P.D. James : a woman of exceptional grace

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.”