Somerville
Arts Week 2012 began on Monday 30th April with a talk from two
delightful ladies from the Dorothy L
Sayers Society, an international ‘appreciation society’ dedicated to the
life and work of detective novelist and notable Somerville alumnus, Dorothy L
Sayers. 2012 is the centenary of Sayers ‘coming up’ to Oxford and the society
is commemorating this in August with a convention that is taking place in
college and will comprise of various talks and events, celebrating the life and
memory of the writer and reviving enthusiasm for her work. Radio 4, who
serialised some of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries on air, recently did this
too. Sayers’ talent and determination to succeed in all areas of her work is
admirable, and in true Somerville fashion, her particular fortitude to pursue
lines that were previously the realm of men designates her as a figure that
Somerville should be proud to remember and promote. It was therefore an
absolute pleasure to invite Seona Ford and Jasmine Simeone, the Vice-Chairman and
Secretary of the society respectively, to speak during term-time to the
students and enlighten them on some of the lesser known aspects of Sayers’ life
and work, particularly her poetry, something that the audience, myself included
were ignorant of its importance and influence on her. The talk was part
biography, interspersed with passages from her books and anecdotes from her
life.
Sayers
was born in Oxford, her ‘appreciation of
words’ was evident from an early age when she would change the language of
nursery rhymes to fit her own family and experiences. Like many authors, she
was a great reader and constantly experimented with poetry and prose relating
to the world around her, acting as a script writer for a pageant at a local
village and producing poems such as ‘The
Gargoyle’ in her mid teens. Sayers won the Gilchrist scholarship to Oxford
to study modern languages with the highest recorded marks that year, where she
continued to flourish and cultivate her talent through groups of like-minded
students such as ‘the mutual admiration society,’ a group of young women who
encouraged each other with their work and studies.
Sayers’
work was influenced by the goings on around her and much of her work is drawn
directly from her experiences in Oxford during the First World War and
consequently her work at Bensons, an advertising agency, where she first began
to develop a taste for the manipulation of words and style. This assisted her
greatly in ‘Murder Must Advertise,’
her experiences of a working environment dominated by men were seen here and
subsequently in the work of Miss Climpson, a character with a typing bureau in
the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries who is employed by Wimsey to assist his
investigations, as in the musings of Lord Peter and thus Sayers herself, who
would suspect a woman…?
Sayers
had a confident and direct yet professional approach to writing. She was aware
of censorship laws, seen notably in ‘Whose
Body?’ where her idea for the body found to be a naked man in bath drew
much intrigue and controversy. Sayers was also prepared to research her
material intricately. ‘Five Red Herrings’
required research into train timetables and the work of painters and ‘The Nine Tailors’ facilitated a great
deal of research into the art of bell-ringing, yet by the end of this Sayers
had still never pulled a rope.
The
best thing about the talk was the insight it gave into how varied the work of
Sayers was. She wrote comedy, mystery, about religion, village life, the impact
of the war, her cats and even did a great deal of work translating other works
such as ‘Song of Rowland’ and Dante,
the latter being completed after her death by her goddaughter, Margaret
Reynolds who was chair of the Dorothy L Sayers society until her death in
March. Sayers was also an incredibly sophisticated writer. She moved both the
genre and characters of detective fiction forward; Martin Edwards has
recognised this particularly with the development of Lord Peter Wimsey, who was
given a history of shell shock from the war and was impacted by the various
reforms of the roles of peers in the House of Lords during the time of Sayers’
writing.
Somerville college has produced a vast
number of strong female authors, Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain included,
but the dedication of Sayers to her writings, her characters and to Oxford
itself, seen most particularly with the reunion of Harriet Vane and Lord Peter
Wimsey in the fictional Shrewsbury College in ‘Gaudy Night,’ ensures that she will and should be celebrated as a
great author as well as a great Somervillian.
‘The
Gargoyle.’
The
Gargoyle takes his giddy perch
On
a cathedral or a church,
There,
mid ecclesiastic style
He
smiles an early Gothic smile
And
while the parson, full of pride,
Spouts
at his weary flock inside,
The
Gargoyle, from his lofty seat,
Spouts
at the people in the street;
And
like the parson seems to say,
In
accents doleful, ‘Let Us Pray.’
I
like the gargoyle best. He plays
So
cheerfully on rainy days-
While
parsons, no one can deny,
Are
awful dampers when they’re dry.
