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Wimseyfic
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grondfic I spent some time today following links to all things Wimsical and found this description of an unfinished piece of Wimseyfic by, of all people, Stephen King. And it got me thinking in more depth about the relationship of fanfic to source texts (though purely in a concrete – how does King differ from Sayers? – rather than an abstract sense).
The link is http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/FREEREADRockyWood, and the relevant extract runs as follows:
In what we can read of this aborted novel Lord Peter Wimsey and his servant Bunter are on their way, through ‘beastly rain’ to a party at Sir Patrick Wayne’s estate in the country. Wimsey had last met Sir Patrick in 1934. Wimsey and Bunter discuss the foul weather and the death of Salcomb Hardy, which has put Wimsey in a funk. During the trip the two men’s dry sense of humour becomes apparent.
After they cross ‘…an alarmingly rickety plank bridge which spanned a swollen stream…’, Wimsey calls for a toilet stop and, alerted by the contrast to its more solid nature the previous time he had crossed it, looks at the bridge, only to find that the supports had been cut almost through. Somehow this dangerous discovery seems to have enlivened Wimsey, who calls with ‘…more excitement in his voice than Bunter had heard in a long time … he could not remember how long.’ However, Bunter thinks this flash will pass, ‘… gleams of what Wimsey had been and could not even yet deny utterly. It would pass, and he would become the Wimsey that was in this dull aftermath of the war that had made their war seem like child’s play – a dreary ghost-Wimsey, distracted and vague, a Wimsey who did too much solitary drinking, a Wimsey whose wit had soured.’
Returning to the car Wimsey states that if the heavy weather continues the bridge will collapse. When they return to the road Wimsey even wonders if ‘Sir Pat’ was not himself responsible for trying to isolate his home from the world, considering in particular his ‘…invitation, renewed so tiresomely over the last month and a half, until we quite ran out of excuses. It began to take on a … a flavour, did it not?’ Wimsey and Bunter begin to consider that Sir Patrick might have a problem ‘…requiring certain detective talents…’ Then, ‘Wimsey said quietly, “I don’t detect. I shall never detect again.” Bunter did not reply. “If I hadn’t been off detecting for the British Secret Service, I … what rot.”’ Apparently Wimsey blamed himself for his wife’s death in the Blitz.
Now their thoughts turn to Miss Katherine Climpson, another of Wimsey’s employees. Wimsey tentatively asks how ‘she’ was and Bunter does ‘… not affect to know of whom Lord Peter spoke’. We discover that Climpson is mortally ill with cancer in a hospital near Wimsey’s Picadilly flat and that he had ‘…gone to visit her himself in the first nine weeks of her stay, but at last he had been able to face it no more. He cursed himself for a coward, reviled himself, called himself a slacker and a yellow-livered slug … but he did not go.’ The slow decline of Climpson was, ‘Too much. Harriet was dead; his brother was dead; even Salcomb Hardy was dead; Miss Climpson was dying and Sir Patrick Wayne, a rich old bore who had been knighted for making himself richer at the expense of thousands of lives, was alive and apparently doing fine. “Is tomorrow Halloween, Bunter?” “I believe it is, my lord.” “It should be,” Wimsey said, and helped himself to a cigarette. “It bloody well should be.”’
As Sir Patrick’s house approaches the brakes fail and their Bentley crashes (Bunter, still in character, laconically comments, “We appear to have lost all braking power, my lord”). Chapter One ends at this point.
In the aftermath of the crash and the beginning of Chapter Two Wimsey wakes and calls for Bunter. At this point what we have of the story ends.
Although Wimsey is relatively short there are a number of interesting facts to report.
Sir Patrick Wayne’s estate is seven miles from Little Shapley, England. If the bridge collapsed, there was only one other road, barely a cart track, out of the estate. Wimsey and Bunter were driving to the estate on 30 October 1945 (“is tomorrow Halloween?”), less than six months after the end of the Second World War in Europe.
