In summary: This is the best biography of Sayers that I have read, or am likely to read.
I’d already read two biographies of Dorothy Sayers before I picked up this. One (by Hitchman) I didn’t think much of; the other (by Brabazon) was pretty good. That would seem to be plenty.
But Reynolds isn’t just another biographer. She was a friend and collaborator of Sayers at the end of her life; she edited Sayers’ letters (volumes which are well worth reading); she was a scholar and translator that I particularly admire in her own right (especially for her translation of Orlando Furioso and the Cambridge Italian Dictionary (a constant companion in my 20s).
If you’re primarily interested in Sayers as the author of detective stories, this might not be the book for you. Reynolds gives, I would say, proper weight to the Wimsey books, and I learned a lot about their origins from her account. But she’s primarily interested in Sayers herself, and the Wimsey books only occupied about 15 years of her life; neither Sayers nor Reynolds thought they’re the best or most important things that Sayers wrote.
Based on family sources, especially letters, Reynolds gives an unusually detailed account of Sayers’ childhood. Sayers was the only child of an elderly couple, the father a Church-of-England priest who held various positions through her life, but a crucial early one was at Oxford, the source of Sayers’ earliest memories where she would return, in person and in her imagination, again and again in her life.
In her fifth year her father became the rector of Bluntisham in Cambridgeshire, and it’s in this largely rural parish that Sayers grew up. She was educated in the home, and was extremely precocious, teaching herself to read as her mother read aloud to her, and beginning Latin at the age of 6. Modern languages were like candy to her and she acquired something like native proficiency from the tutors brought in to educate her.
She was an imaginative child, constantly staging dramas with friends and toys and family members, and engaged in longterm imaginative play which we would call LARPing nowadays. She was particularly crazy about The Three Musketeers, and frequently dressed up as Athos, assigning various roles to friends and family. Her father was Louis XIII, and even wore a fake beard to help the game along. Her mother played Cardinal Richelieu (Charlton Heston not being available). She wrote copiously, especially highly formal poetry.
This was a girl who was clearly destined to go to a university and her parents, Victorians though they were, wanted that to happen. That meant that she had to go from homeschooling to some kind of prep school, and eventually she was sent to the Godolphin School in Salisbury.
There she was a miserable outcast—or someone who had a blast and was a happily welcomed joiner. It all depends on which version, provided by Sayers herself, that you believe. Her letters sent home are full of sunny cheer about the school and her life there. As an adult she wrote an autobiographical novel (never finished or published) which depicts a DLS-like character who is lonely and miserable at school. Reynolds is inclined to take at face value the tone of her letters home, but I have to say this sounds naive. Throughout her life Sayers made a practice of concealing things in her life that would make her parents unhappy (e.g. her out-of-wedlock child), and there’s no reason to suppose that she didn’t do this while at Godolphin. On the other hand, she did learn a lot, make friends, and experienced an intense “pash” for one of her female instructors. Probably she was happy and unhappy, alone sometimes and with friends sometimes, ecstatic and miserable. She was a teenager, after all.
“What’s with all this gender fluidity?” you might be wondering. And well might you wonder. Reynolds reports it, but she’s not the sort of person to be asking that kind of question about her dead friend.
Sayers did end up earning a scholarship to Somerville College at Oxford. She always looked back on her time in Oxford as a transformative experience and there’s no reason to believe otherwise. She immersed herself in French, modern and medieval, read a lot of detective novels, made lifelong friends with a circle who mostly used masculine names for each other, and (although she claimed she never worked) graduated with a triumphant First Class honors in Romance languages.
Then… what? That’s the big question for a lot of people with their undergraduate degrees in hand. (Graduating from Somerville didn’t yet entitle one to a degree from Oxford, but the university would rectify that in 1920, retroactively granting graduates like DLS both BAs and MAs.) Sayers had published a couple volumes of poetry which were interesting enough to catch the attention of future Inkling Charles Williams; she tried and failed to get involved in wartime nursing; she got a job in publishing that kept her in Oxford for a couple more years.
Eventually she drifted to London, teaching here and there, frequently out of work, living from allowance check to allowance check, seeing friends and going to parties. She followed a friend she had romantic feelings toward to France, where he was running a kind of school. He left to get married and she drifted back to London.
And she read heaps of detective novels, especially the Sexton Blake books.
In London she eventually got work for an advertising agency but she was already circulating a manuscript that she referred to as “Lord Peter” but would eventually appear under a title chosen by the American publisher: Whose Body?
Who was the original on which Lord Peter Wimsey was based? That’s the kind of thing Sayers buffs spend a lot of time wondering about. Was it that plummy archetype of Balliolity, Roy Ridley? Was it her friend, employer, and sometime romantic interest Eric Whelpton? Or maybe that’s that just smoke and mirrors and, as one observer has said,
to me it seems pretty clear that he’s the sort of person Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster would be if Wooster were a genius instead of an idiot.
Anyway, she secured an agent and a publishing deal with the novel, finally got reliable employment at the advertising firm of S.H. Benson, and began her second novel. I don’t think I’ve left out anything important from the years 1920-1921 except the thing that, at the time, may have seemed the most important to her.
