Swanvale Halt Book Club: "Gaudy Night" by Dorothy L Sayers (Gollancz, 1935)

A friend may be leaving Oxford, a city she loves, after more than two decades. The 1930s is not her favoured period, but having heard Dorothy L Sayers’s Gaudy Night described as ‘a love letter to Oxford disguised as a mystery novel’, I thought I’d buy an appropriately elderly copy as a present. I felt I should read it first, never having done any Sayers. 

Good heavens, it was hard going. The action focuses on a fictional women’s college based on Somerville, the author’s alma mater, located somewhere off Jowett’s Walk where the modern Balliol housing now stands; and many of the characters, and suspects in the crime, are the college’s academic staff, a parade of virtually-indistinguishable Misses This or That, occasionally and even more confusingly referred to by their title instead of their name. They engage in bouts of verbal sparring of the kind I thought I might encounter myself in Oxford, but never did: perhaps such displays of intellectual prowess had died out long before I arrived, around the time fluency in Latin stopped being an entry exam requirement.

And at the heart of that is Lord Peter Wimsey, quite the most loathsomely annoying character I have ever read presented as a hero. Any such person you might meet in real life, whose every other sentence is a recondite quotation and who politely refrains from making his intellectual superiority over everyone else around them too apparent except obliquely, would be an individual you would quickly learn to avoid. The romance between Wimsey and Harriet Vane is part of the story, and you cannot help feeling she has been absolutely correct to repel his matrimonial suggestions for five years and should very much carry on doing so. At one point Harriet has discovered that the antique chess pieces he has bought for her from an Oxford antiques shop have been violently smashed by the unknown miscreant causing havoc to the College’s wellbeing. One pawn has survived:

“My dear girl [counsels Wimsey], don’t cry about it. What the hell does it matter?”

“I loved them”, said Harriet, “and you gave them to me.”

He shook his head.

“It’s a pity it’s that way round. ‘You gave them to me, and I loved them’ is all right, but ‘I loved them and you gave them to me’ is irreparable …”

A quotation, with grim inevitability, follows. At this point, were I Miss Vane, the antiquity and belovedness of the chess-set notwithstanding, I would have found a use for that surviving pawn that His Lordship might have been surprised by.

Allied to the maddening quality of Peter Wimsey is the tendency of this novel – as so many of the mid-twentieth century – to drew conclusions about its characters from their physical appearance. Harriet notes that Lord Peter’s nephew, a student at Christ Church who falls a bit in love with her, has similar features to Peter’s but ‘with a certain weakness about the jaw’. Of course the dashing aristocratic detective is a master at this dubious neo-phrenological analysis, but everyone in the book whose inner thoughts we know does it, and it’s a feature you simply cannot imagine emerging in fiction now. How did it come to an end?

This all adds up to a high price for a spot of Oxford romanticism. But as the narrative builds towards the climactic unmasking of the villain, there is a certain cathartic violence which culminates in the speech that villain gives to the assembled members of the College, an attack on both academic culture and first-wave feminism so daring, violent, and all-encompassing, that it almost justifies the time you have spent reading so far: regardless of whether you agree with the character in question, which Sayers certainly does not. Whether I will in fact pass Gaudy Night on as planned having experienced it, I am not decided!

[The picture shows 'the first cheap edition' of 1936, a copy of which I purchased at a very modest price. The presence of the original dust jacket would have raised it to £200 or more.]

Keeping a Kind of Vigil

It wasn't the first time I found myself negotiating my way through another sort of spiritual space. On St George's Day this week - the customary St George's Day, though in the Church calendar the Great-Martyr George has been bumped backward to next Monday because you can't celebrate a feast day in the Octave of Easter - I attended the monthly Vigil at Crossbones Graveyard in Southwark. Without recounting the contested history of the site, which you can look up for yourself, in later years the graveyard has become 'a shrine for the outcast dead' as that history has been recovered, publicised, and acknowledged, and therefore part of the consciousness of those living who also feel themselves marginalised and outcast and who read their own experiences in those souls who are memorialised at Crossbones. Although the acknowledgment of the site has included recognition by the cathedral community mere yards away, this place belongs to those the Church has traditionally pushed away, which makes it all the more affecting that it can make sincere use of Christian imagery and words from time to time.