The only details of note that King provides us with about Wimsey himself are that he was formerly a detective with the British Secret Service, that his wife Harriet Vane Wimsey had died during the German blitz and the reader’s presumption that the elder Duke of Denver was Wimsey’s brother.
Wimsey’s nephew, the current Duke of Denver (‘Jerry’) had visited Sir Patrick Wayne’s daughter until she had become engaged to another man. Jerry had served in the RAF during the Battle of Britain and was one of the relatively few survivors of that action.
Katherine Climpson seems set to be an important character in the novel. She ran Wimsey’s typing bureau, was unmarried, and was dying of cancer in a hospital on Great Ormond Street, London. Salcomb Hardy, who had recently died of a stroke, was a crime reporter and heavy drinker. Wimsey read his obituary in The Times.
King adopted a style for Wimsey that is indeed very English in tone, including a rather dry tone of exchange between Bunter and the title character. It is clear that King was quite capable of delivering in this style, as one might expect from a premier novelist. In one passage, as Bunter pulls the car over for a comfort stop, he reminds his employer, “If you would not take it amiss, my lord, your heavy overcoat is one the hook directly behind you. I’m afraid of the effects of the rain might be on that worsted.” In another Wimsey says, “Let’s go back to the car, Bunter, before we take a chill,” in the best of British aristocratic tones of the 1940s.
Wimsey is mentioned as a literary character in both Bag of Bones and Apt Pupil. Adding this to the fact that King attempted a Wimsey novel leads us to speculate that King is probably a fan of the Wimsey series. King listed Wimsey’s creator, Dorothy L Sayers, as one of the authors he most admired during an interview for The Waldenbook Report in late 1997.
Sayers’ character, Lord Peter Wimsey was immensely popular in the 1920s and 1930s and the books are still read avidly today. The BBC made two successful television series based on the character, starring Ian Carmichael and Peter Haddon in the lead roles, and there were also 1935 and 1940 movies based on two of the novels.
The fourteen novels and additional short stories were all published in the 1920s through the early 1940s and feature Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey, the younger brother of the Duke of Denver and a World War I veteran. His manservant is Bunter. An avid rare book collector, Wimsey develops a penchant for investigating crime, often assisting Detective Inspector Charles Parker, his brother in law. Sayers’ imaginary life of Lord Peter ends in 1942, with Wimsey married to Harriet Vane and the father of three sons. From the Author’s Note in Thrones, Dominations we know that he served in Military Intelligence in World War II.
It seems that King has been faithful to the Wimsey mythology, as we would expect. He has Wimsey married to Harriet, although he extends the mythos by having her die in the Blitz. He also has Wimsey serving in the British Secret Service during the War, linking the note of his serving in Military Intelligence. Readers will conclude from the text that he is the uncle of the current Duke of Denver, which is the way Sayers had it.
***********
Clearly King is planning to strike a rather different note than Sayers. His Wimsey is an emotionally scarred and desiccated creature, who has lost all enthusiasm for life and who has given up detecting. Mortality has caught up with him with a vengeance – Denver is dead, Sally Hardy is dead, Miss Climpson is dying horribly, and he blames himself, in some obscure way for Harriet's death (did the boys also die in the Blitz? It would fit with the bleak tone of the piece if they had). Sayers' Wimsey had also been through ghastly experiences of death and loss – the Great War and Barbara – but his response is a nervous breakdown rather than a descent into what seems very like depression, and he takes up detecting precisely as a way of recovering from that breakdown. All in all, King's story seems likely to be very much more angsty than anything Sayers wrote, although admittedly she was heading that way with Peter's increasingly emotional responses to the death of the murderers he caught ("Doing good that evil may come," as he puts it in Nine Tailors). Thus King is doing what every good fanficcer does – taking a character he loves and inserting him into a scenario he finds more interesting than anything the source texts ever provided him with. And I have to say that so far I'm with him – I'm a complete sucker for well-done examinations of death and loss and the effect they have on people.
