Book Review
Mutually Edifying
Dorothy and Jack: The Transforming Friendship of Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis by Gina Dalfonzo
reviewed by Louis Markos
"What I'm saying is . . . that men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way." So claims the male protagonist near the beginning of When Harry Met Sally (1989), a film that helped revive the romantic comedy as a staple movie genre. By the end of the movie, Harry and Sally fall in love and marry, a denouement that rather supports than explodes Harry's contention that men and women can't be friends.
Fast forward three decades to a world that claims to have broken down all the walls between the sexes, an achievement that should have prepared the way for a boom in non-erotic male/female friendships—only it hasn't. While recklessly deconstructing the essential masculinity and femininity that God inscribed into us ("male and female created he them"), our postmodern culture, not only outside but inside the Church as well, has increased the estrangement between men and women.
As an English professor, I routinely teach upper-level classes that boast a female-to-male ratio of 80/20. Until as recently as five years ago, I would spend long hours in my office conversing with my female students about life and literature, spiritual growth and creative pursuits. In the shadow of the "me too" movement and the growth in Marxist identity politics, I no longer feel safe or comfortable doing so. Though I have not fully embraced the "Michael Pence rule" of never being alone with a woman who is not a part of my family, I am tempted to do so.
Model for Friendship
In the face of the growing rupture between the sexes, Gina Dalfonzo's engagingly written and well-researched Dorothy and Jack: The Transforming Friendship of Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis comes as a much needed antidote. Dalfonzo, a columnist, editor, and essayist who holds English degrees from Messiah College and George Mason University, opens a window on the vibrant and mutually edifying friendship of Sayers and Lewis. Through a close reading of their letters to one another and a careful filling in of the context out of which they lived and wrote, Dalfonzo does more than offer insight into two of the twentieth century's greatest Christian apologists and fiction writers; she provides a model for what a healthy male-female friendship can look like.
"[I]f men and women are different," writes Dalfonzo, "as the church teaches us, it stands to reason that we need each other to help get us out of our own heads, broaden our perspectives, and increase our understanding and our empathy" (19). The author means this statement to have general applicability, but it applies particularly well to Lewis. Dalfonzo makes a strong case that Lewis's understanding of women was broadened by his infrequent meetings and more frequent correspondence with the witty, highly literate, strong-willed, and often combative Sayers. Indeed, it was broadened so much that it may very well have prepared Lewis for his marriage to a woman very much like Sayers.
Dalfonzo further suggests that Sayers played a vital role in Lewis's life and writing career at the very time when his relationship with the Inklings was growing strained. -Dalfonzo argues persuasively that "what ultimately undermined" the Inklings was not so much the death of Charles -Williams in 1945 as "the increasing sharpness of the criticism within the circle" (127). She pinpoints Tolkien's dislike of Lewis's Narnia books and popular apologetics and Lewis's discomfort with Owen Barfield's allegiance to anthroposophy as key causes of the sharpness.
Against this backdrop, she offers an original reading of the importance of Sayers to Lewis that is well worth quoting in full:
[A]s the cracks in the Inklings widened and deepened, Jack increasingly found himself in need of other friends to turn to for discussion and critique, including Sayers. Dorothy, as we have seen, could be as sharply critical as any of his other friends, but with a fundamental difference: at bottom, she respected and appreciated the main body of his work. He could discuss with her both his apologetics work and his fiction, and be assured of a largely sympathetic (if not always concurring) listener. This is not to say that his friendship with Dorothy replaced any of his other friendships; he would remain friends with Tolkien, Barfield, and most of the others until the end of his life. But she helped to fill a need that emerged as the solidarity and support of the group had eroded. And she could be a staunch defender in public [in particular of his Narnia books] as well as an appreciative listener in private. (128)
Fascinating Links
In addition to these insights, Dorothy and Jack forges links between Lewis and Sayers that are always fascinating and sometimes deeply insightful. These links include:
• They lived just blocks away from each other in Oxford in 1917 but never met.
