The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers

Catherine Kenney

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 1991
• ISBN:
  9781612779126
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

One of the most fascinating comments often made about Dorothy l. Sayers is that she wrote "real" novels. Catherine Kenney considers why Sayers mysteries tend to strike astute readers this way, and in so doing, suggests her place not only in the history of detection, but in the larger tradition of the English novel which she admired. Gaudy Night, for example, bears striking similarities to nineteenth-century English fiction, especially the novels of Jane Austen. The links between these authors have important implications not only for literary and social history, but also for our growing understanding of the subtle relationship between gender and genre.

Unlike earlier book-length studies of Sayers, what Professor Kenney has written is not a biography or a survey, but an assessment of Dorothy Sayer's main contributions to modern letters and culture. Drawing upon Sayer's novels, essays, plays, manuscripts, and letters, Kenney demonstrates the organic relationship of the parts of Sayer's canon and argues persuasively that all of her important themes and concerns are embedded in her best work, her fiction.

Sayer's three main accomplishments serve as the organizing principle of this book: first, her transformation of the modern detective story into a serious novel of social criticism and moral depth; second, her penetrating critique of the situation of modern women; and finally her compelling work as a lay theologian and interpreter of Christianity. Thus, the book proceeds not only in roughly chronological order, but also from the work that most readers know best what they know least. The author assumes some familiarity with Sayer's fiction, but The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers is not intended for specialists alone. Indeed, it is appropriate for the same reader that DLS had in mind when she wrote. It will appeal to those who already admire her work, and it may bring others to appreciate her as a literary figure of importance.

I

A Detective in the House of Fiction

All art and myth-making disclose the universal pattern of things and may therefore be taken as symbolic presentations of truths greater than themselves.

—“Oedipus Simplex”

What a piece of work is man, that he should enjoy this kind of thing! A very odd piece of work—indeed, a mystery!

—The Omnibus of Crime I

1

The Making of a Mystery Writer

It is impossible to say precisely what drove Dorothy L. Sayers to choose the detective story as her genre in the early 1920s, a time she would later characterize as “that spiritually ragged period”¹ and which she drew with great precision in her novels. After graduation from Somerville College, Oxford, in 1915, she spent some difficult years casting about for her life’s work. Like most educated women until very recent times, she tried to use her university education as a schoolmistress,² first in Hull, for just over a year beginning in January of 1916, and later in London, beginning in the autumn of 1920. She never really wanted to be a teacher, however, and between these two short-lived experiences, took time out for a two-year stint at Blackwell’s in Oxford, beginning in 1917. At Blackwell’s she was a sort of publisher’s apprentice in which it was her job to learn “the whole business, from discount to the three-colour process.”³ This job, which at least superficially suited her literary aspirations better than did the teaching positions, ended when Blackwell’s changed from an emphasis on belles lettres to textbook publishing. It is likely that Dorothy Sayers was also something of a challenge to deal with in that office, for in Basil Blackwell’s judgment the brilliant, exuberant young woman seemed “a racehorse harnessed to a cart.”⁴

Her next job was as an assistant (in a secretarial rather than a teaching capacity) to an Oxford friend, Eric Whelpton, who had a teaching position at a school near Paris after World War I.⁵ To readers of Sayers’s novels, perhaps the greatest significance of this experience at L’Ecole des Roches, in Verneuil sur Avre, was its likely influence on the development of the writer’s distinctive—and rather un-English—Francophilia, the strong admiration of French culture and mores which informs much of her work.⁶

Sayers seems to have been temperamentally unsuited to the job of teaching, and to her credit realized this early on and decided to do something else. It must be remembered that, for a woman in the first quarter of this century, such a decision carried greater liabilities than it does today, when women’s choices are wider. It has never been easy to support oneself by writing, and Sayers’s decision to attempt to do so was courageous, although she would probably refuse such a label. In 1955, she described her job history in a letter to The Church Times, which had run a rather garbled account of her life, implying that what she had really wanted was a fellowship at Oxford. The petulant tone is characteristic of such missives:

