Dorothy L. Sayers—For Good Work, for God’s Work

I met Lord Peter Wimsey in high school. He wasn’t handsome but was witty, urbane, often nonsensical. Listening to him chatter and patter I learned a great deal about logic—how to assemble facts and draw reasonable conclusions. It wasn’t until years later that I learned of his creator, Dorothy L. Sayers. Although Wimsey isn’t a male recreation of Sayers, she did give her famous detective the same mental powers she possessed.

Peter Wimsey stories are quite out of the ordinary—longer, more complex, and intellectual, without the stock characters useful to most detective novelists. As Peter Wimsey’s mother, the Dowager Duchess, says of Harriet Vane’s mysteries in Strong Poison, they are “really quite good and so well-written, and I didn’t guess the murder till page 200, rather clever, because I usually do it about page 15.” But more than just the cleverness and writing style place Wimsey above Asey Mayo or Albert Campion. Sayers provides us with clues in her mysteries to other facets of her personality and beliefs. As with C. S. Lewis, each of her writings forms a part of a unified whole. Whose Body, the first of the eleven Wimsey novels, may not appear to have much in common with The Mind of the Maker. But each of her books further develops the central or controlling theme of her creative life: we know man is made in God’s image by his desire to make things.

What are some of the clues Sayers’s novels give to her personality and beliefs? Police Inspector Charles Parker studied theology while in school and reads Bible commentaries to keep his wits sharpened. Lord Peter’s assistant, the spinster Miss Climpson, is an outspoken Christian who struggles with her conscience to determine right and wrong in the gray areas of investigations. She has a strong spiritual sensitivity that Wimsey relies on to discover the good from the bad, the guilty from the innocent. That spirituality saves Harriet Vane from being hanged for a murder she did not commit. (Lord Peter eventually marries Harriet in the final Wimsey novel, Busman’s Honeymoon.) Although Lord Peter is not a Christian, he is thoroughly versed in Scripture and theology, and in the early novels he and Parker have some low-key discussions about, for example, the merits of Bible scholars. In Whose Body? Lord Peter discovers the murderer not through a logical collecting and cataloguing of facts but by reading a book, Physiological Bases of the Conscience, written by the murderer: “The knowledge of good and evil is an observed phenomenon, attendant upon a certain condition of the brain-cells, which is removable.” The author went on to speculate that as man progressed the conscience would disappear, since when it functioned it caused death. Sayers juxtaposes this blatantly criminal philosophy with that of Christianity.

Some of Sayers’s Christian readers have wondered why she didn’t make Lord Peter convert to Christianity, since she herself was a Christian. Sayers replied in The Mind of the Maker: “Peter is not the Ideal Man; he is an eighteenth-century Whig gentleman, born a little out of his time, and doubtful whether any claim to possess a soul is not a rather vulgar piece of presumption.” Although her refusal to make Lord Peter something he wasn’t continues to disappoint readers—and to cause some to think she couldn’t really have been a Christian—her reason for not doing so is intrinsic to her view of the duty she owed to God the Creator, who gave her certain human, creative gifts. She could not violate her creation by imposing her will on him any more than God imposes his will on us. He wants us to surrender to him freely. (It may sound strange to talk of Lord Peter as though he were real. But anyone who has tried to invent characters, compose a song, or paint a picture knows that a work of art takes on a life of its own. No amount of molding or plumping or rewriting by the artist can change it. To try would be to violate the truth of art.)

Harriet Vane runs into this problem in Gaudy Night, one of Sayers’s best and most philosophical novels. She falsified one of her characters to smooth the plot, but the book was wooden. Lord Peter makes a few suggestions, to which Harriet says, “But if I give Wilfrid all those violent and lifelike feelings, he’ll throw the whole book out of balance.” She rewrites the book. Sayers avoided that kind of problem, except in Have His Carcase, where she invented a locality to hang her story on a murdered hemophiliac. Nothing about the book works; even the usually good dialogue between Harriet and Lord Peter strikes consistently false notes.

