Strong Poison

An extract from Os Guinness' book, Fool's Talk. (Chapter 3) Just thought Fans of LPW might be interested in references to him found in literature. smile emoticon

"For readers of Dorothy Sayers’s novels, Harriet Vane is an important character because in many ways she is the author’s double. Like Sayers, she is a mystery writer. Like Sayers, she gained a first class degree at Oxford University, and like Sayers, she has a formidable mind. (Sayers was one of the first woman graduates in Oxford history.) And like Sayers too, she had affairs. In Harriet’s case, she frequented artists’ circles in Bloomsbury, where she lived with her lover for a year—a less successful writer, Philip Boyes. He claimed not to believe in marriage, so she was persuaded to live with him without marrying.

Sayers’s own affairs were not publicly known during her lifetime, and there are key differences between her life and that of her fictional stand-in. But the public was aware of some of the similarities, and they engaged in a lively correspondence with Sayers about the advisability of that “horrid girl” having such a place in the life of Sayers and their real hero, the debonair and aristocratic Lord Peter Wimsey.

It would be several books and many adventures before Harriet accepted Peter’s proposal and became Lady Wimsey. But the novel in which they are brought together closely is Strong Poison, published in 1930, and the reason hinges on a key part of the logic of the Christian faith that meant so much to Dorothy Sayers. After Boyes and Harriet had lived together for a year, he asked her to marry him, now assured that she loved him. Her reaction, however, was indignation. Furious with him, she broke off the relationship altogether—outraged at his hypocrisy and at being offered a wedding ring as what she considered a “bad-conduct prize” for living with him.

Soon after the breakup, Boyes was found dead through arsenic poisoning, which was the very murder method Harriet had researched for the book she was writing. She at once became the prime suspect, with a strong and obvious motive, and all the circumstantial evidence against her. So she was arrested, tried for murder and looked to be staring at the hangman’s noose.

Harriet’s prospects were grim. The case against her looked watertight, and the prosecution pressed for a guilty verdict. She had the motivation to kill her former lover, and she had the opportunity. All the known facts of the case were against her, and there were no other suspects. She should obviously hang. When conclusive evidence appears to lock hands with justice, even a rush to judgment seemed appropriate. Harriet Vane had committed a horrible crime, and she would pay the supreme price.

But into that grave situation steps the fearless hero, Lord Peter Wimsey. He knows Harriet, so he believes in her innocence, and his logic has a steel to match the prosecutor’s case: The known facts may be against her, but because he knows her, he knows that the known facts cannot be all the facts. The challenge is to find the missing facts that change the picture entirely. The police had jumped to the wrong conclusion on watertight-seeming evidence that was actually incomplete. Harriet had been unjustly framed. She was innocent, and she did not deserve to die.

Lord Peter argues with his colleagues, “There must be evidence somewhere, you know. I know you have all worked like beavers, but I am going to work like a king beaver. And I have one big advantage over the rest of you . . . I do believe in Miss Vane’s innocence.”
-- Dorothy Sayers, Strong Poison (London: Times Mirror Books, 1970), p. 33.

Leg before wicket and natural law

The word "law" is currently used in two quite distinct meanings. It may describe an arbitrary regulation made by human consent in particular circumstances for a particular purpose, and capable of being promulgated,

enforced, suspended, altered or rescinded without interference with the general scheme of the universe. In this sense we may talk of Roman "Law", the "laws" of civilised warfare, or the "laws" of cricket. Such laws frequently prescribe that certain events shall follow upon certain others; but the second event is not a necessary consequence of the first: the connection between the two is purely formal. Thus, if the ball (correctly bowled) hits the wicket, the batsman is "out". There is, however, no inevitable connection between the impact of the ball upon three wooden stumps and the progress of a human body from a patch of mown grass to a pavilion. The two events are readily separable in theory. If the M.C.C. chose to alter the "law", they could do so immediately, by merely saying so, and no cataclysm of nature would be involved. The l.b.w. (leg before wicket) rule has, in fact, been altered within living memory, and not merely the universe, but even the game, has survived the alteration.

The vote of the M.C.C. about cricket, on the other hand, does not merely alter a set of theories about cricket; it alters the game. That is because cricket is a human invention, whose laws depend for their existence and validity upon human consent and human opinion. There would be no laws and no cricket unless the M.C.C. were in substantial agreement about what sort of thing cricket ought to be-if, for example, one party thought of it as a species of steeplechase, while another considered it to be something in the nature of a ritual dance. Its laws, being based upon a consensus of opinion, can be enforced by the same means; a player who deliberately disregards them will not be invited to play again, since opinion-which made the laws-will unite to punish the law-breaker.

The second condition is, of course, that the arbitrary law shall not run counter to the law of nature. If it does, it not only will not, it cannot be enforced. Thus, if the M.C.C. were to agree, in a thoughtless moment, that the ball must be so hit by the batsman that it should never come down to earth again, cricket would become an impossibility. A vivid sense of reality usually restrains sports committees from promulgating laws of this kind; other legislators occasionally lack this salutary realism.

THE MIND OF THE MAKER, Dorothy L. Sayers 1941

The worst religious films I ever saw

Let me give you an illustration of what I mean. When my play The Zeal of Thy House was produced in London, a dear old pious lady was much struck by the beauty of the four great archangels who stood throughout the play in their heavy, gold robes, eleven feet high from wingtip to sandaltip. She asked with great innocence whether I selected the actors who played the angels “for the excellence of their moral character.”

At least one good actor was selected for this film!
"Any of my personal beliefs or opinions runs the risk of impinging on your own relationship with the movie. I feel movies are best left enigmatic, left raising more questions than answers. I don't want to ever preach. So [whatever you get] from the movie [is] far more interesting than I could ever offer."

I replied that the angels were selected to begin with, not by me but by the producer, who had the technical qualifications for selecting suitable actors – for that was part of his vocation. And that he selected, in the first place, young men who were six feet tall so that they would match properly together. Secondly, angels had to be of good physique, so as to be able to stand stiff on the stage for two and a half hours, carrying the weight of their wings and costumes, without wobbling, or fidgeting, or fainting.

Thirdly, they had to be able to speak verse well, in an agreeable voice and audibly. Fourthly, they had to be reasonable good actors. When all these technical conditions had been fulfilled, we might come to the moral qualities, of which the first would be the ability to arrive on stage punctually and in a sober condition, since the curtain must go up on time, and a drunken angel would be indecorous.

After that, and only after that, one might take character into consideration, but that, provided his behavior was not so scandalous as to cause dissension among the company, the right kind of actor with no morals would give a far more reverent and seemly performance than a saintly actor with the wrong technical qualifications. The worst religious films I ever saw were produced by a company which chose its staff exclusively for their piety. Bad photography, bad acting, and bad dialogue produced a result so grotesquely irreverent that the pictures could not have been shown in churches without bringing Christianity into contempt.

God is not served by technical incompetence; and incompetence and untruth always result when the secular vocation is treated as a thing alien to religion….
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Why Work?: Discovering Real Purpose, Peace, and Fulfillment at Work. a Christian Perspective.