Gotham Diary:
Gilded Unicorn
2 July 2014

Goofing off a bit yesterday, I read almost half of Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935), the novel set at Oxford in which detective novelist Harriet Vane is at last obliged to seek the help of her savior and would-be suitor, Lord Peter Wimsey, to clear up some unpleasantness at fictional Shrewsbury College. The novel resolves with an interesting proposal — it goes untranslated:

Placetne, domina?
Placet.

This is more than a tribute to Harriet’s scholarly background; it is Lord Peter’s ingenious transmutation of the echoes of submission that cloud affirmative answers to the question, “Will you marry me?” into a request for approval, as of a thesis. “Does it please [you], professor?” “It pleases.” Throughout the novel, Harriet has engaged herself in a furious internal argument about marriage generally and marriage to Wimsey in particular. (Since getting her off the hook for murder, he has proposed several times a year.) She likes Wimsey very much, but doubts that their friendship could survive marriage. Working together on the Shrewsbury case brings Harriet closer to Lord Peter than she has ever been, and her thinking evolves. She finally decides that what draws the man to her is, indeed, her own fierce autonomy. She, and it, will be safe with him.

In the halls of Golden Age British crime, the Wimsey novels will always occupy a hallowed niche, partly because of the romantic yet savvy hero but also because, even in a genre remarkable for its braininess, they stand out for unashamed cosmopolitan learning. Sayers was of course a distinguished Dante scholar; her translation may not be the most mellifluous, but her annotations, which make the three Penguin volumes so fat, are indispensable. In Gaudy Night, there is no doubt that the dons of Shrewsbury are the scholarly equals of their male colleagues — even if some of those males are heard to groan in occasional demurral. Lord Peter himself beautifully responds to mention of “the question of women’s education” by asking, “Is it still a question?” Harriet Vane is in possession of a room of her own, not to mention plenty of guineas (earned by herself). It is true that Gaudy Night is more the climax of the Wimsey series than representative of it, and there is a shocking want of corpses. But Gaudy Night is also less a detective story than a character-based novel. It is not about crime, but about one woman’s struggle with her identity. In the end, she marries the guy, but this resolves her struggle only. It does not answer any larger questions about marriage and independence.

The uniqueness of the case is underlined by the paragon whose proposal Harriet at long last accepts. Lord Peter Wimsey is (we are invited to believe) the finest flower of British aristocracy. Handsome and brave, brilliant, self-possessed, and a complete gentleman, Wimsey nevertheless struggles with the dark absurdity of the Great War, which not only wounded him personally but brought crashing down the hopes and ideals of two centuries of liberal sway. Beneath the great surface charm there is deep melancholy. Beneath the melancholy, however, there is a high-spirited boy. It is the boy in him that earns him the steady disapproval of his sister-in-law, the Duchess of Denver — a disapproval that only makes us love him the more. Rich and well-connected, Wimsey pursues aristocratic leisure whenever he is not solving a mystery or manning a spot diplomatic move on behalf of the Foreign Office. Any woman with her head screwed on would think herself very lucky to be asked to be Lady Peter — except, of course, for Harriet Vane. I’d like to think that Gaudy Night has its place on the smart girl’s shelf, alongside Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre.

As I finished the book, it occurred to me that I do not know, and have never known, any aristocrats — Europeans with titles. I haven’t even known any bogus ones. This is not at all surprising, given my course in life, but it seems a bit odd anyway, because I know so many aristocrats from novels. How much do real and fictional aristocrats have in common? For all I know, Lord Peter Wimsey is a gilded unicorn.

***

Thinking about aristocrats, social classes and social “background,” I wondered, somewhat tangentially, whether my father would have done as well in today’s corporate world as he did in that of half a century ago. (One thing’s certain: had he done as well, he’d have made a great deal more money doing it!) If I haven’t known any aristocrats, I’ve known a few CEOs (all long since retired); I grew up passing them hors d’oeuvres at my parents’ parties.

Just as television has “improved” since its early days, transforming itself from an innocuous and somewhat boring source of last-ditch entertainment to a narcotic monstrosity, so the CEOs have “gotten better,” too. They are more and more a distinct type of human being, and they are aware of this distinction from an early age: it is a kind of athleticism, not unlike the physical giftedness that marked the earliest European aristocrats, who were men strong enough to wage battle on horseback. Physical violence has of course been repressed in the modern counterpart, but the typical chief is younger and more in trim than he used to be, as if his body, no longer called upon to act brutally, nevertheless served as a kind of indispensable hood ornament. The real violence concerns the acquisition of power and money. Sometimes the CEOs do battle among themselves, and this makes for interesting stories in the Business Section. By and large, though, the violence is wrought upon hapless workers who can’t fight back. The modern CEO has learned what pre-industrial capitalists regarded as a rule second only to “buy low and sell high”: the ideal number of employees is zero.

Something else struck me, too, as my thoughts drifted away from Lord Peter Wimsey. The modern CEO is a champion of those who continue to believe that men are just better than women. Women have exploited the law to enforce an ever-rising baseline of gender equality. The CEOs have exploited finance to create ever-rising income inequality in which they stand out, as leading men have always liked to do, as top dogs. The billionaires are, largely if not exclusively, male. Betty Who? Gloria Who? Jane Who? Feminists seem to have missed this successful end run. When women ask to see more women in the CEO slot, they’re missing the point. The CEO slot, in its current form, ought not to exist. It’s as hostile to progressive democracy as the most ponderously constraining nobility ever was.

Daily Blague news update: Fault Lines.