Cover Her Face by P.D. James
Here is a novel written in 1962 that reads as if it were written in 1862. You would think that the diction would call attention to itself in an exasperating way. It might. in fact, do that for some contemporary readers.
Not for me, though. I raced through the novel as though it were an up to the minute thriller. Although I’ve read it before – some years ago- I did not remember who the perpetrator was. And I could hardly wait to find out!
I can readily understand a certain impatience being evoked by James’s extremely measured prose style:
There was the sound of slow, careful footsteps and then a knock on the door. It was Martha with the nightly hot drinks. Back in his childhood old Nannie had decided that a hot milk drink last thing at night would help to banish the terrifying and inexplicable nightmares from which, for a brief period, he and Deborah had suffered.
The “he” in this passage is Stephen Maxie, heir to the Martingale estate and surgeon in training at a London hospital. Deborah is his sister, a young widow who also lives at Martingale and has no discernible occupation. Another young woman who frequently turns up at Martingale is Catherine Bowers. She does have a vocation – she’s a nurse – but her true aim in life is to get Stephen Maxie to marry her. Deborah, meanwhile, is spending apathetic time with a smart Londoner names Felix Hearne.
As I was typing in the quoted passage above, I was reminded of the extent to which the residents of wealthy country domains were routinely cosseted by their servants. In fact, Martha fusses over Stephen and Deborah just as she must have done when they were children.
I found something curiously bloodless about these characters. They came perilously close to being caricatures. And yet….
Into this attenuated existence is launched a detonator names Sally Jupp. She is everything the other female characters are not – headstrong, willful and devious. She is also an unmarried mother, and if that isn’t scandalous enough, she refuses to identify her child’s father.
Sally had been living at a home for unwed mothers. It was thought that installing her as a servant in the Maxie establishment would be an advantageous placement. We’re meant to see that by accepting her into their household despite her fallen state, the Maxies are behaving in a magnanimous manner.
At one point, Martha is questioned by Detective Chief-Inspector Adam Dalgliesh concerning Sally Jupp’s present employment Martingale, to wit: Had Mrs Maxie ever before engaged the services of ‘an unmarried mother?’
Martha offers this spirited riposte:
“It would never have been thought of in the old days. All our girls came with excellent references.”
Well. In a house full of entitled denizens of the upper class, Martha Bultitaft, maid of all work, may be the most rigidly class conscious of them all.
Right from the start, Sally Jupp is a burr under the saddle of the Maxie family’s aristocratic hauteur. It’s pretty obvious that her presence at Martingale will precipitate some sort of crisis.
And so it proves.
One of the many things I love about P.D. James’s writing is her frequent references to classic literature. Indeed, this novel’s title is taken from a line in John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi:
‘Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young.’ (The words cover her face are spoken by an appalled Stephen Maxie.)
[There is an interesting story about the choice of title for this novel. It involves Agatha Christie. See the Wikipedia entry for Sleeping Murder and scroll down to ‘Title changes.’]
I have kept very few texts from my college days, but I was able to unearth a 1959 Folger Library edition of The Duchess of Malfi. Here it is, expertly scanned by the resident IT wizard, aka my husband:
Later, Felix Hearne quotes from The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe:
‘But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.’
[Fans of the Inspector Morse books and TV series will recall the title The Wench Is Dead. In that episode, Morse, confined to a hospital bed, struggles to solve a murder committed in the environs of Oxford in the nineteenth century. It’s a set-up that calls to mind – deliberately, one assumes – Josephine Tey’s classic novel, The Daughter of Time.]
And what of the first appearance on the scene of DCI Adam Dalgliesh? In my view, his is a singularly low key debut. Not much in the way of a distinct personality emerges in the pages of this novel. We do learn two important things about him: First, as Felix Hearne exclaims, he is “A cultured cop!” (Hearne adds that he thought such beings only appeared in ‘detective novels.’ This comment is elicited when Dalgliesh correctly identifies a painting by George Stubbs on display at Martingale.) As the Dalgliesh series unfolds, readers gain further insight into the deeply discerning mind of Adam Dalgliesh.
