Dorothy Sayers' Public Confession of Faith

The train from London rattled through Kent fields still damp from morning rain. I sat across from Dorothy with a folder of notes on my lap, watching her light one cigarette after another. She had agreed to the commission only after three letters and a telephone call that lasted past midnight. Canterbury wanted a new play for their festival, and the names attached to previous years were the reason she finally said yes.

She spoke little on the ride. Her eyes stayed on the passing hedgerows. At the station a car waited, driven by a man from the cathedral chapter who kept glancing at her in the mirror as though expecting her to recite something. She gave him only directions to the hotel. That evening she walked the precincts alone, hands in the pockets of her coat, stopping once to look up at the damaged stone where the fire of 1174 had left its mark.

I joined her two days later in the chapter house where the first reading took place. The cast sat in a half-circle of wooden chairs. Dorothy stood at a small table with the script open. When she reached the scene of the architect William of Sens falling from the scaffolding, her voice changed. She read the lines about work as an act of worship without lifting her eyes from the page. One of the actors, a young man playing a mason, asked whether the speech was meant to be ironic. She answered that it was not.

Over the following weeks I watched her revise at a table in the hotel dining room after the actors had gone. She crossed out whole pages and wrote new ones in the margins. The director, a quiet man named Nugent Monck, came each morning with questions about doctrine. She answered him by reading aloud from the creed printed in the back of her prayer book. She told him she had not opened that book for its theology in years, only for the language.

Her private life stayed folded away. She mentioned the boy only once, in passing, when a letter arrived from the cousin in the country. The envelope stayed unopened on the table for an hour before she slipped it into her bag. That night she worked until the lamps were turned off by the night porter.

On the afternoon of the first performance the nave filled with an audience that included both clergy and the usual festival crowd from London. I stood at the back near the west door. When the actor playing William spoke the line about offering the work of his hands as prayer, a murmur moved through the front rows. After the curtain a woman in a black hat approached Dorothy in the cloister and asked whether the play was intended to convert anyone. Dorothy replied that she had written what the story required.

The letters began arriving the next week. Some thanked her. Others accused her of presumption. She answered the angriest ones by hand, always in the same measured script she used for her novels. She told one correspondent that she had never set out to defend the faith, only to finish the commission.

Months later, when the BBC asked her to write a series of plays on the life of Christ, she hesitated again. She showed me the contract across a table at the Detection Club. Chesterton was there that night and told her the job needed doing. She signed it on the condition that the scripts remain dramatic rather than hortatory.

The broadcasts brought a different storm. One postcard called her a disgrace to her sex. Another blamed the fall of Singapore on her refusal to soften the doctrine of the incarnation. She kept every letter in a cardboard box under her desk. When Lewis praised the scripts in a note, she read it aloud once and then filed it with the rest.