Allow me to inform you that I never at any time either sought or desired an Oxford fellowship. If anybody entertained such hopes on my behalf, I am not aware of it, and if I disappointed anybody by my distaste for the academic life, that person has my sympathy. …

Neither was I “forced” into either the publishing or the advertising profession. … Nor do I quite understand why earning one’s living should be represented as a hardship. (After all, even Oxford fellows have to do some work nowadays to justify their existence). “Intellectual frustration” be blowed! … it was all very good fun while it lasted. (Hone 180)

That last sentence is a key to understanding the life and work of Dorothy L. Sayers. A woman of deep and wide-ranging enthusiasms, she enjoyed many types of experience—all great fun while they lasted. At different periods of her richly varied life, and in different moods, she engaged in novel writing, advertising campaigns, Dante studies, religious drama, literary criticism, and social commentary because it pleased her to do so. One of the reasons her work is pleasurable is that it communicates this sense of fun and pleasure in the work done. Sayers addicts—of which there are a goodly number—are fired by her enthusiasm, which they match in the intense interest they bring to her work.

In spite of her disavowals and indeed the evidence of her life, it has become something of a cliché to characterize DLS as a failed scholar who missed her chance in academe and then “settled for” writing popular fiction. Even so astute and sympathetic a reader as Robin Winks, himself a historian at Yale as well as a great aficionado of detective fiction, has asserted that “Sayers wanted all her life to be a don” (Modus Operandi 35). Perhaps one of the reasons for this confusion was her statements in the mid-1930s, around the time of Gaudy Night, to the effect that she had always expected to grow up to be an Oxford-educated scholar.⁷ As the only and very gifted child of an Oxford man, this was a reasonable expectation, especially since Dorothy Leigh Sayers had been born in the old Choir House at Christ Church College, Oxford, where her father was then Headmaster, just as the movement to admit women’s colleges to the University was gaining real momentum. It is perhaps not idle to speculate about what kind of difference it might have made in her life if the Reverend Henry Sayers had fathered a son as well as a daughter.

We should not equate Sayers’s wanting to be a scholar with a desire for becoming a professor or don, however; her life and work suggest that she herself did not equate the two. It is true that she eagerly sought membership of the University of Oxford, and that she wished to be considered part of the wider community of scholars. This she certainly accomplished, and not just by virtue of her First Class Honours Degree in Modern Languages (French) from Somerville, which was finally recognized as a full-fledged part of the University in 1920 at a ceremony where DLS was among the first group of women ever to be awarded an Oxford degree. Perhaps in a bizarre way that day made up for centuries of waiting, for those women were awarded BA’s and MA’s at the same ceremony, five years after DLS had completed her work at Somerville. Yet the final proof of her scholarship came in her life and work. The evidence shows that she approached experience as a scholar: in the integrity she brought to writing fiction and criticism, in her capacity for change and growth, and in her energetic employment of well-honed skills in the study and translation of medieval French and Italian works, most importantly the first Penguin edition of Dante’s Commedia. There is much of Dorothy L. Sayers in Harriet Vane’s happy realization when she returns to Oxford in Gaudy Night: “They can’t take this away, at any rate. Whatever I may have done since, this remains. Scholar; Master of Arts; Domina; Senior Member of this University … a place achieved, inalienable, worthy of reverence” (ch. 13).

Superior though her intelligence and classical though her education might have been, Dorothy Sayers wanted, even demanded a larger, more exciting stage than that offered by the Oxford she loved and would remember affectionately in Gaudy Night. As we shall see in the discussion of that novel, she was acutely aware of the perennial tension between Town and Gown, and though attracted to both, chose Town when it mattered most—just as Wimsey and Vane do. In the summer of 1919, after her job with Blackwell’s had folded, she wrote to her parents that she intended to leave Oxford: “I want … a thorough change,” she declared (Brabazon 75). By 1920, she had effectively turned away from the security of both college walls and the indulgent arms of family, away from university and vicarage forever, and into the clamorous uproar of London. This move seems the crucial one in her path to becoming a writer, and it influenced greatly the novels she wrote. Though she would return to the university through the years, lecturing on occasion at both Oxford and Cambridge, she came back as a scholar-citizen of the world, a status explored in some detail in Gaudy Night, which remains one of the best college novels ever written.

