Piccadilly and shell-shock | 22 February 2008

I’m reading Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, published in 1925 and set in 1923, the year Sayers’s Whose Body was published. The edition I’m reading (Penguin Modern Classics) has a map of Central London at the time. Lord Peter Wimsey lives at 110A Piccadilly, which I believe Clarissa would have walked by on her way to buy flowers. It’s exciting to see literary worlds collide.

One of the things I find fascinating about Wimsey (aside from his dogged pursuit of one Miss Vane) is his response to the results of his investigations — his reaction to having brought someone to death, though it also be to justice — in some cases, his detecting even leads the murderer to kill more people before she is caught. Having suffered a breakdown due to shell-shock during the Great War, and recovered thanks to his inestimable man Bunter, years later Wimsey continues to suffer occasional and short-lived relapses, brought on by the resolution of his cases, by again having responsibility for the lives of others, as he did in the war. This sensitivity is such a contrast to Wimsey’s inexhaustible intellect and high-spirited energy for detectin’.

The portrayal of the effects of shell-shock in Mrs. Dalloway is much different. Septimus Warren Smith is nearly insane, and Woolf puts us inside his head:

A marvellous discovery indeed — that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life! Happily Rezia put her hand with a tremendous weight on his knee so that he was weighted down, transfixed, or the excitement of the elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling with all their leaves alight and the colour thinning and thickening from blue to the green of a hollow wave, like plumes on horses’ heads, feathers on ladies’, so proudly they rose and fell, so superbly, would have sent him mad. But he would not go mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no more.

Wimsey has Bunter and, by the end of Busman’s Honeymoon, Harriet; Septimus has his wife, Rezia, who is (at least so far) not understanding or compassionate. Sayers was never able to kill off Wimsey, as she apparently would’ve liked to, but I hear (accidentally read) that Septimus won’t be so lucky at Woolf’s hand.

If this were an essay, at this point an English professor (or a much-loathed TA) would bark, “So what?”

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