But there are other ways in which King's sensibility differs markedly from Sayers' and they're clearly visible in the structure of even this incomplete outline. First of all there's Bunter. King has apparently chosen to make him a lens character, from whose point of view we see Lord Peter (though whether this would have continued past The First Man in the Bible it's impossible to say): "Bunter thinks this flash will pass, ‘… gleams of what Wimsey had been and could not even yet deny utterly. It would pass, and he would become the Wimsey that was in this dull aftermath of the war that had made their war seem like child’s play – a dreary ghost-Wimsey, distracted and vague, a Wimsey who did too much solitary drinking, a Wimsey whose wit had soured.’ " Getting to see so much of what's going on inside Bunter's head stands in stark contrast to Sayers, who shows us Wimsey from the inside (at least) sometimes) and Bunter from the outside. As Peter himself says "What I don't know about Bunter would fill a book". Much of the joy of Bunter's character comes from his inscrutability, and the marked contrast between his utterly formal behaviour around Peter and the tiny snippets of information that show us there must be a totally different side to his character (Nine Tailors, when the village has taken refuge in the Church : "Three evenings a week were devoted to concerts and lectures, arranged by Mrs Venables, Miss Snoot and the combined choirs of St Stephen and St Paul, with Miss Hilary Thorpe and Mr Bunter (comedian) assisting." One wonders exactly what kind of comedy routine the rather terrifyingly correct Bunter offered. Trying to reconcile such contrasts in a psychologically realistic fashion would run the risk of making the character fall flat. Moreover, lens characters in fanfic, who are emphatically not lens characters in the original, tend to run the risk of being, not to put too fine a point on it, obsessive about the character they're viewing. The author inevitably picks them in order to examine their favourite character up close (perhaps "microscope lens character" would be a better designation) rather than because they're genuinely interested in the world view of the lens. Judging by this admittedly small sample, King's Bunter runs precisely this risk, worrying less about the sabotaged bridge than his master's state of mind. Oh, and judging by the coat and brake remarks, it's Bunter who's driving. Is Lord Peter so traumatised that he no longer drives???
The other way in which King's sensibility manifestly differs from Sayers' is in the choice of genre. This little extract has the fingerprints of horror all over it. Not only does the adventure begin quite specifically on the eve of Halloween, but Sir Patrick has cut off all approaches to his house bar the rickety bridge, now sabotaged, and a cart track, effectively turning it into an island. Moreover, the isolation of his property is explicitly linked to his psychological state. The repeatedly renewed invitation to Wimsey to visit does indeed begin to "take on a flavour", but it is not the flavour found in Sayers's books. Her settings are all resolutely real - not symbols, even of a state of mind, and not gateways to the supernatural. The Bellona Club, Fenchurch St Paul, Pym's Publicity, Shrewsbury College are all places of bricks and mortar, rooted, crucially, in communities. There are no isolated madmen on private islands here, and any tinge of the supernatural (the bells, Peter's Pot) is something read into the setting by human beings (the short stories, I concede, are a different matter; but they're also mostly nowhere near as good). Where there is evil it is an absolutely comprehensible human evil, greed or bitterness or self-preservation.
And finally, in spite of the praise lavished on King for his command of British English by the author of the summary, I have my doubts that he was really up to the job. " Bunter does ‘… not affect to know of whom Lord Peter spoke’ is simply wrong – it should be "affected not to know" – and I'm not convinced by the "yellow-livered slug" (lily-livered, surely?). And there is no way, no way on God's green earth, that Bunter would think of Peter as "Wimsey". "His Lordship," maybe, but then the rest of Bunter's indirect speech becomes grammatically impossible, so it would have to be "Lord Peter", which King appears to (mistakenly) find too intimate a form ("gleams of what his Lordship had been and could not even yet deny utterly. It would pass, and he would become the Lord Peter that was in this dull aftermath of the war that had made their war seem like child’s play – a dreary ghost Lord Peter, distracted and vague, a Lord Peter who did too much solitary drinking, a Lord Peter whose wit had soured.’)It shows, in fact, all the hallmarks of a piece of fanfic, though by the sounds of it one that I would have enjoyed more than Thrones, Dominations.
