Choosing Community

Action, Faith, and Joy in the Works of Dorothy L. Sayers

Christine A. Colòn

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830870301
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Literatur & Kunst im Christentum

Few writers in the twentieth century were as creative and productive as Dorothy L. Sayers, the English playwright, novelist, and poet. Her justly renowned works include detective fiction featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, theological reflections, literary criticism, and her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy.Among the prominent themes of her work was the need for and challenges of developing community. Sayers, who was herself an active member of various writing groups throughout her lifetime, offers her readers visions of both fractured and harmonious communities.In this Hansen Lectureship volume, Christine Colón explores the role of community in Sayers's works. In particular, she considers how Sayers offers a vision of communities called to action, faith, and joy, and she reflects on how we also are called to live in community together.Based on the annual lecture series hosted at Wheaton College's Marion E. Wade Center, volumes in the Hansen Lectureship Series reflect on the imaginative work and lasting influence of seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.

1

Dorothy L. Sayers’s Vision for Communities of Action

IN THE NINE TAILORS, one of her most famous detective novels, Dorothy L. Sayers discusses the “art of change-ringing”—an art where a group of bell ringers gather together in a church’s bell tower “to work out mathematical permutations and combinations” on the bells.1 Rather than playing tunes on the bells, change ringers carefully practice various peals—sequences of different combinations of the order of the bells. For each unique peal of the bells, a change ringer must understand where his or her particular bell falls within the ever-shifting pattern and then must be able to control the bell well enough to make sure that it rings at the correct moment. Take, for example, the peal known as Plain Bob Minor, which is played on six bells numbered from the highest pitch to the lowest. The peal begins with each bell ringing in order, but as it progresses, the order of the bells shifts:

1 2 3 4 5 6

2 1 4 3 6 5

2 4 1 6 3 5

4 2 6 1 5 3

4 6 2 5 1 3

6 4 5 2 3 1, etc.2

To an untrained ear, these changes in the order can be difficult to perceive, but for a change ringer each peal makes its own particular music. As you might suspect, this art is not an easy one to master. It requires not only the physical stamina to pull a heavy church bell, sometimes for hours at a time, but also the mental stamina to keep track of when to pull your bell in the ever-shifting patterns that make up a peal. It also requires that you work in perfect harmony with everyone else in the group, timing your bell ringing in relation to everyone else’s. There are, in fact, so many different components involved in change ringing that it has the potential to quickly deteriorate into chaos. When everything comes together, however, there is, as Sayers’s narrator describes it in The Nine Tailors, “satisfaction in mathematical completeness and mechanical perfection . . . [and] the solemn intoxication that comes of intricate ritual faultlessly performed.”3

I begin with the example of change ringing because I believe it serves as a powerful image of the challenges of community that Sayers explores throughout her works. Like change ringing, community for Sayers is an “intricate ritual” in which individuals must work diligently to perform their parts, trusting that these parts will ultimately combine well with the others so that the ritual will be “faultlessly performed.” In these essays, I will be exploring how Sayers articulates three particular qualities that she believes are essential in order to successfully perform this ritual of community: action, faith, and joy. Because Sayers returns to the topic of community so many times throughout her works, I believe it can serve as a powerful lens through which we may gain not only a good sense of Sayers’s artistry but also a deeper understanding of some of the theological foundations of her work.

In her introduction to The Man Born to Be King, her retelling of the life of Christ, Sayers discusses how closely theology and artistry are intertwined. She remarks, “A loose and sentimental theology begets loose and sentimental art-forms; an illogical theology lands one in illogical situations; an ill-balanced theology issues in false emphasis and absurdity.”4 While Sayers is focused here primarily on the process of adapting Scripture to literature, she had earlier made a similar connection between theological truth and the creative mind in The Mind of the Maker.5 For Sayers, her integrity as an artist was enmeshed with her integrity as a Christian, and this was true not simply of her religious plays and essays but also of her detective novels. I will begin this series of essays, then, by focusing on how Sayers’s growth as a writer of detective fiction is integrally connected to her developing ideas regarding community and, more particularly, the role of individual action within it. As Sayers worked to develop the genre beyond the simple puzzle that often characterized it, she also began developing a more complex theological perspective on community—one that would resonate powerfully throughout her life and work.

Figure 1. Sayers as a successful writer

COMMUNITY IN SAYERS’S LIFE

In her own life, Sayers was well aware of the potential power of strong community. At university, she and several of her friends created the Mutual Admiration Society, a writing group where members would come together to share their poetry and invite critique from the other members. As a detective novelist, she was one of the founding members of the Detection Club, where mystery writers would socialize and support each other in their craft. As a playwright, she reveled in the community that arose around each production, immersing herself in the vibrant creativity of the actors, director, and production team. And as a Christian apologist, she worked with St. Anne’s House in Soho to open a dialogue between Christians and agnostics through lectures, debates, and discussions. Throughout her life, Sayers immersed herself in groups that would not only help to nurture her own individual creativity but also allow her to work with others to achieve more as a group than she could individually. She recognized the potential power of people working well in community and utilized it in her own life and career.

