A Mind in Love: Dorothy L. Sayers, Her Life and Soul.

Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life & Soul

Barbara Reynolds 

St. Martin's Press, $25.95, 398 pp.

Nowadays Dorothy L. Sayers is known by the reading public mostly for her detective fiction;but after reading this fascinating account of her life by a close friend and collaborator in her later years, I wonder how pleased she would be by her posthumous fate: "She had come to the conclusion," says Reynolds, "that detective stories tended to have a bad effect on people, making them believe that there was one neat solution for all human ills, and she would have no more part in encouraging such an attitude." And like Conan Doyle before her, she grew rather fired of letters from fans (not to mention her publisher) pleading with her to continue to pump more life into her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, especially now that he had married Harriet Vane, a suspect in one of the earlier novels.

But books, as was famously said of Horace, have their own fate, and that seems to hold true within an author's canon as well: say but the name Dorothy Sayers and nearly everyone thinks first of her detective Lord Wimsey and rarely, if at all, of her theological achievements or her scholarship on Dante (that "mind in love" she called him). And yet I think it no exaggeration to say that, based on her radio plays on the life of Christ (originally written for children but which found an extremely wide audience on BBC during World War II), she must be considered one of the most effective catechists in England since Wesley; and, based on her extremely lucid explanation of the Trinity in The Mind of the Maker, she can certainly be regarded as the most accessible and popular apologete for Christianity in this century after C.S. Lewis, at least in the English-speaking world.

What made her many achievements possible (she was also a translator of note of early French poetry and worked full-time for many years in an advertising agency) were, without any doubt, the new opportunities in higher education that opened up for women the generation before her. After private tuition at home by her parents and aunts (her father was an Anglican clergyman), with additional tutoring by a governess, she later attended a boarding school to qualify for Somerville, the women's college at Oxford, where her musical and scholarly talents could blossom (and where she would locate her later novel, Gaudy Night). Living proof, in other words, of Virginia Woolf's point in A Room of One's Own that, given the requisite support and privacy, a woman could easily match the achievements of a man in letters and the arts.

All very true, but for Sayers this should be the end of it. Once out of the starting gate, so to speak, an achievement is an achievement; and she had little patience with the notion that women have a special epistemological credit-line in their bank account that makes them think differently from men or renders them inherently more virtuous. She was, in current jargon, an "equality feminist" and not a "separatist." In this sense, I think Reynolds is quite fight when she says that "Dorothy was never a feminist and said so clearly more than once." For example, in responding to an invitation to speak at a women's group, Sayers replied: "I have a foolish complex against allying myself publicly with anything labeled feminist...The more clamor we make about 'the women's point of view,' the more we ram into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is--at least not in my job."

Nor did she find the idea of women's ordination appealing, though perhaps more from her experiences as a playwright than as an apologete for Christian dogma (she refused to be called a theologian and declined an offer of an honorary doctor of divinity degree from the archbishop of Canterbury, lest it imply more training than she possessed): in a letter to C.S. Lewis she said she thought it would be more dramatically appropriate that a man should be, as she put it, "cast for the part" of representing Christ, though she was diffident in going public with her opinions.

Sayers certainly could turn a phrase, especially in her more sardonic and polemic moments, a skill that no doubt stood her in good stead when she took up her pen to defend the Trinity to an empirically minded and increasingly skeptical British public. This is a theme of theology that, in spite of its centrality, often spooks even the most daring of preachers, but not Sayers. The boldness and the freshness of The Mind of the Maker has made it for me one of the great classics of popular theology (Karl Barth was so taken with it he translated it on the spot into German), and it will never lose its appeal (it was recently brought back into print by Harper & Row with an introduction by Madeleine L'Engle). And the same tart Sayers mind is at work, cutting through the fog of obscurity and seeing the nub of the issue.

Even before the banalities of so-called inclusive language came sweeping over the world of Christian worship and life, she could anticipate its major arguments and see through its various nonsequiturs:

Christian doctrine and tradition, indeed, by language and picture, sets its face against all sexual symbolism for the divine fertility. Its Trinity is wholly masculine, as all language relating to Man as a species is masculine. When we use these expressions, we know perfectly well that they are metaphors and analogies; what is more, we know perfectly well where the metaphor begins and ends. We do not suppose for one moment that God procreates children in the same manner as a human father and we are quite well aware that preachers who use the "father" metaphor intend and expect no such perverse interpretation of their language.

Reynolds's biography is a wonderful portrait of this tart and incisive mind; her affection for her subject does not obscure Sayers's personality but works to highlight it all the more effectively. The book is perhaps a bit too tethered to the documents to merit being called, in the subtitle,"HerLifeandSoul."But Sayers's real brilliance, her zest for life, her love for her friends and her husband (apparently a most difficult man) come through these pages with a delightful vibrancy. She had a great mind--no one would dispute that--but her lasting claim to fame is that it became, in service to the Christian truth (and to borrow her own term for Dante), a "mind in love."

Jack Deedy's Auden as Didymus (Paul P. Appel, $15), which solves the mystery surrounding the identity of one of Commonweal's most distinquished columnists (see Commonweal, August 13, 1993, pp. 20-21), is now available. The handsome 72-page book by Commonweal's former managing editor analyzes the Didymus columns which have been overlooked by most Auden scholars. Deedy also discusses the full range of W.H. Auden's relationship with Commonweal, including Auden's published reviews and poetry as well as the Didymus columns. The book can be ordered through the publisher: 216 Washington Street, Mount Vernon, N.Y. 10553, [phone].