Thanks to
grondfic I spent some time today following links to all things Wimsical and found this description of an unfinished piece of Wimseyfic by, of all people, Stephen King. And it got me thinking in more depth about the relationship of fanfic to source texts (though purely in a concrete – how does King differ from Sayers? – rather than an abstract sense).The link is http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/FREEREADRockyWood, and the relevant extract runs as follows:
In what we can read of this aborted novel Lord Peter Wimsey and his servant Bunter are on their way, through ‘beastly rain’ to a party at Sir Patrick Wayne’s estate in the country. Wimsey had last met Sir Patrick in 1934. Wimsey and Bunter discuss the foul weather and the death of Salcomb Hardy, which has put Wimsey in a funk. During the trip the two men’s dry sense of humour becomes apparent.
After they cross ‘…an alarmingly rickety plank bridge which spanned a swollen stream…’, Wimsey calls for a toilet stop and, alerted by the contrast to its more solid nature the previous time he had crossed it, looks at the bridge, only to find that the supports had been cut almost through. Somehow this dangerous discovery seems to have enlivened Wimsey, who calls with ‘…more excitement in his voice than Bunter had heard in a long time … he could not remember how long.’ However, Bunter thinks this flash will pass, ‘… gleams of what Wimsey had been and could not even yet deny utterly. It would pass, and he would become the Wimsey that was in this dull aftermath of the war that had made their war seem like child’s play – a dreary ghost-Wimsey, distracted and vague, a Wimsey who did too much solitary drinking, a Wimsey whose wit had soured.’
Returning to the car Wimsey states that if the heavy weather continues the bridge will collapse. When they return to the road Wimsey even wonders if ‘Sir Pat’ was not himself responsible for trying to isolate his home from the world, considering in particular his ‘…invitation, renewed so tiresomely over the last month and a half, until we quite ran out of excuses. It began to take on a … a flavour, did it not?’ Wimsey and Bunter begin to consider that Sir Patrick might have a problem ‘…requiring certain detective talents…’ Then, ‘Wimsey said quietly, “I don’t detect. I shall never detect again.” Bunter did not reply. “If I hadn’t been off detecting for the British Secret Service, I … what rot.”’ Apparently Wimsey blamed himself for his wife’s death in the Blitz.
Now their thoughts turn to Miss Katherine Climpson, another of Wimsey’s employees. Wimsey tentatively asks how ‘she’ was and Bunter does ‘… not affect to know of whom Lord Peter spoke’. We discover that Climpson is mortally ill with cancer in a hospital near Wimsey’s Picadilly flat and that he had ‘…gone to visit her himself in the first nine weeks of her stay, but at last he had been able to face it no more. He cursed himself for a coward, reviled himself, called himself a slacker and a yellow-livered slug … but he did not go.’ The slow decline of Climpson was, ‘Too much. Harriet was dead; his brother was dead; even Salcomb Hardy was dead; Miss Climpson was dying and Sir Patrick Wayne, a rich old bore who had been knighted for making himself richer at the expense of thousands of lives, was alive and apparently doing fine. “Is tomorrow Halloween, Bunter?” “I believe it is, my lord.” “It should be,” Wimsey said, and helped himself to a cigarette. “It bloody well should be.”’
As Sir Patrick’s house approaches the brakes fail and their Bentley crashes (Bunter, still in character, laconically comments, “We appear to have lost all braking power, my lord”). Chapter One ends at this point.
In the aftermath of the crash and the beginning of Chapter Two Wimsey wakes and calls for Bunter. At this point what we have of the story ends.
Although Wimsey is relatively short there are a number of interesting facts to report.
Sir Patrick Wayne’s estate is seven miles from Little Shapley, England. If the bridge collapsed, there was only one other road, barely a cart track, out of the estate. Wimsey and Bunter were driving to the estate on 30 October 1945 (“is tomorrow Halloween?”), less than six months after the end of the Second World War in Europe.
