"Dorothy and Jack" by Gina Dalfonzo

It may sound like a kind of heresy, but I read Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) before I read C.S. Lewis (1898-1963). In the 1970s, there was a revival of mysteries from the Golden Age (1920s-1940s, possibly including the 1950s). I was reading Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Margery Allingham, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, and many others. I connected to Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey stories through Chesterton. In the late 1970s, I was reading Francis Schaeffer, and it was through Schaeffer that I began reading Lewis. 

While I came to know a lot about Lewis and the Inklings, and his friendship with Tolkien, what I didn’t know was the connection between Lewis and Sayers. One connecting point was Charles Williams, a sort of “add-on Inkling” who moved to Oxford with the University Press in 1940. He became great friends with Lewis, but not so much with Tolkien. It was Williams who inspired Sayers to undertake her translation of The Divine Comedy by Dante, although his death in 1945 happened before she began to publish.

 

The original connecting point was a fan letter written by Sayers to Lewis in 1942. For the next 15 years, until Sayers’ death in 1957, they developed and maintained a friendship nurtured in writing, faith, education, family background, interests, and philosophy. Gina Dalfonzo tells their story in Dorothy and Jack: The Transforming Friendship of Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis, and she notes that it would be difficult to find a man and a woman more alike in virtually all aspects of their lives. 

 

Gina Dalfonzo

The story of their friendship is the story of two towering intellects who connected initially through that fan letter. Dalfonzo notes that the letter itself has been lost; we don’t know which of Lewis’s works inspired her to write. Lewis said that this letter was the first fan letter he received from someone famous.

 

Their correspondence continued and grew. It was a friendship of equals – equals in intellect, faith, and fame. Their correspondence and occasional face-to-face meetings continued. Dalfonzo ably guides us through their friendship, the letters, and the context of their meetings and discussions. As the meetings of the Inklings became more sporadic, Sayers may have provided the intellectual sounding board that Lewis thrived on. And vice versa. 

 

It's a wonderful book, filled with insights about both authors.

 

Dalfonzo is the author of One by One: Welcoming the Singles in Your Church and the editor of The Gospel in Dickens: Selections from His Works. She serves as a columnist at Christ & Pop Culture and is the founder and editor of Dickensblog, a “blog for all things Dickens.” She’s written for The Atlantic, Christianity Today, First Things, Weekly Standard, and Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, among many others. She received a B.S. degree in English from Messiah College and an M.A. degree in English from George Mason University. She lives in Virginia.

 

Dorothy and Jack is an important contribution to our understanding of not only both authors individually but to that overall climate in England in the 1940s and 1950s that did much to fan the flames of Christian faith on both sides of the Atlantic.

Jill Paton Walsh’s “The Late Scholar”

From 1923 to 1937, Dorothy Sayers wrote a series of mystery novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, son of the Duke and Duchess of Denver. Lord Peter always seemed something of the quintessential English aristocrat, except one with a penchant for getting himself involved in murders and other nefarious situations.

Dorothy Sayers

Sayers was more than a mystery writer; she wrote plays, essays, literary criticism and poetry. She translated Dante’s Divine Comedy. And her writings on faith and Christianity so reflected Anglican  teaching that the Archbishop of Canterbury offered her a Lambeth doctorate in divinity (which she declined).

But it is for Lord Peter Wimsey that she’s best known today. The Lord Peter mysteries are still read, helped along over the years by television series. And there was one Lord Peter manuscript left unfinished by Sayers. In 1999, mystery and fiction writer Jill Paton Walsh stepped in and completed it, the title publishing as Thrones, Dominations in1999.

Walsh wrote two more Lord Peter stories (giving Lord Peter’s love interest and eventual wife Harriet Vane close to equal billing). A Presumption of Death was published in 2002, and The Attenbury Emeralds in 2011.

Now we have The Late Scholar. It is 1953, and Lord Peter discovers that he is the official “Visitor” at St. Severin’s College at Oxford, thanks to a generous donation made by an ancestor in the 1700s. And the Visitor is being asked to come to Oxford to break a college deadlock that has everything to do with tradition versus academic survival. The issue at hand is whether to sell an Anglo-Saxon copy of The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, possibly annotated by King Alfred, so the college can buy a piece of land ripe for development, or hold on to what is the most prized possession of its library.

The vote by St. Severin’s fellows is split 50-50. The warden (head of college) who is supposed to break ties, had sided with keeping the manuscript, that is, until he disappeared. And then fellows start dying, in ways strongly suggestive of the plots of Harriet Vane’s murder mysteries. Threads are discovered leading to a savage five-year-old literary review in the Times Literary Supplement, a researcher’s suicide years before, and a beautiful and frightened woman living in an isolated house.

Jill Paton Walsh

Lord Peter (followed by Harriet) is on the scene, and the murders continue.

The Late Scholar is grand fun (fun in the sense of engaging murder mysteries). Walsh is faithful to the spirit of Sayers and her detective. No, it’s not exactly as Sayers might have written the story, but it’s close enough to be recognizable as a Lord Peter Wimsey story. And with deaths in organ lofts, attacks with ceremonial swords, and a murder via skylight, Walsh continues the Lord Peter Wimsey rather swashbuckling tradition of private detection.

Oh, and there’s Bunter, too, Lord Peter’s chauffeur, butler, cook and general factotum.

Yes, it’s great fun.

Photograph: A 1931 Daimler 4-seater; Lord Peter Wimsey owned a 1927 model (among others).

Making Good Tables

In church this morning, the sermon was based upon Luke 19:14-27, the parable of the nobleman who is made king of a distant country, and he gives money to 10 servants to invest while he’s away. What he gave each was a mina, the equivalent of three months wages. One servant has earned 10 minas with the original one; he gets 10 cities to rule. The next earns five from the original one, and he gets five cities. A third kept the mina hidden in a piece of cloth, because he knew the king was a hard man. His mina gets taken away and given to the main who earned 10.

The sermon was about the value of work, but it could just have easily been about working for someone you don’t like, someone who “takes out what he didn’t put in, and reaps what he didn’t sow.” The third servant, the king points out, could have at least put the money on deposit and earned some interest. While that is an interesting discussion for another day, I want to focus on what the pastor said about work: that it’s a trust we are given, a calling we are to respond to, and a destiny we inherit.

Think about that. Work is a trust, a calling and a destiny. And it’s not that only for those with advanced college degrees, but actually for everyone: "Both the preacher and the plumber can work to the glory of God.”

The pastor quoted the writer Dorothy Sayers and what she said about work. Actually, to call Dorothy Sayers a writer is an understatement. She was a writer, a playwright, a theologian, a translator of Dante from the original Italian, a mystery writer (the Lord Peter Wimsey novels), a noted speaker and a lot of other things. She was a contemporary of C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, and I suspect she could have more than held up her end of the conversation with them or anyone else.

In an address entitled “Why Work?” delivered at Eastbourne on April 23, 1942, she said this: A man must be able to serve God in his work, and the work itself must be accepted and respected as the medium of divine creation. “The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter,” she said, “is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.”

In other words, work is a vocation, and a sacred one.