Sayers raised the level of detective writing to an art form, and her stories deserve to be called novels. Recognition of this and of her growing popularity is seen in the British productions of her novels—most recently Five Red Herrings—for public television’s exciting “Masterpiece Theatre” series. Regrettably, many of the Christian distinctives have been excised in the television adaptations. Those unfamiliar with Sayers would never sense from these films that she was a Christian. In his introduction Alistair Cooke tried to compensate for this by saying that late in life Sayers became a dedicated “church-woman,” a description that suggests a church bazaar mogul more than a serious Christian artist.

And that is finally what distinguishes her from other writers of the same genre—her attitude toward her work, of which those clues I outlined are only a small part. Her detective novels were just one expression of a theme—or to use her word from The Mind of the Maker, the Idea—that motivated her throughout her life: work as a sacrament. Through work God continually recreates us in his image, and in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, we offer back to him “our selves, our souls, and our bodies.” By our good labor we can express to God thoughts and feelings not possible with words alone. Our work becomes prayer made concrete. That is why a character in Gaudy Night can say, “A good painter mustn’t paint bad pictures—that would be immoral.”

God worked, we work. God created, we create. We can readily recognize God’s work as an act of primary creation, but we seldom think of our own as creation at all. We reserve that idea for artists. Sayers insisted that each of us should work as though it were a sacrament, an act of creation. In that way we reflect God’s image in us, and give back to him what he has given us, the opportunity to work creatively.

We think of work as an evil result of the fall. Yet before the fall Adam and Eve were told to be fruitful and multiply, to nurture the garden and care for the animals. Milton in Paradise Lost captures this prelapsarian attitude toward work:

On to thir morning’s rural work they haste

Among sweet dews and flow’rs; where any row

Of Fruit-trees overwoody reach’d too far

Thir pamper’d boughs, and needed hands to check

Fruitless imbraces: or they led the Vine

To wed her Elm; she spous’d about him twines

Her marriageable arms, and with her brings

Her dow’r th’ adopted Clusters, to adorn

His barren leaves [V, 211–19].

Here Adam and Eve eagerly attend to their tasks of keeping order and nurturing trees and plants. The attitude toward work perhaps more than the work itself changed when Adam and Eve sinned. Before the fall, man worked blissfully; after, grudgingly. In The Zeal of Thy House Sayers says, “The hatred of work must be one of the most depressing consequences of the fall.” As part of our Christian commitment, then, we need to change our attitude toward work.

Again and again in her novels, plays, and essays she talks about what work means, how we should respond to whatever it is God has given us to do, and what our attitude toward work should be. Before we can change our attitude, though, we need to discover what it is that God wants us to do. Once we’ve found that out, we can begin not only to enjoy our jobs but to do them well. In Creed or Chaos Sayers explains that the Church “has lost all sense of the fact that the living and eternal truth is expressed in work only so far as that work is true in itself, to itself, to the standards of its own technique. She has forgotten that the secular vocation is sacred … that work must be good work before it can call itself God’s work.… The official Church wastes time and energy, and, moreover, commits sacrilege, in demanding that secular workers should neglect their proper vocation in order to do Christian work—by which she means ecclesiastical work. The only Christian work is good work well done” (Harcourt, 1949, pp. 56–58). That harsh condemnation hits the evangelical church, which has often said that only missionaries or ministers, to use the most obvious examples, are doing God’s work. How many bad preachers were talked into the ministry by well-meaning people when they would have served God far better by being good grocers or conscientious craftsmen?

