Barbara Reynolds--Dorothy L. Sayers's longtime collaborator, biographer, and disciple--has assembled "all the letters devoid of obscenity, malice, or libel" from the first 43 years of the writer's life. They contain neither any startling revelations about Sayers the woman and writer nor many timeless observations about God and human life--in the fashion, for example, of Flannery O'Connor's The Habit of Being. These letters serve, instead, as a documentary companion to Reynolds's biography of 1993, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul. A second volume from the last two decades--when Sayers ceased writing detective novels and became a celebrated Christian apologist, translator, and playwright--will follow. Yet since Reynolds quotes the choicest passages from Sayers's correspondence in her biography, this reviewer was left wondering whether a single volume, more disciplined in its selection, might have sufficed. Even so, there are important new things to be learned from this collection.

In a letter commenting on the central theme of Gaudy Night, Sayers explained to a friend that her novel is not about the "dreaming-spires" atmosphere of Oxford, but about "the ultimate and unforgiveable sin . . . the sin against intellectual integrity. To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life." These letters reveal how fully Sayers practiced her own preachment. For her, the deadliest of all falsifications lies in giving emotional assent to what one does not thoughtfully believe. From her earliest years, she thus developed a salutary scorn for all false sentiment, especially in matters religious.

Every sign of treacly piety was an abomination to Sayers. She wrote home from Oakhurst School, at age 17, to confess that she loathed the collects she had to memorize, and that she liked morning worship because there was but a single hymn, and because the Scripture readings and prayers were short. She was also troubled that "the good people of the world are generally rather uninteresting," but she was eager to commend the priest who prepared her for confirmation because he was not stiff with rectitude: "I went in the other day to tell him about my besetting sins and we ended by discussing Oxford and my future career."

Most of Sayers's evangelical enthusiasts have become inured to the news that she was no conventional Christian, that she bore a child out of wedlock, that she married a thorough-going pagan with whom she had little in common. Here her antimoralism is made ever more evident. Already as a young woman she had become an unabashed lover of music and poetry, of theater and art, of fashion and style, of fine wines and food and cigarettes. We thus find the 15-year-old Sayers extolling charity as the chief virtue, declaring condemnatory righteousness to be the chief enemy of Christianity. "People who prefer to believe the worst of others," she later wrote, "will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts."

Neither was Sayers an enthusiast for Protestant liberalism. As one of the first women to study at Oxford, she refused to join the Christian Social Union because it virtually equated the gospel with leftist economics, its members "gassing on about the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man." Like her own father's classmate Oscar Wilde, Sayers discovered the problem with socialism is that it leaves no free evenings. She refused to concede that her first concern as a Christian must be the slums of London--as if the gospel could be reduced to social action, its transcendent truth merely assumed. Neither could it be simply asserted. Young Sayers was drawn to G. K. Chesterton precisely because he was no bullying apologist, but rather a cheerful and witty witness to the deep paradoxes of Christian faith.

Though she remained an uncompromising high-church Anglican--going on silent retreats, making auricular confession, observing the great feasts of the church, crossing herself before meals, keeping a crucifix on her desk--Sayers was no Christian imperialist. In fact, she had such misgivings about Christendom that she declined to have her own infant son baptized: "This is no longer a Christian country," Sayers wrote. "The chances are that the boy will not want to be a Christian; if he does, it will be because he believes it, which is the only good reason. The Early Church, living, as we do, surrounded by a heathen population, did not baptise infants, and I daresay she was right."

Lest this declaration make Sayers sound like a Baptist, it is important to note that she was an early opponent of biblical literalism; for her it meant the death of faith. Hence her concern to find fresh new ways of imagining God's continuing work in creation. Unlike the Oxford Inklings, who were concerned chiefly to link the gospel with myths and cultures that came before it, Sayers sought also to reconcile Christian revelation with modern science:

What fun it would be if all the solar systems in the universe were only atoms in a PERFECTLY ENORMOUS animal. . . . And similarly, if all the little electrons were solar systems of worlds in which incredibly minute people had infinitesimal love affairs and wrote preposterously unimportant detective stories?

Already during her Oxford years, we find Sayers wrestling with the vexing question of religious pluralism. She confesses to her parents that she has no ready answer:

It isn't a case of "Here is the Christian religion, the one authoritative and respectable rule of Life. Take it or leave it." It's "Here's a muddling kind of affair called Life, and here are nineteen or twenty different explanations of it, all supported by people whose opinions are not to be sneezed at. Among them is the Christian religion in which you happen to be brought up. Your friend so-and-so has been brought up in a quite different way of thinking; is a perfectly splendid person and thoroughly happy. What are you going to do about it?"

What Dorothy L. Sayers did about it was to insist that lasting solutions to perennial problems must not be borrowed from others nor turned into convenient formulae: they must be carpentered from the rough timber of experience. Sayers's letters were her workshop.

Ralph C. Wood has recently been appointed as Distinguished Professor of Religion at Samford University.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture magazine.

July/August, Vol. 3, No. 4, Page 31

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