This week's Vigil was especially poignant as it took place after an apparent attack on the shrine, burning some of the memorials and decorations. It was stressed that the rituals weren't religious, and indeed there is nothing specifically religious about burning incense, ringing bells, silence, tying ribbons in remembrance, and reciting poems. It was only the final bit I felt I had to stand back from - a collective act of re-hallowing the memorial by the assembled community touching the gates, while a prayer was recited and repeated with the aim of 'concentrating energy', a mode of operating that goes all the way back to the New Thought of the 1880s. It was described as an act of 'magic', so I touched nothing and said nothing. But then, it seems to me, Crossbones is a place of integrity, for me as for anyone.

Holy Week 2025 ...

… has offered a variety of experiences.

Monday: I attend on my Spiritual Director and mention that the Bishop, for the first time ever, is doing my ministerial review this year. 

    Me: I don’t want to say the wrong thing. 

    SD: Would it matter if you said the wrong thing? 

    Me: Well, he is my father-in-Christ to whom I owe canonical obedience – 

    SD: Oh, don’t give me that ****ing ****.

Wednesday: The new Dean at the Cathedral offers to hear confessions at a set time for the first occasion in years. I don’t have much to say but go and find myself tearful with thanks.

Thursday: I and Il Rettore are back at the Cathedral for the Chrism Mass. As always, the Bishop preaches but delegates the service and blessing of oils to his suffragan, which mitigates the point of the whole thing somewhat. I am tired enough to enter a dubious state during his sermon in which I hear every word but can’t recall a single one. (At least I think I am hearing them: I’ve noticed that when I reach the stage of nodding off while reading in bed I can start fully awake and then fail to find on the page the words I have just read absolutely clearly). Fr Donald from Lamford, sitting beside me, makes some theological point I can barely understand. Afterwards Il Rettore asks me what I thought and I tell him the Devil seldom rages at me as hard as during the Chrism Mass. He shares that he felt like walking out during the sermon. At the Maundy Thursday vigil I do my usual exercise of bringing my friends into Gethsemane. Of course Professor Cotillion’s dogs are there, and Bartle barks to keep the demons away while Brindle licks the Lord’s hand to comfort him.

Friday: During the Mass of the Presanctified I get caught out by Drop Drop Slow Tears as the communion hymn and almost can’t carry on. In her new position in a big choral church in the North, my friend Cara has her first experience of prostrating herself in their equivalent liturgy and finds it ‘curiously restful’. Two priests of the Society mansplain administering the chalice to her during the administration itself: ‘I’ll administer it in a way you really won’t like in a minute’, she didn’t say. Paula the pastoral assistant and her husband Peter drop off hot-cross buns on my doorstep which present the ideal way of breaking my fast in the evening.

Saturday: I take communion to Janet, among others that day. We get to the end, and then she says ‘Did I tell you my friend is going to bring me to church tomorrow? I didn’t like to tell you not to come after all. Thank you, I know you’re so busy’. I mentally tot up all the things I have yet to do, from polishing the wall plaques to setting out the crockery for breakfast tomorrow.

Easter Day: A few fewer than in recent years at the Dawn Mass but the other services drew numbers pretty similar to last year. A pink rubber duck appeared in the churchyard, apparently part of a cancer awareness campaign, so it came to the Dawn Mass and I popped a photo on LiberFaciorum.

Decease of pontiffs notwithstanding, happy Easter Week to you all!

Healing Words, Maybe

Past healing masses at Swanvale Halt haven't gone all that well, but eight souls at last night's for Holy Week was all right. The priest rehearses the words and actions of Jesus at every eucharist anyway, and yet it seemed like a special kind of impertinence - a sense of 'privilege', which is what you're supposed to say, was far away - to lay my hand on people's heads and recite 'Receive God's healing touch to make you whole'. 