That’s a guy, John Cournos. Jewish in heritage, born in Russia, raised largely in America, he was an already-published writer of literary fiction living in London and he and DLS were absolutely hot for each other.
Here’s the problem: she wanted to marry; he was opposed to marriage in principle. He wanted to have sex without marriage, using birth control. She objected somewhat to the nonmarital sex, but even more to condoms, for which she seems to have had a strong dislike. He scorned her ambitions as a detective novelist and wasn’t interested in her pretensions as a scholar; he didn’t like to go to the theater or to the cinema. They were completely unsuitable for each other as partners and apparently obsessed with each other physically.
They went back and forth for months. They necked. They lay naked in bed with each other. They talked and they talked and then they talked some more. But they never apparently did the deed of darkness.
Eventually Cournos wandered off to America where—maybe you saw this coming—he got married… to a detective novelist, no less: a burn so sick it should be on display at the British Museum. He later claimed that he would have married Sayers if she had given herself to him freely and without conditions, which is not the sort of comment that would cool Sayers’ temper.
DLS, all stirred up and really not very interested in literary conversation for the nonce, hooked up with a guy named Bill Smith. He had a motorcycle and was fun; he was a sexually experienced guy who could give and receive pleasure. DLS and he did that to each other. And then, in spite of using the loathéd condoms, she got pregnant anyway.
Smith wasn’t interested in a pregnant girlfriend, or getting married, or being a father, so she told him to go to hell. Then there was the question of what she was to do about her pregnancy.
Marriage was out. Abortion was both illegal and dangerous. Sayers had her son out of wedlock—never telling her aged parents that they had a grandson—and sent him to be raised by her cousin, who ran a home for foster children.
She didn’t just dump the kid and leave him to his own devices; she remained involved in his life, first as friendly “Cousin Dorothy” and then openly acknowledging that she was his mother. They never lived together but she looked after his education, and he ended up following her to Oxford, winning a scholarship to Balliol.
She had meanwhile married a sometime-journalist and boon companion, veteran of the Boer War and WWI, Atherton Fleming, generally known as Mac. It was a happy marriage, and then it was just a marriage. Mac’s war injuries, including PTSD and the aftereffects of poison gas, made it difficult for him to earn a living, so DLS increasingly took on that task. Patriarchy made it difficult for him not to be a dick about this, but DLS assumed that burden, too.
Sayers the novelist used the experiences of her personal life the way a thrifty butcher makes use of a pig, using everything but the squeal. You can see the difficulties of her marriage with Mac in the marital troubles of the Fentimans in The Unpleasantness of the Bellona Club. You can see the literary shadow of her not-quite-an-affair with John Cournos in the plotlines of Ann Dorland in Unpleasantness and also, of course, the affair of Harriet Vane and Philip Boyes in Strong Poison. She used her love of motorcycles and cars in stories like “The Fantastic Horror of the Cat in the Bag” and Clouds of Witness. She used the seedier parts of Fleet Street, that she’d encountered with Mac, in characters like Salcombe Hardy, a semi-regular in the Wimsey series. Her experience at S.H. Benson’s went into the better half of Murder Must Advertise, a semibrilliant murder mystery set at an advertising agency.
The Wimsey series made her so much money that she could quit the advertising agency and, eventually, stop writing Wimsey books. In the 1930s-40s she took up a new career as a playwright (many of whose works were commissioned by the BBC) and sort of professional spokesperson for Christianity.
She seems to have been uncomfortable in that role, and I certainly found this the most uncomfortable part of the book. Speaking as a guy who still goes to church once in a while, I find mid-century Anglican apologetics extremely grating. They can be braying, triumphalist, almost jingoistic—like war propaganda. There’s a lot of talk about what a “Christian society” would look like: apparently this would start by excluding people with the poor taste to have their own religious opinions. There’s some stuff written in this genre and period that I value: Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, for instance. But if I’d heard CSL’s radio broadcasts (as reported in the most nonhostile way possible by Humphrey Carpenter in The Inklings), I’m not sure I’d be a fan.
It was in this period that Sayers wrote what she and Reynolds both regard as her most important works: the cycle of religious plays collected as The Man Born to Be King and a meditation on creativity and religion, The Mind of the Maker. They’ve been on my TBR stacks for years. I’ve put off reading them because I don’t want to think less of her. People who have actually read them, please advise.
At the end of her life she also took up translating works from the Romance languages for Penguin books. She created a lively and readable version of The Song of Roland in English assonantic verse, and then launched on a somewhat forbidding but brilliant translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Her version of the Paradiso was incomplete at her death and was finished by Barabara Reynolds. Her Roland and Dante have since been replaced in the Penguin catalog by fresher translations, but her work remains valuable and worth reading.
This book, like its subject, is not perfect. In particular, Reynolds is intent on defending the memory of her friend by making her more conventional than she really seems to have been. But Reynolds is too meticulous a scholar to suppress facts. And, if this is a labor of love (as it clearly is), love is more revealing than hate.