In May of 1922, owing perhaps as much to her experience at Blackwell’s as to her Oxford degree, Sayers landed the job of copywriter at S. H. Benson’s, then England’s largest advertising agency, where she was to make her bread and butter for the next decade as she turned out increasingly complex novels at the rate of roughly one per year. It is easy for her admirers to belittle this position at Benson’s. It was a kind of drudgery for the gifted young woman, and it did deplete much of her time and energy. Equally important, however, is the fact that it provided steady income and a relatively stable life for the aspiring novelist; as such, it effectively supported her writing habit until she was well enough known, in the early thirties, to command good advances on her books. The ebullient evocation of office life in Murder Must Advertise also suggests that at the advertising agency, she found some of the camaraderie she must have missed since her college days.⁸ The job taught her much about the use and abuse of language in the modern world, which became the theme not only of Murder Must Advertise, but of many of her later essays and lectures. Certainly this experience in advertising, combined with her thorough knowledge of book publishing, made her an unusually astute writer when it came to the business of contracts, publication schedules, permissions, and book promotion. It was, at any rate, a propitious combination of experiences to prepare a writer who was to see the novelist’s job as both art and craft.

According to her authorized biographer, James Brabazon, by August of 1929 DLS had secured a contract with an American publisher that guaranteed her a steady income from her writing (Dorothy L. Sayers 142). From 1930 on, she was effectively that rare bird, a self-supporting freelance writer, and after that time, focused increasingly on the kind of book she wanted to do. Indirectly, this argues for how little she was actually motivated by money-making in her writing.

Like many fiction writers, DLS had begun by composing verse in childhood, and she penned some rather derivative, highly stylized and conventional poetry while at Oxford and in the years immediately following. Some of this poetry was collected in Op I and Catholic Tales and Christian Songs, slim volumes brought out by Basil Blackwell in 1916 and 1918 respectively.⁹ She continued to write poetry intermittently throughout her life, and Brabazon believes that she always considered herself a poet rather than a novelist (126). If so, it would appear that she suffered from an inability—common among writers—to judge her own work. Though her poetry was an attempt at writing “real” literature and was closer to the literary models she had studied in school than her detective fiction was, Sayers had little to contribute to the development of modern poetry, while her fiction includes some of the greatest mystery stories ever written.

Although it is not as effective as her prose, her poetry shares with her fiction a love of tradition, legend, and myth, and in subject matter and theme, often anticipates her later religious writing. The early work in poetry provided useful practice in the careful employment of language and attention to form that was later to distinguish her novels from the average detective story or indeed from most popular fiction. Her life-long work as a poet was also essential preparation for the monumental task she would take on in the 1940s, after ceasing to write mysteries, of translating the Divine Comedy into English poetry, although her infelicity with verse is sometimes noted as a weakness of that translation. Much as she may have wanted to be, Dorothy L. Sayers was not a great poet. But she was a great storyteller. Her narratives are filled with unforgettable characters living in a fully realized world that is presented in inimitable style. After fifty years, even her approach to Dante as a storyteller seems the freshest and best aspect of her admirable work on him.¹⁰

The future novelist—and the Dorothy L. Sayers that most of the world was to know—was prefigured, not in the early verse-making, but in the little girl who enjoyed making up wildly dramatic stories to act out in the isolation of her childhood homes, the rectories of Bluntisham and Christchurch in the remote fen country of East Anglia.¹¹ One thinks of a parallel in the young Jane Austen, in other vicarage, at another time, acting in little dramas of her own invention, although Sayers did not share with Austen the benefit of a large family audience for her earliest “work.” This proclivity for story-telling is the hallmark of Sayers’s art, informing everything from the detective novels through her approach to Dante.