Only a few minutes before we began I discovered that my homily notes were nowhere to be found, so I had to try and remember what I wanted to say. Il Rettore said it had effectively skated the theological thin ice that holds the healing service up above the abyssal waters of blaming God for our sorrows or blaming ourselves, so I thought I'd put a tidied-up version here. 

When people tell you in response to you sharing some trouble that ‘God has a plan’ they mean it kindly, but it raises questions about the purpose of what happens to us. If we think that our sufferings and sorrows are God’s choice for us, what does ‘healing’ mean?

We can understand healing in different ways – the palpable, natural problems we have that we ask for help with, and the inward shift in our attitudes and understanding that enables us to see things differently. Both make sense: the fact that in the Gospels people come to Jesus and he very much does heal physical issues implies that Christian healing doesn’t only mean passive acceptance of what might come our way, though it might include coming to see our problems in a new light.

Preparing the readings I was reminded of the way the coming of the Christ is prepared for through long ages, foreshadowed in the declarations of the Prophets. God’s saving work unfolds across the centuries, and in so far as we are united with Jesus, we and what befalls us are part of that narrative. We can be confident that, though the fallen world may be arbitrary, and therefore no direct reason lies behind whatever sorrows and sufferings come our way, God is not.

As we follow the way of Christ this Holy Week, we find that he is the site of understanding, the means by which we can place what happens to us in the light of God’s purposes. The events of his passion and resurrection point towards that time when even our sorrows and pains will be made sense of. Christian healing is a declaration of faith in that, here and now.

Ready for Anything

Last Wednesday we finished the five sessions of the Lent course I’d put together, the first time in several years that we’d done anything of the kind. I wanted to do something that both encouraged and equipped laypeople to take on more of the spiritual management of the church if no ordained people were available. Say a church at the Catholic end of the spectrum has no prospect of an incumbent for some time, and visiting priests coming in on a Sunday now and then: what can laypeople do to maintain its spiritual life? I did sessions on the nature of the Church and its mission; how the Church relates to society, and society to it (somewhat sobering, bits of that); the Church calendar; the building as a house for prayer; and shoehorned in something about faith-sharing for the last one. The diocese will be pleased with that, anyway. I pointed out how ringing the bell is easy, and each session got attenders joining in with a plainchant psalm, because having experienced it I think getting your head round plainchant can really increase people’s confidence. It was a bit of a rod for my own back, but I did each session twice, once on a Monday afternoon and once on a Wednesday evening, to give as many people as possible a chance to attend. Not everyone managed to get to all the instalments, but I was pleased with getting roughly thirty souls along.

When I described the idea, more than one member of the congregation took it as a signal that I was thinking of leaving, which is not the case, but it does rather suggest that they’re a bit scared of that happening. Which maybe means I should! The whole concept of the thing was to reduce laypeoples’ dependence on clergy in general and me in particular, but will that happen in any way while I’m still around?

Biblical Relics

Anna comes to speak to me about various things, including her old family Bible. None of her family wants it, she says, and she doesn't feel she can look after it. What should she do with it?

It's actually a Prayer Book and Bible bound as one volume, and dates from 1773 with all the family names and dates inscribed on an initial leaf (the one in my illustrative picture would be much later). It's potentially a nice artefact, but isn't in good shape: the covers are detached, the leather almost worn away, and it smells strongly enough of mould that you don't want to breathe in too deeply in its company. Despite its date, the problem is that there are simply too many of these Bibles around for anyone other than the family involved to be interested in it, unless there was something unusual about the family or the circumstances in which it was compiled. Every family that could afford a book like this would have had one, and the question of what to do with them regularly arises, at museums as much as at churches (at my last workplace we had a couple). 

The old Jewish custom is that worn-out texts and manuscripts that might contain the name of God are held in a storeroom in the synagogue, the Genizah, and then formally buried perhaps every seven years. Maybe churches should offer a similar service! If nobody in her family was interested in keeping the book, I told Anna, the most respectful thing would be to bury it, to return it to earth. She seemed to like that. I remember doing the same some years ago with copies of the Book of Mormon Mad Trevor gave me, but respect wasn't the issue there.