Lord Peter Wimsey's Dream

The nightmare at Tallboys

I’m not a huge fan of dream sequences in novels. They can sometimes feel as if the author is giving up on the constraints and discipline of writing inventively, in favour of a mode where anything can happen and so nothing matters much. Particularly in a post-Freudian world, they can be an excuse to present the reader with “the meaning” of a situation or a plot, without either writer or reader going through the hassle of discerning that meaning in events or people. (Gosh, I make reading novels sound like hard work. I honestly don’t think it is. I’m just impressed by how well good writers build meaning without having to signal it as a “message”.) And, at their worst, dream sequences can provide an opportunity for wackiness and self-consciously whimsical writing. I’m mildly allergic to books which are pleased with their own wackiness, like the accountant who makes a point of showing off his stripy socks.

Which is not to say dream sequences can’t be fascinating or enjoyable. It would be too sweeping to condemn them outright on the basis of my own prejudices. Not to mention the fact that anyone who puts dream sequences under anathema is going to exile themselves from the turning point of Prince Caspian, and wouldn’t get past the first page of Rebecca. Not at all a fair prospect. And passages in books which describe things “as if in a dream…” have their value too, though I think that needs careful handling.

Detective fiction has a particular use for dream sequences. In the classical version of the form, the author has to manage a situation where (usually) the reader sees everything which the detective sees, but does not have full access to their thoughts. (Otherwise bang goes the suspense.) This can be managed via a sidekick like Watson, Hastings or Lewis, who duplicates the detective’s movements and outward perceptions, without allowing us to see inside the little grey cells. Another, slightly more abstruse way, is for the reader to have access to the detective’s thoughts, without those thoughts constituting the whole of the detection process. This sounds pretty oblique, but it happens in the Miss Marple novel A Caribbean Mystery. We “overhear” most of Miss Marple’s thoughts, but whilst she is dozing between sleep and wakefulness thee are moments when her mind is clearly working without it being clear to either her or us what she is exactly thinking. And indeed a very alert reader will notice that she thinks something about a piece of glass which holds a clue to the mystery, but she does not realize it at the time.

This provides a situation where the author can hint at the solution to the crime without giving it away completely. The familiar tendency of dreams to include people or objects seen by the dreamer recently allows the text to highlight to the reader which elements of the story so far they should be thinking about, but to present them in a puzzling or misleading jumble. Something like this happens in the dream sequence in Christie’s The Moving Finger, where the main character dreams he is watching a wedding in the local church, involving people from the story so far.

I’d like to discuss a dream sequence which does even more than this, Peter Wimsey’s dream in Busman’s Honeymoon presents a more complex and subtle set of elements. It implicitly provides clues to the crime, and at the same time it suggests the tensions in Peter’s feelings about his role as detective. As many readers will no doubt know, Peter and his new bride Harriet are spending their honeymoon in an old house in the rural area where Harriet grew up. They discover that the previous owner, from whom they bought the house, is dead in the cellar.

FAIR WARNING: the following discussion of the dream will initially reveal the means by which the crime was committed, and then finally mention the identity of the killer. Anyone who doesn’t want to know anything about the crime should bail out now, and I’ll add another warning below for those who want to leave before the murderer is revealed.

An investigation begins, and Harriet mentions that Peter seems to have been troubled by a dream:

“Peter, what were you dreaming about early this morning? It sounded pretty awful.” He looked vexed.

“Oh, my God, have I started that again? I thought I’d learnt to keep my dreams to myself. Did I say things? Tell me the worst.”

“I couldn’t make out what you said. But it sounded as though--to put it mildly--you had something on your mind.”

“What an agreeable companion I must be,” he said, bitterly. “I know. I’ve been told about it before. The perfect bedfellow--so long as I keep awake. I’d no business to risk it; but one always hopes one’s going to come right again some time. In future I’ll remove myself.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Peter. You stopped dreaming as soon as I got hold of you.”

“So I did. It comes back to me now.... Fifteen of us, marching across a prickly desert, and we were all chained together. There was something I had forgotten--to do or tell somebody--but I couldn’t stop, because of the chain.... Our mouths were full of sand, and there were flies and things.... We were in dark blue uniforms, and we had to go on....” He broke off. “I don’t know why blue uniforms--it’s usually something to do with the War. And telling one’s dreams is the last word in egotism.”

“I want to hear it; it sounds perfectly foul.”

“Well, it was, in a way.... Our boots were broken with the march.... When I looked down, I saw the bones of my own feet, and they were black, because we’d been hanged in chains a long time ago and were beginning to come to pieces.”

“Mais priez dieu que tous nous veuille absoudre.”

“Yes, that’s it. Very like the Ballade des Pendus. Only it was hot, with a sky like brass--and we knew that the end of the journey would be worse than the beginning. And it was all my fault, because I’d forgotten--whatever it was.”

“What was the end of it?”

“It didn’t end. It changed when you touched me--something about rain and a bunch of chrysanthemums....

