Presented by Philippa
Wetherell
P. D. James – Phyllis Dorothy
James – was born and died in Oxford though she
lived much of her life in London, becoming in
1991 Baroness James of Holland
Park. Acclaimed as the
writer of nigh on twenty erudite crime novels, classical detective stories,
James’ stories reflect her belief that “it is perfectly possible to remain
within the constraints and conventions of the genre and be a serious writer,
saying something true about men and women and their relationships and the
society in which they live.”
I have enjoyed many of her
novels, admiring her imaginative and stylish use of the English language,
fascinated by the ingenuity of her plots, transported by her depiction in
meticulous detail of settings both strange and humdrum, and caught up in the
workings of the mind and the controlled emotions of the heart of her favoured
protagonist, Commander Adam Dalgliesh. That poet and lover of poetry is at the
centre of fourteen of her crime novels. Indeed in an interview James considered
him to be “a male version of me, brainier than me, but his emotions are mine,
very unsentimental like me.”
However it was only when I
read ‘A Fragment of Autobiography’, a kind of diary that P. D. James kept
between her seventy-seventh and seventy-eighth birthdays, that I came to know
something of the woman behind the stories. Written in 1997-98 and prompted by
that great man of letters, Samuel Johnson, who wrote that “at seventy-seven it
is time to be in earnest”, she reluctantly agreed to record her thoughts as
they arose out of day-to-day happenings, perhaps with “a need to capture time,
to have some small mastery over that which so masters us.” The memoir was
published under the title ‘Time to be in Earnest’.
In an interview in 2010 in
her ninetieth year, James said, “I have lived a very happy and fulfilled life.”
That she could say this with sincerity is testament to her strength of
character and her Christian faith, for her growing up and her married life were
both scarred by the mental illness of the two people she loved most dearly, her
mother and her husband. Compassion and sensitivity she showed in abundance in
her person and in her writing, but with a spurning of the sentimental and the
mawkish. In the prologue to the diary she admitted that there was much in her
past painful to dwell upon but “it is over and must be accepted, made sense of
and forgiven.” And she adds: “I have always known that happiness is a gift, not
a right.”
P. D. James was a conservative
both in faith and in political allegiance. An Anglican, who worshipped at the
Anglo-Catholic church
of All Saints’, Margaret Street,
she preferred the 1662 liturgy, delighting in the beauty of Cranmer’s language.
“Words in their beauty, their simplicity, their numinous power, should be
capable of so entering our consciousness … that we rest confidently in their
familiarity to bring us into that hoped for communion with God which is surely
at the heart of prayer and worship.” Yet she was far from closed to
contemporary ideas. After attending a conference in Cambridge in 1998 under the title ‘Sexing the
liturgy’ (perhaps ‘Liturgy and Gender’ would have been a more appropriate
title -
her words) she wrote that it was “interesting and educative for me.”
Surprised in 1991 to have a
life peerage conferred upon her, Lady James took her responsibilities very
seriously, sitting in the House of Lords with the Conservatives and taking a
keen interest in the debates. She had worked hard from her mid-teens entering
first the National Health Service then the Home Office, at first in the Police
Department and then in the Criminal Policy Department, from which she retired
in 1980. She put to good use the knowledge she gained there, her crime novels
from ‘Cover her Face’, her first in 1962, to ‘The Private Patient’, her last
published in 2011, reflecting her keen interest in forensic matters. In this
last novel she finally allowed Adam Dalgliesh to wed his Emma, an elegant and
dignified occasion as would be expected.
P. D. James was the devoted
mother of two daughters, Clare and Jane, and the delight she took in them and
their families, her five grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren, was
evident in her memoir. She shared many occasions with them in the midst of a
very busy round of speaking engagements, meetings of various boards, public
lectures, supporting charitable fundraising activities, especially those that
promoted all kinds of literary endeavours. I should mention her great
admiration for Jane Austen and her writing, which led to he final production, a
novel, indeed a murder mystery in the style of Austen and featuring the ‘Pride
and Prejudice’ characters: ‘Death come to Pemberley’.
P. D. James was a woman and a
writer to be admired, I believe. I can do her no more justice than to use words
from her friend Nigel Williams who described her as “funny, warm, self-critical
and never puffed up.” Kingsley Amis called her “Iris Murdoch with murder.”
