Feature
Lady with a Sword
The Dramatic Life & Legacy of Dorothy L. Sayers
Let us take particular notice of the empty brain. Here Sloth is in a conspiracy with Envy to prevent people from thinking. Sloth persuades us that stupidity is not our sin, but our misfortune: while Envy at the same time persuades us that intelligence is despicable—a dusty, highbrow, and commercially useless thing.
—Dorothy L. Sayers, "The Other Six Deadly Sins," in Creed or Chaos? (1949)
On the surface, the crime novels of Dorothy L. Sayers, featuring amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey, can appear merely diverting, a good choice when one is looking for a little light reading. Wimsey often spouts nonsense, like Bertie Wooster, but woven underneath and behind the seeming frivolity are universal themes. Sayers leaves clues, not just to the solution of the crime, but also into the depths of human character and the role of conscience, responsibility, and God's laws of justice. Even the off-hand remarks of her characters pack a punch. (Why is Detective Parker reading a commentary on Hebrews, and Lord Peter a folio Dante in Whose Body? I leave it to you to find out.)
Dorothy Sayers was an adept writer of murder mysteries, but she was also a poet, Christian apologist, and playwright. In these roles she was never diplomatic. She wasn't able to tip-toe around a ticklish subject; no, she waded in swinging, taking a good bit of fiendish delight in the battle, no matter what topic she was tackling, from sloppy prose to flabby theology. Jumping into the fray, she challenged sweetly pious Christians and highbrow atheists alike. Often the determined unbeliever responded with interest, and the spineless believer straightened up under her blunt tongue.
Sayers won't allow our minds to rot, even when she is at her most entertaining. A polymath herself, she was constantly urging Christians and seekers alike to eschew intellectual laziness. "A Note on Creative Reading" in her 1940 book Begin Here: A War-Time Essay is a challenge to escapist readers like me. She worried that intellectual rigor would be put aside for the duration of the war, a concern that has its parallel today. She advises reading the book reviews in "a decently serious paper" and ordering the books that look intriguing.
If the book, when obtained, does not interest you, ask yourself why; and have the elementary politeness to give yourself a sensible answer. Does the subject displease you?—and if so, is it by any chance one of those disquieting things that you "would rather not know about", though you really ought not to shirk it? Does the author's opinion conflict with some cherished opinion of your own?—If so, can you give reasons for your own opinion? (Do try and avoid the criticism that begins: "We do not like to think" this, that or the other; it is often so painfully true that we do not like to think.) Or is it that the author is ignorant, illogical or superficial? (Are you sure? Have you taken the trouble to verify his references? Can you support your own view from your reading or experience?) Or is his style dull, obscure, or ugly? Does he write bad English? If you think so, justify yourself by examples and be sure you know why they are bad.
What was her driving ambition? To stir up Christians to experience the gospel as truth and to confront intellectuals with the case for the reality of the Word Incarnate. As she wrote to Charles Williams in 1944:
If God gave us an intellect, it was presumably that we should use it in His service. . . . Of course, the experience of the presence of God is not the same thing as having opinions about Him. But false and ignorant opinions are an obstacle to spiritual experience, and it is our business to remove those false opinions and cure that ignorance as far as we can.
The Pioneer
Sayers was born in 1893 and educated at home—her father was an Anglican rector—until she went to boarding school at sixteen. In 1915 she received a certificate of first-class honors in medieval French literature from the all-woman Somerville College, Oxford. Notice that she did not receive a diploma. Women did not achieve that possibility until 1920; in that year she was one of the first to be granted a retroactive MA.
Although during the First World War the variety of jobs available to young women broadened, it was not smooth sailing for Sayers. She spent several years living on an allowance from her parents, as she was only able to secure short-lived posts teaching, tutoring, and as an intern in a publishing house. During this time she published two books of poetry: Op. I. in 1916 and Catholic Tales and Christian Songs in 1918. Sayers considered herself Anglo-Catholic, the high-church branch of Anglicanism. She used the word "Catholic" in her writings to mean ecumenical, addressing her lectures and articles to -Roman Catholics, Anglo-Catholics, and Greek Orthodox alike. "I make it a rule never to make an attack on any one of these three communions, and never, if I can help it, to exhibit their disagreements but to emphasize their agreement."