This horrific dreamscape blends a number of details on which a reader who has completed the book can exercise the psychoanalyst’s craft (since they in fact know what is being glanced at by Peter’s subconscious mind.) The marching and the uniforms, as he notes, are because the trauma dreams began as a result of his service in the First World War. Previous novels mention that at one point during the war his trench was hit by a shell and Wimsey was buried in debris, then dug out by Bunter. (At that point in their relationship Bunter was Lord Peter’s sergeant; it was later in civilian life that he became a valet.) The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club is all about the different ways the war left its mark on Peter and his comrades, and there are scattered references in Sayers’ other books.

The terrible sense that the whole scene is his fault, that he had forgotten to do or say something is also an emotional residue of his military service. One of the distinctive elements of trench warfare, when compared to previous conflicts (according to historians), was the way it enforced a certain kind of passivity on soldiers. In the campaign in France British officers and men spent more time taking cover from threats which they could not see or predict, which thus produced a particular kind of stress and trauma. It has been suggested that “shell shock”, and the various forms it took, was connected to this distinctively new form of horror in war. It made demands upon the soldiers which their training and their previous life had not prepared them for; traditional notions of “courage” and manhood could not sustain them. Wimsey’s sense that the men around him are suffering because he has failed them somehow is apparently a reflection of the experiences of an infantry officer, whose men are dying without his being able to do anything about it.

This is also, however, where the dream brings his war trauma together with the details of the detective plot. He mentions that they were marching across a “prickly desert” and their mouths were full of sand. This diverges from what we know of Wimsey’s military experience from the other books. He served on the Western Front, in France, in both the infantry and military intelligence. There doesn’t seem to be any chance that this would have involved marching across a desert in great heat. There were military operations in North Africa during the First World War, though they weren’t as extensive as in the Second. British forces were involved in campaigns there which would have involve soldiers marching through the Western Desert, but there is no suggestion Wimsey was one of them. This discrepancy should catch our attention, both as dream interpreters and readers of mystery fiction. Where there is a discrepancy, there is a clue.

And it certainly is a clue. As will become clear in the denouement of the novel, the murder was committed by the killer suspending a heavy bronze cactus pot by means of a length of twine, in such a way that it would swing down and smash into the head of whoever opened the cabinet of a radio. A related, and crucial, detail is the length and location of the chain from which the pot was usually hung. The fact that Wimsey and the uniformed men are walking across a desert, when he only saw service in the muddy landscapes of northern France, is a hint that something else is trying to surface in his mind. The “prickly desert” is as close to thinking about a cactus as he has managed, and they are chained together because Wimsey has subconsciously noticed that the chain on the pot is important. (It has possibly also become mixed up with the pot-chain which fell down the chimney earlier in the novel, which is itself a hint for the reader to start thinking about chains and things suspended from them.) Peter’s sense that he is responsible for something which he had forgotten is a signal that the solution to the mystery is present in this dream somewhere. He knows he has noticed something, but cannot work out what he knows that is so vital.

However, the dream is also an expression of his mental conflict, since he both wants to recognize what he has instinctively noted about the room where the murder was committed, and also to prevent himself from seeing it. This is where Sayers’ use of the dreamscape goes far beyond the use made of it by most writers in the genre. She’s not simply showing us a muddle of clues, but dramatizing Wimsey’s own reluctance to piece them together. This is surely influenced by Freud’s writing on dreams, which argues that they are attempts by the unconscious mind to process repressed desires and internal conflicts. The dream is not just a fictional device here; Wimsey is deeply ambivalent about his role as a detective. He expresses concerns across the novels that he is indulging himself in it as a hobby, that he is morally unworthy to pass judgement on others, that his meddling may cause harm, and that he is effectively killing someone by handing them over to the authorities to be tried for a capital crime. He both wants to solve the crime and wants to avoid responsibility for another death; he knows he has noticed something crucial and wishes to avoid seeing it.

If he takes hold of the clues about the cactus and the chain with his conscious mind, it will result in the murderer being tried for murder and – if convicted – executed. The image of the men already having been hung in chains brings together these facts, linking the clue of the chain with the death by hanging which is the logical outcome of a murder trial in 1930s Britain. There is some light disguise in the fact that no ropes are present in the scene, but the word “hang” is. Moreover, hanging a body in chains, or “gibbeting” it, happened in English law after the execution of the criminal. The opening of Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel involves the protagonist remembering a time in his youth when he saw a body hung on a gibbet. There is another shade of meaning here too, I think. Hanging in chains is not simply a mental substitution for hanging by a rope, nor is it only to emphasize the significance of the chain. Hanging a body in chains was done as a way of publicly putting particular shame and stigma on the crime they had committed. It was intended as a way of calling upon the population as a whole to condemn them.