Figure 2. Sayers (second from the right) with friends at college

Sayers was also intensely aware of the problems that arose when people could not figure out how to live well in community, a fact that was vividly revealed to the world through the realities of World War I and World War II. Born in 1893, Sayers was twenty-one years old when World War I erupted. She was, in fact, on a cycling tour of France, and her letters home reveal her excitement about being in the midst of things (as well as her obliviousness to the potential danger). In a letter on August 2, 1914, she remarks,

Yesterday we went into the town here. It was most extraordinary. Everybody one met seemed to be in a fearful hurry, and on the other hand, all the street corners were occupied by groups of people talking about the war. Every other man had a newspaper in his hands. Soldiers and sailors were all over the place. . . . In the circumstances, you see it is quite possible we may have to come back, if we can get back. I do hope we shall be able to stay, because it is so fearfully thrilling, but of course it wouldn’t be fair to stay and eat up all Mme Larnaudie’s provisions.6

That excitement began to dim when she returned to England and experienced some of the realities of war, enduring zeppelin raids while a teacher in the port city of Hull and seeing young men return from the front with physical, mental, and emotional wounds. When World War II broke out twenty years later, she began to reflect on the ways that these two wars might be a result of moving away from God’s original design for community.

She expressed these ideas in a work written at the outset of the war titled Begin Here, in which she argues that the essential challenge of Western society “has been that of inventing and maintaining a kind of state in which every man and woman should enjoy freedom and equality while yet sharing in an orderly communal life.”7 In this work, which was designed to encourage her readers to persevere in the face of war, Sayers approaches the topic from a theological perspective. She first argues that humanity has continually failed to develop community according to God’s fundamental laws for the universe and then posits a better approach to community that would bring society closer into alignment with God’s original plan. Sayers’s approach is founded on the idea that if individuals could learn to integrate “feeling, thought, and deed; soul, mind and body,” they would restore the “full creative power” that God designed them to have.8 Then, they would be able to come together and use that creative power to discover and implement effective solutions for their larger communities. At the time Sayers wrote Begin Here, she was known primarily as a writer of detective fiction, so her readers may have been surprised that she not only addressed such a serious and important subject but also discussed it in theological terms. The truth is, Sayers had already been exploring many of these ideas in her fiction writing. She may not have expressed them in explicitly theological terms, but, looking back from the perspective of her later works in Christian apologetics, we can see that many of her ideas about the relationship between individuals and their community develop over the course of her detective novels.

Figure 3. Sayers during World War II

CONVENTIONS OF DETECTIVE FICTION

In order to understand how Sayers was handling the topic of community in her novels, we must first understand the conventions of detective fiction that she was working with. In the standard formula for detective fiction, the story begins with a peaceful, happy family or community that is threatened in some way by evil. The community calls upon a brilliant detective—often accompanied by a less brilliant sidekick—who discovers the evil and purges it from the community so that the community may return to its quiet, peaceful state. While there are certainly variations to this standard formula, it proved to be very popular from the nineteenth century—when the detective novel was created—through the golden age of detective fiction in the 1920s and ’30s when Sayers was writing.

Think, for instance, of a typical Sherlock Holmes mystery such as “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.”9 Here, a young woman in distress arrives to ask Holmes for help. She fears that her stepfather may have killed her sister two years previously and worries that he is now attempting to kill her. Holmes, along with Watson (who recounts the tale), travels to the country estate and carefully examines the evidence. Becoming suspicious of the layout of this young woman’s bedroom, Holmes arranges for her to spend the night elsewhere while he, unbeknownst to the stepfather, occupies the chamber and discovers the intricate device that the stepfather had created to encourage a deadly snake—the speckled band of the title—to enter the room and bite whoever happened to be lying in the bed. Holmes, of course, escapes being bitten, and the snake, returning to its handler (the stepfather), bites him instead. At the end of the story, not only has the mystery of the earlier murder been solved, but the evil stepfather who was willing to murder his stepdaughters to control his late wife’s fortune has also been destroyed, leaving the young woman free to enjoy the money she has inherited and to marry the man she loves.

As numerous critics of the detective story have pointed out, this formula is problematic, for it presents a simplistic view both of evil and of community. W. H. Auden’s critique is one of the most famous. In an article titled “The Guilty Vicarage,” Auden begins by outlining two typical trajectories of a detective story and explaining the various components that make up both formulas. The first begins with a “peaceful state before murder” and then moves through the stages of “murder,” “false clues, secondary murder, etc.,” “solution,” and “arrest of murderer” before reaching the “peaceful state after arrest.”10 The second begins with “false innocence” and then moves through the stages of “revelation of presence of guilt,” “false location of guilt,” “location of real guilt,” and “catharsis,” ending with a final state of “true innocence.”11 As you can see, the mysteries in both trajectories move through a state of confusion in order to reach a final state of peaceful innocence. The evil has been purged, and the community returns to normal. The question that arises, though, is whether this final state is actually normal, or if it presents a problematic view of the world. As Auden continues, he analyzes his own addiction to detective fiction and presents his suspicion that “the typical reader of detective stories is . . . a person who suffers from a sense of sin”12 and who enjoys “the illusion of being dissociated from the murderer.”13 For him, detective fiction is a “phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence.”14 Rather than having to grapple with the evil inside themselves, readers are able to project it entirely upon the fictional villain who is safely eliminated at the end of the story. Sayers herself recognizes this problem, for in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: Walter Hansen
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1 Dorothy L. Sayers’s Vision for Communities of Action
• Response: Tiffany Eberle Kriner
• 2 Dorothy L. Sayers's Vision for Communities of Faith
• Response: Andy Mangin
• 3 Dorothy L. Sayers’s Vision for Communities of Joy
• Response: Bryan T. McGraw
• CONTRIBUTORS
• AUTHOR INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX
• THE HANSEN LECTURESHIP SERIES
• NOTES
• PRAISE FOR CHOOSING COMMUNITY
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• MORE TITLES FROM INTERVARSITY PRESS
• Copyright