With her concern for work well done, it seems strange at first to think that Sayers’s most famous character is independently wealthy and only dabbles in detection as a hobby. Yet even in the first Wimsey story, which began what Sayers called her lifelong “hymn to the Master Maker,” the question of work comes up between Parker and Wimsey. Wimsey asks Parker if he likes his job. “The detective considered the question, and replied: ‘Yes—yes, I do. I know it to be useful, and I am fitted to it. I do it quite well—not with inspiration, perhaps, but sufficiently well to take a pride in it.’ ” To Lord Peter, criminal investigation is just an exciting hobby that keeps his life from boredom—at first. By the time we get to Busman’s Honeymoon, he and we discover that it’s his job just as much as Parker’s, and that no matter how much he’d like to disregard his duty, it would be immoral not to do it with all his energy. Harriet Vane in Gaudy Night defends her profession to the dean of her old school: “I know what you’re thinking—that anybody with proper sensitive feelings would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don’t see why proper feeling should prevent me from doing my proper job.”

Sayers understood the frustrations of not knowing what job she was called to do, as well as the emptiness of unemployment. After attending Oxford, where she was in the first class of women ever to receive a master of arts degree from the university, she taught in a girls’ school for a while, wrote some slim volumes of poetry, and finally returned to the Fen country to the home of her father, who was an Anglican clergyman. In her late twenties she took a temporary job writing jingles for a London advertising agency. She stayed ten years. Out of desperation she began writing mysteries, discovered she was good at it, and kept on until she’d made enough money to write and sometimes produce religious plays, such as The Zeal of Thy House and The Man Born to Be King, a cycle of twelve plays for radio written during World War II.

It is simple to say, “Enjoy your work; do it well as an offering to God.” But what of those whose work is degrading or boring or in fact harmful? Sayers understood those problems, too, with her ten years in a job she considered worthless, a job she exposed in Murder Must Advertise. She also discusses the problem in a chapter-length postscript to The Mind of the Maker, “The Worth of the Work.” In order to lift work from drudgery into a sacrament, we need to consider it apart from economic necessity. An artist or any creative person lives to see his work completed. He does not just work to live. “Whether it is possible for a machine-worker to feel creatively about his routine job,” she says, “I do not know; but I suspect that it is, provided and so long as the worker eagerly desires that before all things else the work shall be done.” Or, as the author of Ecclesiasticus says, the craftsman “watches to finish the work.” Each of us can have that attitude. The typist looking (almost lovingly) on clean, error-free letters, reports, or manuscripts, neatly stacked and assembled. A secretary who efficiently schedules and guides her supervisor’s day for the greatest productivity. The grocery clerk who rapidly and accurately checks out foodstuffs. Or the waiter who enhances the pleasure of a well-prepared meal by cheerful, courteous service. A housewife who knows that cleaning is a never-ending job and proudly views shining floors and polished tables. All these are jobs considered by our society as menial, yet they can be done creatively and can produce satisfaction. Any task that brings order out of chaos is of the nature of the first creative act of God and becomes a sacrament.

To this Sayers adds one strong note of warning in her moving play The Zeal of Thy House. We cannot continue with a task that God has taken from us and given to another. We must guard against making the work more than a sacrament, which is after all only a physical image of spiritual communion between us and God. Even as she explains the importance of work Sayers also warns us not to take the image literally, not to make work the thing it represents and worship it rather than him from whom work comes. William the master architect learns this at the end of The Zeal of Thy House: “What, in my work? The sin was in my work? Thou liest.… In my work? That cannot be.… O now, now I begin to see. This was well said, He is a jealous God. The work was not ill done—’twas done too well.”

Yet if we keep our perspective, always seeing the image as image, we can faithfully serve God by faithfully doing the work he gives us. Dorothy L. Sayers lived out this conviction, and her work shows that integrity. She was an honest craftsman who knew whom she served. Two verses from her poem “The Makers” sum up her message to us:

Let each do well what each knows best,

Nothing refuse and nothing shirk,

Since none is master of the rest,

But all are servants of the work—

The work no master may subject

Save He to whom the whole is known,

Being Himself the Architect,

The Craftsman and the Corner stone.

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