Finally, she became an advertising copywriter for S. H. Benson in London, a large and prosperous agency. She was the second woman copywriter to work there, and remained with the firm for nine years, writing ad copy during the day and her crime novels at night. One of the campaigns she worked on was for Guinness beer, which had begun using a pelican balancing a glass of beer on its beak, with the line, "My goodness, my Guinness!" in an attempt to imply that Guinness beer is healthy. -Dorothy's idea was to use a toucan instead, with a little jingle: "If he can say as you can / Guinness is good for you / How grand to be a Toucan / just think what Toucan do!" That toucan became associated with Guinness beer for the next fifty years.
The Novelist
Dorothy's first mystery novel, Whose Body?, was published in 1923. It introduced her durable sleuth, Lord Peter -Wimsey, to an enthusiastic public. Lord Peter and his butler, Bunter, lead the cast of characters in twelve crime novels, forty-some short stories, plays, movies, television series, and spin-off fan literature still in demand today. Hers was a remarkable achievement in that golden age of detective fiction when Agatha Christie was writing her Miss Marple books, and G. K. Chesterton his Father Brown tales.
After a series of unhappy relationships, Sayers bore a son out of wedlock in 1924. The father was a married man who did not acknowledge the boy. A cousin who took in foster children provided a home for the child. For the rest of her life Sayers kept her son a secret from her parents and the public, although she was in constant contact with her cousin, and provided money for the boy's keep and education. Sayers knew that the situation would have shamed her father and caused gossip in his congregation. It is significant, in the light of what must have been an unremitting sense of guilt, that Sayers wrote with intensity of the role of the conscience, repentance, and salvation throughout her life, in her fiction and plays as well as her essays.
In 1926, Sayers married Captain Oswald Atherton (Mac) Fleming, a Scottish journalist. Since he was divorced, they could not have a church wedding, so they were married in a registry office. Neighbors knew Sayers as Mrs. Fleming, although she continued to use "Dorothy L. -Sayers" as a pen name. From her lively letters to her mother, we know that hilarious jaunts in Mac's old motorcycle and sidecar typified the early years of their marriage. Unfortunately, his health declined—perhaps due to being wounded and gassed in the First World War—and when he could no longer work, Mac drank heavily. Sayers continued to care for him until his death in 1950.
Sayers, like Chesterton, used mysteries to explore the choices characters make between good and evil, always, however, while telling an enthralling story. In the introduction to a 1934 collection of short stories that she edited for Victor Gollancz, she explains why "whodunits" are beneficial:
[Such stories] make you feel that it is good to be alive, and that, while alive, it is better, on the whole, for you to be good. (Detective authors, by the way, are nearly all as good as gold, because it is part of their job to believe and to maintain that Your Sins Will Find You Out. That is why Detective Fiction is, or should be, such a good influence in a degenerate world, and that, no doubt, is why so many bishops, school masters, eminent statesmen and others with reputations to support, read detective stories to improve their morals, and keep themselves out of mischief.)
Detective fiction also had its own definition of integrity. Sayers was one of the founding members of the Detection Club, and served as its president from 1949 until her death in 1957. G. K. Chesterton preceded her, and Agatha Christie succeeded her in the office. When a new member joined, he or she had to take the club oath, rumored to be written by Sayers, with one hand on a skull: "Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God?"
The Playwright
The public devoured Sayers's mysteries with enthusiasm, and in 1931 she was able to quit her job at Benson's and write full-time. Although Sayers would write and publish a few more detective short stories in the next years, by 1939 she had come to the end of what she wanted to express in the genre. She then turned with enthusiasm to writing plays with Christian themes; one of these is The Zeal of Thy House, performed at the Canterbury Festival in 1937. A historical account of an architect who rebuilt part of Canterbury Cathedral after a twelfth-century fire forms the kernel of the play. The architect's arrogance leads to his literal downfall—he injures himself falling from a lift that he had designed. Human fallibility destroys, but out of evil God can bring good—another gospel theme—as the architect learns humility and turns to repentance at the final curtain.