The only details of note that King provides us with about Wimsey himself are that he was formerly a detective with the British Secret Service, that his wife Harriet Vane Wimsey had died during the German blitz and the reader’s presumption that the elder Duke of Denver was Wimsey’s brother.
Wimsey’s nephew, the current Duke of Denver (‘Jerry’) had visited Sir Patrick Wayne’s daughter until she had become engaged to another man. Jerry had served in the RAF during the Battle of Britain and was one of the relatively few survivors of that action.
Katherine Climpson seems set to be an important character in the novel. She ran Wimsey’s typing bureau, was unmarried, and was dying of cancer in a hospital on Great Ormond Street, London. Salcomb Hardy, who had recently died of a stroke, was a crime reporter and heavy drinker. Wimsey read his obituary in The Times.
King adopted a style for Wimsey that is indeed very English in tone, including a rather dry tone of exchange between Bunter and the title character. It is clear that King was quite capable of delivering in this style, as one might expect from a premier novelist. In one passage, as Bunter pulls the car over for a comfort stop, he reminds his employer, “If you would not take it amiss, my lord, your heavy overcoat is one the hook directly behind you. I’m afraid of the effects of the rain might be on that worsted.” In another Wimsey says, “Let’s go back to the car, Bunter, before we take a chill,” in the best of British aristocratic tones of the 1940s.
Wimsey is mentioned as a literary character in both Bag of Bones and Apt Pupil. Adding this to the fact that King attempted a Wimsey novel leads us to speculate that King is probably a fan of the Wimsey series. King listed Wimsey’s creator, Dorothy L Sayers, as one of the authors he most admired during an interview for The Waldenbook Report in late 1997.
Sayers’ character, Lord Peter Wimsey was immensely popular in the 1920s and 1930s and the books are still read avidly today. The BBC made two successful television series based on the character, starring Ian Carmichael and Peter Haddon in the lead roles, and there were also 1935 and 1940 movies based on two of the novels.
The fourteen novels and additional short stories were all published in the 1920s through the early 1940s and feature Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey, the younger brother of the Duke of Denver and a World War I veteran. His manservant is Bunter. An avid rare book collector, Wimsey develops a penchant for investigating crime, often assisting Detective Inspector Charles Parker, his brother in law. Sayers’ imaginary life of Lord Peter ends in 1942, with Wimsey married to Harriet Vane and the father of three sons. From the Author’s Note in Thrones, Dominations we know that he served in Military Intelligence in World War II.
It seems that King has been faithful to the Wimsey mythology, as we would expect. He has Wimsey married to Harriet, although he extends the mythos by having her die in the Blitz. He also has Wimsey serving in the British Secret Service during the War, linking the note of his serving in Military Intelligence. Readers will conclude from the text that he is the uncle of the current Duke of Denver, which is the way Sayers had it.
***********
Clearly King is planning to strike a rather different note than Sayers. His Wimsey is an emotionally scarred and desiccated creature, who has lost all enthusiasm for life and who has given up detecting. Mortality has caught up with him with a vengeance – Denver is dead, Sally Hardy is dead, Miss Climpson is dying horribly, and he blames himself, in some obscure way for Harriet's death (did the boys also die in the Blitz? It would fit with the bleak tone of the piece if they had). Sayers' Wimsey had also been through ghastly experiences of death and loss – the Great War and Barbara – but his response is a nervous breakdown rather than a descent into what seems very like depression, and he takes up detecting precisely as a way of recovering from that breakdown. All in all, King's story seems likely to be very much more angsty than anything Sayers wrote, although admittedly she was heading that way with Peter's increasingly emotional responses to the death of the murderers he caught ("Doing good that evil may come," as he puts it in Nine Tailors). Thus King is doing what every good fanficcer does – taking a character he loves and inserting him into a scenario he finds more interesting than anything the source texts ever provided him with. And I have to say that so far I'm with him – I'm a complete sucker for well-done examinations of death and loss and the effect they have on people.