This is why it was done in cases such as highway robbery, piracy, and treason. Tales of famous traitors often involve this detail, to either allow the viewers to be assured that no usurper would take over the land, or to cow them into never trying a spot of rebellion themselves. I think this is part of the image’s meaning: there has been treason and betrayal. Wimsey’s own sense of responsibility and guilt has transformed the deaths of the men under his command into his own treason. At the same time, Wimsey himself has become identified with England during the opening chapters of Busman’s Honeymoon. Harriet is used to seeing him as a metropolitan dilettante, and in Gaudy Night she is unsettled by seeing that everyone at Oxford regards him as a scholar. As they arrive in the country and get used to the house, as Peter shows himself at home with the local vicar and the village inhabitants, Harriet suddenly sees him as a country gentleman. “I have married England”, she thinks. The murder committed in this idyllic rural parish is, in this sense, a crime against England. When the culprit is found, they will have committed a sort of treason.

We might speculate on the significance of there being fifteen men in the dream. My first thought is that they represent the people who will be involved when when sentence of death is passed. Fifteen would be the sum of twelve jurors, the judge, the condemned person, and Wimsey himself. Or is it a literary joke about the means by which the crime was committed? Hanging in chains… pirates… “fifteen men on a dead man’s chest/ Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum”… the radio cabinet is what killed him, it’s the dead man’s chest…? Maybe that is too speculative, but it does have a certain dream-logic to it.

FAIR WARNING: the final paragraphs will reveal the killer’s identity, please depart now if you don’t want to know!

The layering of Wimsey’s war trauma over the prospect of legal action is probably also the reason why the figures in the dream wearing blue. This can’t be a detail from his war service, since the British Expeditionary Force wore khaki. Prison warders and police officers wore blue unforms: the dream presents Wimsey as both a member of a chain gang of convicts and the person responsible for their punishment. The line of poetry which Harriet quotes touches on the tension which runs through the whole dream:

“Mais priez dieu que tous nous veuille absoudre.”

“Yes, that’s it. Very like the Ballade des Pendus.

Francois Villon’s fifteenth-century Ballade des Pendus translates as the Ballad of the Hanged Men, and the line she cites means roughly “But pray to God that we may all be absolved”. The poem is voiced as an entreaty from bodies on the gibbet to those who pass by, not to condemn them but to pray for their souls. Harriet seems to have acquired some of Sayers’ own love of medieval French poetry. She also seems to have intuited some of the emotional meaning of the dream, since the speakers of Villon’s poem insist that those who see the hanging bodies should recognize them as fellow men and fellow sinners. The poem opens thus:

Freres humains qui après nous vivez,
N’ayez les cuers contre nous endurcis,
Car, se pitié de nous povres avez,
Dieu en aura plus tost de vous mercis.

Rendered very roughly, this reads, “Brother humans who live after us, Do not have hearts hardened against us, For, if you have pity for we poor ones, God will have greater mercy to you”. The second verse begins similarly:

Sevous clamons freres, pas n’en devez
Avoir desdaing, quoy que fusmes occis
Parjustice

Again, roughly: “Should we call you brothers, do not be scornful about it, just because we were killed through justice”. Harriet has perhaps identified the source of the imagery which tormented Wimsey (since they both seem to know Villon’s poem), but she has also sensed at least part of the conflict which it represents. There is little enough in Wimsey’s description to call up the pleading of Villon’s hanging bodies, but she understands that this is a question of “brotherhood” in condemnation, and shared guilt.

Wimsey’s account of the hot sun underlines the question of condemnation. When he says the sky was like brass, he is quoting – whether consciously or not – from Deuteronomy. After the giving of the Law, various blessing are enumerated which will accrue from keeping it, and various curses which will result from breaking it:

But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee […] And thy heaven which is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under the shall be iron. The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust; from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed. The Lord shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies

This association of the dessert sun with brass underlines the feeling that this is all happening because the law has been broken. It is also another clue to the means of the murder: it involves both a chain and a brass pot, which fell from above. Exactly who is to blame is the heart of the conflict which Wimsey’s dream coils around. The question of “brotherhood” points towards a male killer, though only faintly. The fact that Wimsey’s turmoil is so easily layered onto his war guilt gives another hint. As we discover, the murdered is the garage-mechanic Frank Crutchley. A young, energetic working-class man of fighting age. If Wimsey manages to recognize the significance of the prickly desert, the chain, the brass sky and all the other details in the dream, the result will be the death of one more working-class young man. In other words, he will have deliberately repeated the failing which he experienced so many times as an aristocratic infantry officer in France, for which neither his conscious nor his subconscious mind can ever forgive him.

Wimsey’s dream strikes me as an astonishing piece of work by Sayers. It brings together so many strands of plot with Peter’s own turbulent psychological landscape, and produces a multi-layered, ambiguous series of images which both conceal and reveal the secrets hidden in the house. It doesn’t simply give the reader some clues, it enacts the conflicts which are preventing Wimsey from solving the crime. Harriet’s quoting of the medieval French poem hints that Peter has finally found somehow who might understand. There is absolutely no sense here of my complaint that dream sequences can be an excuse to escape from the complexities of writing: quite the reverse!