‘I will build up my house from the stark foundations,
… and search unwearying …
for stones or better stuff.
Though here be only the mortar and rough hewn granite,
I will lay on and not desist
Til it stand and shine as I dreamed it when I began.’
The above is an excerpt from a well-written biography of Dorothy Sayers22, which captures the musical score of a mysterious inner heartbeat that inspires much of her work. The author paints an elegant and honest picture of this quick-witted and delightful lioness of language and literature who loved to sing in choirs, laughed at sanctimonious sermonisers, bemused and worried her colleagues by wearing outrageous bird-cage earrings carrying green parrots, and sewed large red roses to her hat and blouse.
Not surprisingly she won the respect of her contemporaries Chesterton and Lewis, and like them, infuriated the literary world by agreeing with Chesterton’s definition that ‘heresy is the fashionable literary position of the day’. A damning charge that suggested their writings—rather than being the much vaunted work of brave and honest souls—were conceived by nothing more than a desire for the approval of their peers. Peers who all did obeisance to the ‘sacred cow’ of literature: ‘we don’t care what you write about as long as you do not commit the unpardonable sin of taking the Christian Messiah seriously.’ This impulse was well described by James Joyce (a contemporary of Dorothy’s) in a letter when he said that he wanted a ‘special odour of corruption, which I hope floats over my stories.’23
At the same time as disturbing her literary friends, this loudly laughing and cigarette-smoking woman of letters rattled, scarified and re-invigorated Christendom by making it remember what it is always trying to forget: that God is the god of chocolate, of flowers and of jokes; and of wine; a being who doesn’t just love human beings, but likes them, is besotted by them and so-oo delights in them enjoying the little things. This self-forgetful pleasure in everything is highlighted in a few lines that Dorothy wrote when she graduated from Oxford.
‘Now that we have gone down …
I would not hold too closely to the past …
thou enchanted town … leave me, clutch me not so
fast …’
‘the thing that I remember most of all
Is the white hemlock by the garden wall.’24
thanks Pete.
that’s OK
what a great woman, I hope to grow up to be like her. I’ll have to read some of her stuff.
yep Georgie,
Glad you like her.
She came with a gust of fresh voices going all the way back to Chaucer and beyond, voices that had no time for the then becoming fashionable self-pitying sulk and bleeding heart brigade of Christians, agnostics and atheists who talked of a ‘pale Galilean’. She seems to have ‘got’ this right from the start and her heart sang and kept singing even though she found herself in the (especially awkward at the time) situation of being a single, working mother.
I’ve included an excerpt from my ‘Flesh’ blog that kind of relates to what it was that I think she ‘saw’ in God.
By the way I have heard that some do not like some of her prose but the Alzina Stone Dale bio is great and apparently ‘The Documents of the Case’ (a highly regarded novel about writing I believe) and two detective stories: ‘Murder Must Advertise’ and ‘The Nine Tailors’. There’s also another biographical book called ‘The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers’ (by Catherine Kenney) which is apparently good too. I would really like to read two books of her lectures on learning and poetry: ‘The Lost Tools of Learning’ and ‘The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement’
Here is the excerpt from my blog.
http://blog.cornerstone.edu.au/pete/2012/09/04/flesh/ (for the full article)
‘Like Anne, when the preacher was young he feared that the dark and cold churches were right: god was in fact the stern cook and cop of civilisation, the gate-crasher on all flesh and fun. But then, as he had tentatively waded through an entire library of books called ‘The Bible’, and followed that (for several years) with various other sacred books, all advocating their own versions of ‘how to fix the problem’, which inevitably blamed ‘the flesh’ as the culprit, he was relieved to find himself one day reading a psalm in which some man and his god were celebrating loudly with wine and oil and music and delighting in being fully human.
‘Yes!’ this god seemed to shout back at the preacher’s head-ful of responsible wonderings, ‘Yes this world is a mess, but I love it!’
‘This is my kind of god,’ the preacher thought. ‘The true mother-father of us all.’
Tonight the preacher fondly remembers this as a strong and clear ‘jury-coming-in’ moment, in which God asserted an incurably human sympathy and desire to join in on the human party and all it’s troubles. As brazenly stated in John’s gospel, ‘The word became flesh.’
‘You are such “a hedonist at heart,”21‘ the preacher murmurs as he looks for a cheerful glass of something to celebrate his luck before he joins his wife in the mysterious room of bed clothes, slumber and happiness. Then as he’s falling off to sleep he relishes the thought that just as it is said in the Greek myths, he is related to a god after all and the blood of that god courses in his veins.
18The Everlasting Gospel: William Blake
19Interview With Anne Rice: Michael Riley p.149 Chatto & Windus 1996
20Called Out of darkness: Anne Rice p.168 Chatto & Windus 2008
21CS Lewis in a statement describing God’s delight in giving and receiving pleasure
22Phantastes: George macDonald p.63 Pan Books (Ballantine) 1971