But there are other ways in which King's sensibility differs markedly from Sayers' and they're clearly visible in the structure of even this incomplete outline. First of all there's Bunter. King has apparently chosen to make him a lens character, from whose point of view we see Lord Peter (though whether this would have continued past The First Man in the Bible it's impossible to say): "Bunter thinks this flash will pass, ‘… gleams of what Wimsey had been and could not even yet deny utterly. It would pass, and he would become the Wimsey that was in this dull aftermath of the war that had made their war seem like child’s play – a dreary ghost-Wimsey, distracted and vague, a Wimsey who did too much solitary drinking, a Wimsey whose wit had soured.’ " Getting to see so much of what's going on inside Bunter's head stands in stark contrast to Sayers, who shows us Wimsey from the inside (at least) sometimes) and Bunter from the outside. As Peter himself says "What I don't know about Bunter would fill a book". Much of the joy of Bunter's character comes from his inscrutability, and the marked contrast between his utterly formal behaviour around Peter and the tiny snippets of information that show us there must be a totally different side to his character (Nine Tailors, when the village has taken refuge in the Church : "Three evenings a week were devoted to concerts and lectures, arranged by Mrs Venables, Miss Snoot and the combined choirs of St Stephen and St Paul, with Miss Hilary Thorpe and Mr Bunter (comedian) assisting." One wonders exactly what kind of comedy routine the rather terrifyingly correct Bunter offered. Trying to reconcile such contrasts in a psychologically realistic fashion would run the risk of making the character fall flat. Moreover, lens characters in fanfic, who are emphatically not lens characters in the original, tend to run the risk of being, not to put too fine a point on it, obsessive about the character they're viewing. The author inevitably picks them in order to examine their favourite character up close (perhaps "microscope lens character" would be a better designation) rather than because they're genuinely interested in the world view of the lens. Judging by this admittedly small sample, King's Bunter runs precisely this risk, worrying less about the sabotaged bridge than his master's state of mind. Oh, and judging by the coat and brake remarks, it's Bunter who's driving. Is Lord Peter so traumatised that he no longer drives???
The other way in which King's sensibility manifestly differs from Sayers' is in the choice of genre. This little extract has the fingerprints of horror all over it. Not only does the adventure begin quite specifically on the eve of Halloween, but Sir Patrick has cut off all approaches to his house bar the rickety bridge, now sabotaged, and a cart track, effectively turning it into an island. Moreover, the isolation of his property is explicitly linked to his psychological state. The repeatedly renewed invitation to Wimsey to visit does indeed begin to "take on a flavour", but it is not the flavour found in Sayers's books. Her settings are all resolutely real - not symbols, even of a state of mind, and not gateways to the supernatural. The Bellona Club, Fenchurch St Paul, Pym's Publicity, Shrewsbury College are all places of bricks and mortar, rooted, crucially, in communities. There are no isolated madmen on private islands here, and any tinge of the supernatural (the bells, Peter's Pot) is something read into the setting by human beings (the short stories, I concede, are a different matter; but they're also mostly nowhere near as good). Where there is evil it is an absolutely comprehensible human evil, greed or bitterness or self-preservation.
And finally, in spite of the praise lavished on King for his command of British English by the author of the summary, I have my doubts that he was really up to the job. " Bunter does ‘… not affect to know of whom Lord Peter spoke’ is simply wrong – it should be "affected not to know" – and I'm not convinced by the "yellow-livered slug" (lily-livered, surely?). And there is no way, no way on God's green earth, that Bunter would think of Peter as "Wimsey". "His Lordship," maybe, but then the rest of Bunter's indirect speech becomes grammatically impossible, so it would have to be "Lord Peter", which King appears to (mistakenly) find too intimate a form ("gleams of what his Lordship had been and could not even yet deny utterly. It would pass, and he would become the Lord Peter that was in this dull aftermath of the war that had made their war seem like child’s play – a dreary ghost Lord Peter, distracted and vague, a Lord Peter who did too much solitary drinking, a Lord Peter whose wit had soured.’)It shows, in fact, all the hallmarks of a piece of fanfic, though by the sounds of it one that I would have enjoyed more than Thrones, Dominations.