As part of the play's promotion, Sayers wrote several pieces for newspapers insisting that the gospel is an exciting story. Outstanding for the beauty of its prose is "The Dogma Is the Drama," published in April 1938 in St. Martin's Review. The article begins with the startling statement:
"Any stigma," said a witty tongue, "will do to beat a dogma"; and the flails of ridicule have been brandished with such energy of late on the threshing-floor of controversy that the true seed of the Word has become well-nigh lost amid the whirling of chaff. Christ, in His Divine innocence, said to the Woman of Samaria, "Ye worship ye know not what"—being apparently under the impression that it might be desirable, on the whole, to know what one was worshipping.
Her reputation as a lay apologist and theologian flourished, much to her chagrin; she called herself a playwright.
Still, she reluctantly agreed to do radio broadcasts and lectures as a prominent public intellectual who consistently presented Christianity as the rational position of the thinking person. Here is an excerpt from a broadcast given in 1941:
We have seen, too, what happens to reason divorced from theology. Encouraged by its success in subduing the material universe, it refuses to admit the validity of anything that is not capable of scientific proof. Its next step is to try to justify the natural virtues by their material results—whence we get the ugly and egotistical doctrine of enlightened self-interest and the hideous tyranny of economics. The last achievement of reason is always to cast doubt on its own validity, so that the final result of rationalism is the appearance of a wholly irrational universe. Thus, human ethics, left to themselves, become helpless and self-contradictory—exactly as they did in pagan times.
The men who now rule Germany [the Nazis], having thrown over the Christian theology, see clearly enough that the Christian ethics will not work without it. Therefore, they have jettisoned the ethics as well. We are greatly shocked by this. But have we the right to be surprised? If Christ is the only guarantee that reason is rational and goodness is good, then, the logical result of repudiating Christianity is the repudiation of reason and virtue.
The Lay Theologian
Sayers compiled her essays and articles into books like Creed or Chaos? and Unpopular Opinions. A theologically innovative book-length essay, The Mind of the Maker, illuminates the nature of the Trinity using the analogy of the creative process. In the introduction to the Harper & Row paperback edition of 1987, Madeleine L'Engle asserts, "The joy of this book is the vitality of the writer's mind, and her luminous understanding of human creativity."
Much of Sayers's time was taken up with fan mail, but there were also questions from people whose faith—or lack thereof—was challenged by her plays and articles. She would suggest, in her less-than-subtle way, that they find the answers for themselves:
And now, don't you honestly think it is time for you either to drop the whole thing or, if you are really interested, to do a little wrestling with it on your own? After all, you wouldn't expect anybody to explain the whole of the Higher Mathematics, or Nuclear Physics, in a few easy lessons by post—so why expect it with theology? Any child can practice the Christian religion, as any child can switch on the electric light: but if one wants to understand the science of the thing, one has to take a little trouble about it.
But then she would go on to answer questions for several typewritten pages, concluding with a list of books that the correspondent might find helpful. She felt, after reading so many of these inquiries, that the Church wasn't demonstrating the basics of the faith very well. She thought that Christian orthodoxy looked to most people like this:
Q: What is faith?
A: Resolutely shutting your eyes to scientific fact.
Q: What is the human intellect?
A: A barrier to faith.
Q: What are the seven Christian virtues?
A: Respectability; childishness; mental timidity; dullness; sentimentality; censoriousness; and depression of spirits.
And so she did her best to "drag out the Divine Drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slip-shod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction."
In 1941 the BBC commissioned Sayers to write a series of radio plays on the life of Christ. Broadcast between Christmas 1941 and October 1942, the plays stirred up a storm of controversy. For one thing, it was likely the first time an actor had voiced the character of Christ on the radio. In addition to that scandal, all her characters spoke contemporary English, not the words of the King James Version of the Bible. She worked directly from Greek sources, and this gave the broadcasts an immediacy that brought the gospel, in all its raw violence and beauty, into two million living rooms. The Man Born to Be King: A Play-Cycle on the Life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was published in book form in 1943.