• Both were strongly influenced by the cheerful common sense of G. K. Chesterton.
• Though both became Christian apologists, they both felt unduly pushed into being confirmed in the Church.
• Both had wrestled with sexual temptation (with Sayers having an out-of-wedlock son) but came to uphold the Church's teaching on chastity.
• Being public figures did not come easily to either of them, but they both felt compelled to write apologetics, and they worked simultaneously at the BBC: Sayers to present her plays on the life of Christ (The Man Born to Be King), Lewis to give his Broadcast Talks that would later be collected as Mere Christianity.
• After Lewis called himself a dinosaur in his inaugural address for the Chair offered him by Cambridge, Sayers wrote him a congratulatory letter "and signed herself 'your obliged and appreciative fellow-dinosaur'" (142).
• Both were disciples of Charles -Williams, with Sayers acquiring her love of Dante from Williams and Lewis patterning Ransom after him in That Hideous Strength.
• Both worked together on Essays Presented to Charles Williams after his untimely death in 1945 and cosigned "a letter to the Times of London to call attention to the tenth anniversary" of his death (181).
• Lewis was so impressed by Sayers's letter-writing skills that he began to save her letters, something he rarely did with others'.
• Both spent much of their later life caring for someone who became increasingly difficult and demanding: Sayers her PTSD-afflicted and alcoholic husband, Lewis the sharp-tongued and accusatory Mrs. Moore. This selfless service strengthened their Christian charity but also became a heavy burden.
• Unlike many of the Inklings, Sayers supported Lewis's marriage to Joy; in fact, she became quite good friends with Joy.
• Both died at the age of 64, with Lewis writing a panegyric for Sayers's funeral.
On the Sexes
Dorothy and Jack offers these and many other incisive connections that help flesh out fuller portraits of Sayers and Lewis. It also broaches the subject of the sexes, arguing that Sayers pushed Lewis to be more open to the expanding roles of women and to accepting them as full sparring partners. On the whole, Dalfonzo treats this subject fairly and objectively, though she at times falls into the modern prejudice of taking for granted that any views Lewis had about women that did not square with our own must have been based on his cultural experiences rather than the Bible—at one point even labeling such views as "theologically unsupported" and "occasionally backward" (118). She also tends to favor Sayers's views on these issues over those of Lewis, despite the fact that Sayers was not always consistent in her positions and could be even more stubborn than Lewis.
Still, though she quotes frequently from Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen's Sword between the Sexes? C. S. Lewis and the Gender Debates (2010), she thankfully does not follow Van -Leeuwen's lead in suggesting, falsely, that Lewis "matured" into an egalitarian or moved away from his firmly held biblical belief that our bodies as well as our souls are masculine and feminine. Dalfonzo allows Lewis to be Lewis; in fact, in her celebration of the friendship of Sayers and Lewis, she helps us to see that men and women do not have to become carbon copies of one another to be true friends. They can be equal in their love of learning and their desire to create while complementing each other in their essential masculinity and femininity.
Indeed, on this point, I think -Dalfonzo (and Van Leeuwen) would have done well to consult Leanne Payne, the author of a fine book on Lewis's spirituality: Real Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Works of C. S. Lewis (1979). In her Crisis in Masculinity (1985), Payne offers a reading of masculinity and femininity that comes close, I would argue, to the beliefs of the "mature" Lewis, who did not care for overly masculine men or overly feminine women and who could identify masculine traits in Sayers and Joy:
Masculinity and femininity are attributes of God, and we, in His image, are most surely—in our spiritual, psychological, and physical beings—bipolar creatures. Our Creator, holding all that is true and real within Himself, reflects both the masculine and the feminine, and so do we. The more nearly we function in His image, the more nearly we reflect both the masculine and the feminine in their proper balance—that is, in the differing degrees and aptitudes appropriate to our sexual identities as male and female.
Louis Markos , Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His 19 books include Lewis Agonistes; Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis; On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis; and From A to Z to Narnia with C. S. Lewis.
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