Book Briefs: December 13, 1993

The Mystery Of Dorothy Sayers

Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul, by Barbara Reynolds (St. Martin’s, 398 pp.; $25.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Alzina Stone Dale, who is the author of Maker and Craftsman: The Story of Dorothy L. Sayers (Harold Shaw).

Two special church services were held on June 13 to commemorate Dorothy L. Sayers, now best known as the author of the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery stories. One was a highly traditional, high-church ceremony at Oxford’s medieval Christ Church Cathedral, sponsored by the Sayers Society under the patronage of the former archbishop of Canterbury, with the bishop of Chichester preaching. The other had a more progressive and feminist flavor. Held in Chicago at the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint James, the service used the modern Rite Two from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and was celebrated by a woman priest with women lay readers and a woman preacher. Taken together, these events aptly symbolize the ongoing religious appeal of Sayers, who would have been 100 years old that day.

In her writing, which includes detective stories and novels, poetry, theological essays, literary criticism, a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and plays, including The Man Born to Be King (the popular BBC play cycle of the life of Christ), the British Sayers was somehow able to combine a continuity of tradition with a contemporary approach to important issues. As a result, Sayers attracts audiences with widely differing agendas. Even among Christians, some see her as a champion of Christian feminism, while others love her witty defenses of orthodoxy, seeing her as having a similar mission as her Oxford friends C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams; still others appreciate her leadership as a Christian artist.

The many facets of Sayers’s character and work are superbly captured in Barbara Reynolds’s Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul, the latest and best of a series of recent Sayers biographies. Reynolds completed Sayers’s translation of Dante’s Paradise upon Sayers’s death and was an aquaintance of hers. This biography restores a necessary balance to the portrait of a remarkably gifted woman.

Previous Sayers biographers lacked the unlimited access to Sayers’s papers and friends that Reynolds had. Some have called Sayers’s religious beliefs “traditional,” that is, old-fashioned or reactionary; others have treated Sayers’s life as a domestic tragedy. By using what Carolyn Heilbrun (another Sayers disciple who writes mysteries under the pen name Amanda Cross) labels the “male erotic plot,” these biographers have claimed that Sayers was an angry, unhappy woman, destroyed by her lack of a perfect marriage and a handful of kids.

These portraits of a strange, raging lady are simply not accurate and do not correspond to the energetic, enthusiastic Sayers that we experience in the writer. Reynolds shows that “the writer lives in her work.” Reynolds says plainly that the Sayers who wrote Gaudy Night and The Mind of the Maker—an amusing, alert, intelligent, and moral artist—was the real Dorothy Sayers.

An androgynous mind

Reynolds’s book is not only based on her personal recollections of Sayers, but also makes excellent use of Sayers’s letters and papers, the studies done by the Sayers Society (which Reynolds chairs), and the many admiring tributes written about Sayers by her fans here and abroad. Reynolds’s biography gives a much fuller picture than others of Sayers’s background and upbringing as an English child of the rectory, descended from generations of Anglican clergy, for whom a love of the King James Bible, Shakespeare, and the Book of Common Prayer was “bred in the bone.”

Reynolds observes that all her life Sayers regarded “the intellect as androgynous and took pleasure in using it.” In her own work, Sayers exemplified her conviction that it is as artists and craftsmen, as makers, that we humans are created in the image of God, adding that “the only Christian work is good work, well done.”

Although disapproving of the extremes of feminism, Sayers wrote Lewis that “I can never find any logical or strictly theological reason against the ordination of women.” Reynolds further quotes Sayers as saying that “Christ never held women up either as a menace or a snare or an inspiration.… He treated them … as individual persons, and seemed to look on them neither as ‘Women, God help us!’ nor ‘The ladies, God bless ’em!’ but just as specimens of humanity who happened to be female. I find this fortifying.”

A reluctant prophet

It is Reynolds’s aim to let Sayers speak for herself, and by quoting Sayers’s letters fully, she corrects previous assumptions and interpretations. In telling about Sayers’s early career and love affairs, her marriage to Mac Fleming and her relationship with her illegitimate son, Reynolds supplies the connecting links that make sense of a much-misunderstood story.

Sayers was always a sociable person, who involved her friends in her work. First at college, then in advertising, and later in the theater, Sayers found versions of her ideal of a productive community working toward a common goal, a state of being she thought the church had lost. At the same time, Reynolds shows us that Sayers was a “reluctant prophet,” who felt that her usefulness as a Christian critic was endangered and compromised by the demands of both press and church. This was the reason Sayers refused the archbishop of Canterbury’s prestigious offer of an honorary doctor of divinity degree, not out of a morbid sense of “sinfulness” nor because of a craven fear that the particulars of her son’s birth would be uncovered.

To do full justice to the joy with which Sayers tackled her last work, her translation of Dante, this biography should be read in conjunction with Reynolds’s earlier book, The Passionate Intellect. There Reynolds makes it plain that Sayers’s translation of The Divine Comedy marked a new enchantment. For Sayers, this work was not just a way of marking time until she died, but the final burgeoning of her creative spirit.

Though a thoroughly satisfying work, scholars may find a few quibbles. To begin, one wishes the editors had not used such loosely annotated endnotes that make it hard to track specific sources and quotations. Second, a more inclusive bibliography of the many secondary sources available for further reading is a sad omission. Nevertheless, fans of Sayers will find this biography to be a welcome and loving portrait of an outstanding artist and Christian.

Fa, La, La, La, La!

The Shorter New Oxford Book of Carols, edited by Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrott (Oxford, 341 pp.; $16.95, paper). Reviewed by David Neff.

Open the Shorter New Oxford Book of Carols to “Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!” and have your Christmas mythology shattered: The organ in Joseph Mohr’s church did not break down on Christmas Eve in 1818, as the legend goes, say the editors. Parish organist Franz Gruber often accompanied singing there on a guitar. But play the music for “Silent Night” the editors have reconstructed from two incomplete autographs, and be charmed. The restoration of the original notes and guitar accompaniment are compensation enough for the dashed sentiment.

Such historical care is characteristic of the 702-page New Oxford Book of Carols (NOBC), which was issued last year. With a price tag of $125, that volume was, however, beyond the budgets of most amateur musicians, who could not write it off on their income-tax returns.

Now comes the Shorter New Oxford Book of Carols, with a diminished selection of carols (122 drawn from a variety of European and American traditions, instead of the 201 in last year’s high-ticket version). Also reduced are the footnotes. While most of us won’t need the missing notes, they are referenced frequently enough in the SNOBC to drive one to buy the big book out of simple frustration.

Also missing is the NOBC’s guide to fifteenth-century English pronunciation. Should you decide to sing “Owt of your slepe aryse,” a visit to a nearby college library will be needed.

For many years, the 1928 edition of the Oxford Book of Carols was an important resource for church choirs. Its editors (including English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams) successfully revitalized a form of folk art that had fallen into a state of Victorian languor. Now the NOBC and its child carry that task further and bring us yet closer to historical and cultural realism—without placing inordinate demands on either listener or singer.

In this “short” volume, most musicians will discover carols they had not known. But the real riches may lie in the restoration of more historically authentic versions of carols that had been bastardized by an earlier generation that underestimated the taste or abilities of congregations. See for yourself by singing the SNOBC restoration of Mendelssohn’s music for “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.”

If, as a result, you feel unusually generous this Christmas, donate a couple dozen copies of this volume to your church’s choir.

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