The director of religious broadcasting at the BBC, Dr. James Welch, wrote to the archbishop of Canterbury regarding her dramas, "My serious judgment is that these plays have done more for the preaching of the Gospel to the unconverted than any other single effort of the churches or religious broadcasting since the last war—that is a big statement, but my experience forces me to make it."
The fan mail continued. There are five published volumes of Sayers's letters, and they make engrossing reading. One of the best examples of her humorous letters is the earliest extant one from her long correspondence with C. S. Lewis, in which she enclosed an advance copy of The Man Born to Be King. Playing off Lewis's book The Screwtape Letters—which had come out the previous year—she writes as "Sluckdrib," the devil who is personally responsible for Dorothy L. Sayers:
The effect of writing these plays upon the character of my patient is wholly satisfactory. I have already had the honour to report intellectual and spiritual pride, vainglory, self-opinionated dogmatism, irreverence, blasphemous frivolity, frequentation of the company of theatricals, captiousness, impatience of correction, polemical fury, shortness of temper, neglect of domestic affairs, lack of charity, egotism, nostalgia for secular occupations, and a growing tendency to consider the Bible as Literature.
The Translator & Poet
Not long afterward, hearing the air-raid siren, Sayers grabbed a handy book on her way to the shelter in her backyard. This was the beginning of her last great love affair with words. The book was Dante's Inferno. The tableau of Dorothy devouring this epic saga of sin, repentance, and salvation with a backdrop of Nazi bombs screaming above is as dramatic as any of her plays. The breadth and depth of the story of the soul's journey toward paradise lit her imagination. She wrote, "I feel it is, as Tennyson observed, 'one clear call for me.'" In a blaze of enthusiasm, she taught herself to read medieval Italian so that she could make her own translation of the entire Divine Comedy. It is no wonder that her play The Just Vengeance, performed a year after the cataclysmic end of World War II, broods on Dantean themes of original sin, inherited guilt, and shared responsibility.
As she worked on Dante's epic, her admiration for medieval scholarship resulted in a lecture given at an Oxford summer school for teachers. "The Lost Tools of Learning," like a pebble thrown into a pond, helped spawn the classical education movement in America. Her goal is familiar: "For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves," but her unique proposition is to teach grammar, logic, and rhetoric as tools for this purpose:
For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armour was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.
Sayers finished Hell, the first volume of her translation of the Divine Comedy, in 1949, surprising reviewers with fearless poetry that used the original rhyme scheme and meter, a feat hitherto considered impossible in English. The second volume, Purgatory, was published in 1955, along with Introductory Papers on Dante, a collection of her lectures. These books, along with her introductions and notes, are still in print today; more than a million-and-a-quarter readers have benefited from her work on Dante alone.
In the midst of her work on Paradise, Dorothy L. Sayers died of a sudden heart attack on December 17, 1957, at the age of 64. She had completed 20 of the 34 cantos of Dante's allegory of the soul's ascent to God.
Each part of her life fit into a pattern of intellectual rigor, discipline, and action. Even at the jolly meetings of the Detection Club, lubricated with cigarettes and beer, she insisted on integrity from her fellow writers. There was no slacking off or resting on her laurels. She could always see the next battle ahead and drove straight toward it, accepting the call as from God.
Where I am at odds with the pundits, you see, is in thinking that it is not so much the young who need education as the mature. Always supposing, of course, that they have not become too ankylosed to learn anything. Youth should be taught that there is no such thing as "completing one's education", and that the mind is an instrument which needs constant use and reverent treatment.
Carole Vanderhoof resides at the Bellvale Bruderhof, a Christian community in Chester, New York, with her husband of 40 years and two parakeets. She works for Plough Publishing and is the editor of The Gospel in Dorothy L. Sayers: Selections from Her Novels, Plays, Letters, and Essays (Plough Publishing House, 2018).
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