P. D. JAMES
For most readers, particularly of crime fiction, the name of Dorothy L. Sayers is primarily associated with the well-crafted traditional detective story, and in particular with her aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. It is doubtful whether she herself would be gratified by a posthumous reputation so focused on one aspect – and perhaps in her eyes the least important – of a literary life which is one of the most versatile, controversial and fascinating of her generation; novelist, poet, playwright, translator and Christian apologist. But it was with the publication in 1995 of the first volume of her letters, sensitively edited by her friend, the Italian scholar Dr Barbara Reynolds, that Dorothy L. Sayers became recognised in a new capacity, as one of the most remarkable letter-writers of her time. This second volume, again edited by Dr Reynolds, will enhance that reputation.
It should not surprise us that Dorothy L. Sayers was so remarkable a correspondent. A good letter requires a writer who has wide interests, a lively and original intelligence, humour which is not without an occasional trace of acerbity, honesty, moral courage and good writing. In brief, the writer should be a person with plenty to say and the talent to say it persuasively. Dorothy L. Sayers, as a letter-writer and as a woman, had all these qualities.
The second volume covers the years 1937–1943, and most of the letters are written from Sayers’ home at 24 Newland Street, Witham, Essex, where she was living with her husband, Mac. The year 1937 opened well. Sayers had established herself as a successful novelist and her first play, Busman’s Honeymoon, was a West End success. The worst of her emotional troubles were behind her, in particular her ill-fated and unconsummated love affair with the writer John Cournos and the birth of a son by a man who was to prove unsupportive and rejecting, both emotionally and financially. She had coped with these traumas with characteristic courage and now looked forward to a period of stability. Her son, John Anthony, was still in the care of her cousin, Ivy Shrimpton, when not at school, and was healthy and doing well.
On 6th October 1936 Margaret Babington, organiser of the Festival of the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral, had written a letter which was to change Dorothy L. Sayers’s life, and not only as a playwright. It was an invitation to write a play for the 1937 Festival. This play, later named The Zeal of Thy House on the inspiration of the set designer, Laurence Irving, was to move Sayers into a new field of creativity which was to provide her with intellectual stimulation, controversy and the comradeship of a joint theatrical enterprise which she had already enjoyed when working on Busman’s Honeymoon. Her commitment to any undertaking was always whole-hearted, not surprisingly in a woman who believed in the almost sacramental importance of work and of intellectual integrity. The letters show that she was closely involved in every aspect of The Zeal of Thy House and the subsequent religious plays; production, casting, music, costumes and the design of the set. This was a world in which her exuberant personality could feel naturally at home. And it was in the speech of the Archangel Michael at the end of The Zeal of Thy House that Dorothy L. Sayers first articulated her understanding of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in terms of creativity which she was to develop in The Mind of the Maker, published in July 1941. A work of creation was three-fold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly; the Creative Idea, timeless and passionate, which is the image of the Father; the Creative Energy begotten of the idea and working in time, which is the image of the Word; the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the individual soul, which is the image of the Indwelling Spirit. It is on The Mind of the Maker that Sayers’s reputation as a lay theologian chiefly rests.
In February 1940 Dr James Welch, in charge of religious broadcasting at the BBC, approached Sayers suggesting that she should write a dramatised life of Christ in half-hour episodes to be broadcast on the “Children’s Hour” programme. She had already written a religious radio play, He That Should Come, but this new and more ambitious enterprise had an inauspicious start. Dorothy L. Sayers had from the beginning set out the conditions under which she would begin what would inevitably be a long, challenging and poorly-paid task. She insisted that there must be no writing down to a child audience which, in her view, was capable of responding both to ideas and to elevated language. Unfortunately the assistant to the producer suggested in a tactfully-worded letter that the BBC should discreetly edit a few passages which she felt were “right above the heads of the children” and too difficult for the audience. This suggestion provoked an immediate response from Sayers in some of the most uncompromising and pugnacious letters which the BBC must ever have received from a commissioned writer. Dorothy L. Sayers was always a bonny fighter and here she was on sure ground: the sole responsibility of the creator for her creation. At one point Sayers even cancelled the contract, but Dr Welch was determined that the plays should not be lost, and the BBC capitulated. A producer acceptable to Sayers was appointed and the work continued with the author’s usual energy and enthusiasm. The result, as might be expected at that time, provoked outrage from people and religious bodies who saw the depiction of Christ by an actor as sacrilege. The BBC stood firm in support of its author and the enterprise was fully vindicated by its success.
The religious plays and the broadcast of The Man Born to be King established Dorothy L. Sayers’s reputation as a Christian apologist, and one senses from some of the letters that this was a role in which she was not altogether at ease, and one that involved her in an immense volume of correspondence. Some of the most fascinating and the longest letters in this volume are those in which she expounds her theological theories in replies to a wide range of correspondents seeking her views and advice on moral and ethical questions, particularly those relating to the war.
These letters will be interesting to more than amateur theologians or practising Christians. Dr Reynolds’ judicious footnotes are helpful in explaining the doctrine which the non-theologian might otherwise find obscure. Sayers’s own religion was devoid of emotion, religious enthusiasm or the outward signs of devotional life. Christianity, for her, was a passionate intellectual commitment to the formal creeds of the Church. In a long letter on 7th October 1941 to Cound Michael de la Bedoyère of the Catholic Herald, a letter which must have taken the best part of a day to write, she states: “I haven’t got a pastoral mind or a passion to convert people; but I hate having my intellect outraged by imbecile ignorance and by the monstrous distortions of fact which the average heathen accepts as being Christianity (and from which he most naturally revolts).” Inevitably her reputation as a lay theologian and Christian apologist grew, and there is no doubt that, through her writing and her lectures, she had a greater personal influence on her time than we readers today often recognise.
She was certainly over-working, trying to reconcile this increasing public commitment with the need to earn a living and the daily problems of running a house in wartime. She was coping with, and fully supporting, an increasingly difficult husband. This overwork cannot have made relations with her son any easier. Without his side of the correspondence we cannot guess how far he resented his exclusion from much of his mother’s life, but in a letter dated 17th March 1937 she writes that she is “nearly dead with tiredness every night”. Most of her letters to him mention how busy she is. She never acknowledged him as her natural son but she was a generous, responsible and supportive parent. School fees were met and money for extras and occasional treats was found from a tight budget. The letters to her son are at their most interesting when they deal with intellectual questions he occasionally raised. She discusses the value of a university education, his ideas for his career and the nature of scientific creativity in letters which any son would have been proud and happy to have received. She couldn’t give him maternal love in its fullest sense; a mother does not bond with a baby if she relinquishes him to another woman within days of his birth. But what she could give Dorothy L. Sayers gave, and one suspects that, as a parent, her reputation deserves better than it has received.
Although for many readers the most interesting letters will be those dealing with her theological theories and her career as a playwright, the range of her interests as a correspondent was wide. She wrote to the Editor of the New Statesman to disagree with the critic Desmond MacCarthy’s views on Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya; she corresponded about Lord Peter Wimsey’s history and the purchase of his shirts; she wrote to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph in support of P. G. Wodehouse who had attracted odium by a broadcast while held in occupied France; she gave freely of her time in responding to queries from amateurs or professionals about the staging of her plays. The variety of her correspondents is as wide as her subject matter, ranging from statesmen, university professors and archbishops to fellow-writers and members of the public seeking her advice or her opinions. Always the voice is uniquely her own. In reading we feel ourselves in touch with a courageous, original and remarkable woman who, despite great difficulties, lived life with exuberant enthusiasm and has left a legacy of work which will endure.
P. D. JAMES