long. :D Whereas Gaudy is probably the same length but seems like every scene means more to the overall story.

I don't mind Bunter/Peter, and I can see the UST, but I'd have a hard time writing it with the same explicitness I could write -- well, Jack/Ianto, say. I just keep thinking how offended Bunter would be that I'd written it. :D I do love the idea of Bunter helping Peter back on his feet -- have you read Devil Took The Soldier Boy? Not to self-recc, but it's focused around Bunter's arrival to help Peter, and I think you might like it. http://sam-storyteller.livejournal.com/38530.html is the url; there's a link to my LPW tag, though "Nothing Constant" isn't really LPW, it just uses themes from the Wimseyverse.

[copperbadge]

Oh -- and have you read the ephemera story Sayers wrote for a newspaper during the war, documenting Peter and Harriet's various adventures during WWII? I have them archived at http://community.livejournal.com/commonplace_sam/53631.html but I haven't actually read them myself yet.

[kalichan]

From the Spectator, no? I haven't read 'em yet, but bits of 'em have been summed up for me. Also, I presume they were used as the basis for the Walsh books. I really like her whole deal about Peter as a complete person, and the quote you mention re: time/timelessness; it sort of highlights my ideas on serial fiction, and characters coming alive. I love that Harriet was meant to be Peter's kinder Reichenbach Falls... and then they obstinately refused to twitter off into happily-ever-after exile. There's something real about them. And I love how Sayers said that Peter never left her head, but stayed there for all the rest of her life, even after she'd quit writing him, and she was always holding things up to the "bar of his opinion."

I've been saving the rest of your Wimseyfic for when I finish this latest re-read. I watched the dvds, read all the Harriet ones, and am now working my way through the rest of the corpus. Almost done with Unnatural Death, now so fic ahoy soon. I'll check out the one you mention; sounds just in my line.

I was pretty fond of your Royal Society one ;-) They are quite a bunch, all of them. Competance is so... hot.

Your proposed library weekend sounds pretty cool; if you discover any lost works, let me know. I'd love a chance to get up there myself someday, fear of ms's and handwriting aside.

[copperbadge]

Sayers never wrote the easy loves. I reckon because she never had any of her own. Which is just as well, because most of us don't, and Peter and Harriet are much more interesting than almost any other couple in the literature of the time, IMO.

(I do love Nero and Archie's timelessness, though; it makes me think they're still out there somewhere solving crimes, and Wolfe is FURIOUS that cable television EXISTS.)

Okay, for serious, I don't mean to be like HEY LOOK AT THIS NEXT but you pushed my LPW geekout button, and I haven't gotten to geek about Sayers in ages. I have the radio plays of Busman's and MMA with Ian Carmichael if you want those, and also a BBC docu about the books, with Jill Walsh, done in I think the early 80s.

Wheaton is a terrifying little town, super-religious (three bookstores, all Christian) and basically built around an ultra-fundie college, but their library is remarkably well-stocked. They have archives (first-editions, manuscripts, etc) of "The Seven": seven popular fiction writers who also wrote on Christian themes. Sayers, Tolkien, and CS Lewis are the only three I can recall off the top of my head.

[kalichan]

Sayers never wrote the easy loves. I reckon because she never had any of her own. Which is just as well, because most of us don't, and Peter and Harriet are much more interesting than almost any other couple in the literature of the time, IMO.

Right there with you. And they stay interesting, which I find fascinating. So much of romance (or other genre fiction) is goal oriented, which I find... less than satisfying at times. I mean, even as they experience one stage -- and the culminations of books are always satisfying -- they move on to the next. Married or not. It's not neat, and they don't stagnate. I love the part in Busman's Honeymoon (and I think it was an intriguing change from/addition to the play version) where there's all the angst about sending the prisoner to the gallows. And Bunter tells us that there always is. Whoever heard of a detective story going there???

Also, ghosts! They have ghosts.

The other thing I love about Sayers is that she seems really just; the world of the novels is not always approving of Peter, or Harriet, or whatever. That makes the characters even more lovable to me somehow.

Feel free to "hey look at this next" -- especially when you come bearing such goodies. Want, want, want.

Is is the rest of the Inklings? Charles Williams and all them? Now there's a group I'd like to have a few drinks with. Imagine those being your colleagues at the office water cooler or whatever.

[chiara7]

Dead on about the easy loves. And you know, the best thing is that this makes both Harriet's long resistance and her capitulation the more believable. Even when they've taken refuge in each other, they know that it's not a place of total safety; they have to keep working at their happiness and there's always an element of risk. That lack of complacency, that sense that both their friendship and their passion contain minefields -- that's a tremendously difficult thing to write; it must also have seemed a fairly radical view of marriage at its time (since people who held those sorts of values often chose not to marry).

[kalichan]

They really are very radical novels in a number of ways. I know Sayers gets a lot of flack for her classist/racist/anti-semitic things, but taken in context... and for what they say about partnership and women's work... it's all quite staggering, I think.

[copperbadge]

I think it must be the Inklings, yes -- the name sounds familiar, although I wasn't paying much attention. I was mostly just interested in the T;D manuscript, and while I have nothing per se against Christianity (anymore) I always get wigged out when my favourite writers are fetishised for their religious beliefs.

(I suspect this has something to do with finding out my beloved Narnia books were Christian allegory right at the height of my teenage rebellious years. I still feel BETRAYED.)

I have to say, Sayers was probably a lot more fun to hang out with when she was young. :D She was obviously a brilliant writer all her life, but from what I've seen I think she got rather staid in her later years.

[kalichan]

(I suspect this has something to do with finding out my beloved Narnia books were Christian allegory right at the height of my teenage rebellious years. I still feel BETRAYED.)

My betrayal still runs strong as well, but not as strong as most; I suspect this is because I was always an outsider to Christianity, so had less trouble making it one mythology among many. (When it has aesthetic appeal. Lots of Christian stuff doesn't.)

Just re-read The Last Battle when I taught it last semester and was overly amused at the Stable which is Bigger on the Inside. But these days I see lots of things with TARDIS-shaped/colored goggles. CURSES ON YOU, WHO!

[chiara7]

Thank you so much for posting your research! Nothing like going to the original, eh?

It's interesting, and as you say, creepy, to hear that Sayers had a more extended sequence about Denver appraising Harriet. The books make it clear that he's concerned with her childbearing, and since Harriet brings no social advantages, it's very like him to concentrate on the sexual ones. And Denver's not the kind of man to think about those sorts of things abstractly.

It's also interesting in light of Peter's reactions to Mrs. Grimethorpe in Clouds of Witness. There's a strong suggestion that the brothers share sexual tastes.

I can only deal with Bunter/Peter as UST, for which I think it's frankly perfect; Bunter definitely fetishizes Peter's appearance and accoutrements over and beyond the call of professionalism, IMO. And Peter needs Bunter's approval more than anyone's, at least until Harriet comes along. So. Off to read your fic, which somehow slipped by me!

[copperbadge]

I don't think Denver has ever thought about sex abstractly in his life. (Possibly he is Jack Harkness. Or a distant ancestor anyway.)

[nineveh_uk]

Tennant would look fine with a deep gold blond, as long as they did his eyebrows and paled him out a little with makeup. He has the nose for it, and Peter's actually quite manic at times.

And if you chopped his legs off mid-calf. But if you're going to do that you might as well go for Paul Bettany, who is naturally blond.

I did a fanfic-secret once as Charles, where he admits he married Mary so that Peter would never leave him. :D
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