In the early 1930s, when Sayers reflected on her childhood following her parents’ deaths, she praised her mother’s intelligence and commitment to her daughter’s education, but also concluded that if her mother could have enjoyed the opportunities of a later generation of women, she probably would have been a writer herself. DLS decided this because her mother’s letters displayed a “great gift of humorous narration.”¹² Is there a better explanation for the success and enduring appeal of works by the daughter of Helen Mary Leigh Sayers than that she inherited, or perhaps absorbed, this gift for telling a story with wit and humor? It was a glad gift that the novelist fully appreciated. In her “Hymn in Contemplation of Sudden Death, “a poem published in Op I, she cites as one of the things for which she is most grateful this God-given ability “to view the whole world mirthfully.” The known details of Dorothy Sayers’s life suggest that this remarkable sense of humor helped her through many difficult times, just as it has kept several generations of readers coming back to her novels.

Since the autobiographical fragments, “My Edwardian Childhood” and “Cat O’ Mary,”are products of middle age, they are both, in a way, Sayers’s fictional rendering of her own story, the narrative of her life reconstructed from the tissue of memory and experience. Thus, one could conclude that hindsight made it easy for her, as a successful novelist, to maintain in her memoirs that she had always known it was her destiny to be a writer. But the force with which she describes her childhood and adolescent fantasies of becoming a maker, a creator of new worlds, is convincing. While most of her experiences at school were disappointing or embarrassing, Dorothy Sayers learned early that she could control any situation in which language was central. As a novelist, she would make Lord Peter Wimsey’s facility with language and civilized chat his most distinctive characteristic, the talent that helped him solve cases, win his lady, and even forestall the coming war. In “Cat O’ Mary,” DLS vividly describes a child’s first realization of having this creative ability, and the feeling of empowerment that attends such a realization, especially if it comes, as such fantasies usually do, when the child is otherwise quite miserable and helpless. The language of the passage suggests the God-like image of the human creator which Sayers would develop later in The Mind of the Maker:

One day I will show them [the other school children, from whom she was essentially alienated]. I will set my feet on their heads, put the world in my hand like clay and I will build, build, build—something enormous—something they never even dreamed of. It is in me. It is not in them and I know it.¹³

She “knew” this, of course, through the writer’s empathic imagination, which permits glimpses into the hearts and minds of others. Many artists’ autobiographies contain such passages, including vivid descriptions of the realization that they were somehow different from their peers, especially in their ability to view their experience as onlookers as well as participants.

The precocious young girl, who did not leave home for boarding school until she was sixteen and who spent childhood mornings happily reading with her mother, probably read widely in her father’s library as well. It was her learned father who taught her Latin and introduced her, at the age of four-and-a-half, to the Alice books, which she obviously loved, given her novels’ many allusions to them (“My Edwardian Childhood” 7, 9–10). Her fiction also reveals a familiarity with the major English novelists from Richardson to Dickens, as well as with the rich vein of detection running from Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle into her own time.¹⁴

One characteristic of classical detective fiction is to refer to other works in the genre. Throughout her career, Sayers alludes to the Sherlock Holmes canon more than any other detective stories; this is true even after her own version of the detective novel had moved far from the formula. As late as Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon, which many people refuse to consider proper mysteries,¹⁵ she was still seeing Wimsey and the detective process partially in reference to Holmes (Gaudy Night ch. 14, and Busman’s Honeymoon ch. 13). Considering the number of writers in the genre between Conan Doyle and herself, it is interesting ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• The Documents in the Case
• Part I: A Detective in the House of Fiction
• part II: Sayers on Women: An Inquiry into the Fatal Subject
• Part III: A Witness of Universal Truth: The Religious Dimension of Sayers’s Art
• Final Judgment: A Writer First and Foremost
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index