Secondly, there’s an intensely personal disclosure concerning Dalgliesh’s private life. He rehearses it in his own mind, in response to one of Mrs. Maxie’s imperious declarations regarding her son Stephen:
‘I have no son. My own child and his mother died three hours after he was born.’
A shocking revelation, but one that cannot – must not – be uttered aloud.
In his classic text Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, Julian Symons writes of (and quotes) P.D. James:
At first she regarded detective fiction only as a useful apprenticeship for writing novels, but “after I had done three or four [detective] novels, I realized that in fact the restriction…could almost help by imposing a discipline, and that you could be a serious novelist within it.”
And of course, she went on to prove her thesis, many times over.
It has been a pleasure to revisit the work of this exceptional author. Thank you, Hilda, for making this choice for the Usual Suspects discussion group.
I have always loved the melancholy theme music, composed by Richard Harvey, that accompanies the Adam Dalgliesh TV series:
Now more than ever….
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
From Ode to a Nightingale
Easeful death did, apparently, come at the very end. Before that came agony. Keats was attended, to the end, by his close friend, the painter Joseph Severn, who had traveled with him to Rome in a last ditch effort to ease his suffering. In the early nineteenth century, tuberculosis was a death sentence. Keats had already lost his nineteen-year-old brother Tom to the ravages of the disease.
From a letter by Severn, written to a mutual friend, informing him of the death of their mutual friend John Keats:
My Dear Brown,
He is gone – he died with the most perfect ease – he seemed to go to sleep. On the 23rd, about 4, the approaches of death came on. ‘Severn – I – lift me up – I am dying – I shall die easy – don’t be frightened – be firm, and thank God it has come!’ I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until 11, when he gradually sunk into death – so quiet – that I still thought he slept. I cannot say now – I am broken down from four nights’ watching, and no sleep since, and my poor Keats gone. Three days since, the body was opened; the lungs were completely gone. The Doctors could not conceive by what means he had lived these two months. I followed his poor body to the grave on Monday, with many English. They take such care of me here – that I must else have gone into a fever. I am better now – but still quite disabled.
What a deep pleasure it has been to revisit the poetry of John Keats, as presented in Lucasta Miller’s luminous traversal. For instance, in a splendid turn of phrase, she refers to Keats’s “Shakespearean level of verbal fecundity.”
There are generous quotes from Keats’s letters interspersed throughout the text. This one was especially meaningful to me:
The “heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways” if an individual soul is to fulfill its potential as “God’s own essence.”
The letters, I think, are worth seeking out for their own special depth and beauty.
Here is part of Miller’s analysis of Ode on a Grecian Urn:
What he wrote reflects his complex response to the pagan past, which he uses as a springboard from which to interrogate–quite literally, given the number of question marks that punctuate the poem–the relationship between art and reality, immutability and transience, past and present, death and life.
Keats, the author tells us, was criticized for privileging that pagan past over the eternal verities of Christianity. Such cavils seem not to have troubled him, thank goodness.
By the by, the exact Grecian urn that Keats was apostrophizing has not been conclusively identified. It existed in his mind, possibly an amalgam of several of its type, and by virtue of his brilliance, it now exists in ours as well. And I have come to believe implicitly in the poem’s final stanza:
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
The poems that form the spine of Miller’s narrative are the three great odes – To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, and To Autumn – two or three sonnets, the strange and enigmatic ballad La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and several others.
To Autumn possesses what, to my mind, is one of the most purely beautiful opening lines in all of literature:
‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,…’
Keats packed all this verbal brilliance into a painfully short period: he died in 1821 at the age of 25. He was buried in Rome’s Protestant cemetery. This is his tombstone:
Almost painful in its deliberate obscurity, it does not even divulge his name, asserting only that “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, Keats is revered as one of the greatest poets from a land rich with great poets. The only greater was Shakespeare, whom he revered.
Keats’s poems can readily be found here.
Books to the Ceiling 