24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO SIR HUGH WALPOLE1
3 January 1940
Dear Sir Hugh,
By all means make use of my name on your books and manuscripts committee, if you feel that it is of any use. (Note: that I have a foolish fancy for always having it written with the “L” in the middle.)
I cannot promise to contribute money, because I am very short of it, nor yet skill and knowledge, of which I have none in this connection. I could, however, turn up occasionally at committee meetings and vote as I am instructed, which is, I take [it], all that is required.
How do you find yourself in the midst of all this shemozzle? I am trying to do a little mild propaganda in the way of articles and lectures, but I can’t say I think the official people give us a very inspiring lead. If you are in Town, perhaps you would lunch with me one day when I am up. I am there fairly often, though less often now that I am not doing anything in the theatre.
With all good wishes,
Yours very sincerely,
Dorothy L. Sayers
1 Sir Hugh Walpole (1884–1941), author of over 40 novels, of which the best remembered are Mr Perrin and Mr Traill (1911) and The Herries Chronicles (1930–1933).
TO VAL GIELGUD
13 February 1940
Dear Val,
I clean forgot on Friday to thank you for my lovely lunch. It made me feel so much like a giant refreshed that I delivered a determined assault upon the searchlight position at Bethnal Green. It required great determination, because the whole place seemed shut up and deserted, with not even a sentry, nor nothing, but after walking round four times and peeping through the bars, I encountered an enormous sergeant who took me into the orderly room and allowed information to be extracted from him. I should never have persevered in a north-easterly wind if it had not been for your good burgundy.
I am sending a copy of Begin Here1 with love and gratitude.
You will think about doing that article, won’t you, on the need for constructive listening? I feel pretty sure the Fortnightly would rejoice to have it as part of the series they are now doing. In the meantime, I will promise to think hard about a detective play for radio.2
With all good wishes and again many thanks,
Yours ever,
[D. L. S.]
1 Begin Here: A War-Time Essay (Gollancz, 20 January 1940).
2 Nothing is known about a new radio play by D. L. S. around this date. She did adapt her short story, “The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face” as a play, which was broadcast on 3 April 1943, the first in the new series, “Saturday Night Theatre”. (See also her letter to Stephen Hobhouse, 7 April 1943.) In 1948 her play Where Do We Go From Here? was broadcast on radio as part of a series of six 30-minute plays by members of the Detection Club. See also her letter to Val Gielgud, 24 February 1941.
On 5 February 1940 the Rev. Dr James Welch, who had become Director of Religious Broadcasting at the B.B.C., wrote a letter to D. L. S. which was to have momentous consequences. It would appear that he was prompted to do so by the favourable reception of her Nativity play He That Should Come. His letter began:
Dear Madam,
I am writing to ask whether you could help us in our work of religious broadcasting for children.…
I have long been conscious that some consistent Christian teaching might be given in dramatic form and I have long wanted to find someone who could write a series of thirty-minute plays on the Life of Our Lord. The children we have in mind are those between the ages of seven and fourteen. I had thought either of a dramatic retelling of the Gospel story, or even the dramatic imaginative telling of Our Lord on earth today. I feel that we might rightly and reverently use direct speech, but my mind is not quite made up about this yet. You may well imagine the good that such a series of about twelve plays might do, broadcast regularly to millions of children and adults. It seems to me a wonderful opportunity which ought to be taken. I believe that you are probably the only person who could take it.…
D. L. S. replied:
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE REV. DR JAMES WELCH
18 February 1940
Dear Sir,
Forgive my long delay in replying to your letter of the 5th February. Just at present I have so much on hand that it is very difficult to see when I shall be able to undertake any additional work; indeed, in the matter of radio plays Mr Val Gielgud has been before you, clamouring for a detective drama which I have weakly promised to write if I can possibly manage it.
The sort of series you suggest, of little dramas from the New Testament, is a thing I have frequently thought I should like to do, but it would, of course, entail a good deal of very careful thought and, consequently, a good deal of time. Your suggestion is exceedingly tempting, and if you are not in a great hurry for the series is just the thing I should enjoy attempting, but it would not be honest to accept it without warning you that I should not be able to get down to it for the next two or three months at the earliest.
If I did do it, I should make it a condition that I was allowed to introduce the character of Our Lord Himself, and to present the play with the same kind of realism that I used in the Nativity play He That Should Come. I feel very strongly that the prohibition1 against representing Our Lord directly on the stage or in films (however necessary from certain points of view) tends to produce a sense of unreality which is very damaging to the ordinary man’s conception of Christianity. The device of indicating Christ’s presence by a “voice off”, or by a shaft of light, or a shadow, or what not, tends to suggest to people that He never was a real person at all, and this impression of unreality extends to all the other people in the drama, with the result that “Bible characters” are felt to be quite different from ordinary human beings.
It seems to me that in broadcasting we are freed from any of the obvious objections which attend the visual representation of Christ by an actor, and are protected from the vulgarities and incongruities which the ordinary theatrical or film producer might import into a stage or screen representation. Radio plays, therefore, seem to present an admirable medium through which to break down the convention of unreality surrounding Our Lord’s person and might very well pave the way to a more vivid conception of the Divine Humanity which, at present, threatens to be lost in a kind of Apollinarian2 mist. The only difficulty I foresee is in a right choice of language. It would not, of course, be suitable to give to Christ any speeches which do not appear in the Scriptures, but if all the other characters “talk Bible”, the realism will be lost, whereas if they talk modern English we may get a patchwork effect. However, the difficulty is not really insuperable; it is just a question of choosing language which is neither slangy on the one hand, nor Wardour Street3 on the other. This difficulty did not, of course, arise in the mediaeval mystery plays, whose authors were quite prepared to let Christ say anything that seemed natural and appropriate, but we could not go so far as this without arousing roars of disapproval among the pious.4 It is not that the thing cannot be done but that it requires a good deal of careful consideration and cannot be done in a hurry. I should like, if I may, to think it over and perhaps discuss it with you at some time, always provided, of course, that you can contemplate putting off the series until, let us say, the Autumn. Perhaps you will let me know what you feel about this.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 This prohibition ceased to be operative after 1965.
2 Apollinarianism is a heresy which consists in a failure to admit the completeness of Christ’s humanity. Apollinarius’ own position changed over time: his fullest developed belief was that Jesus had a human body and an animal, not a human, soul and that He had but a single, divine nature. It has been said that the phrase of becoming incarnate “by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary” was added to the Creed to combat this heresy.
3 See letter to May E. Jenkin, 22 November 1940, note 7.
4 Roars of disapproval were indeed raised after the press conference held on 10 December 1941. See Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul, pp. 320–323.
TO REV. A. J. MORRIS1
19 February 1940
Dear Mr Morris,
Forgive my long delay in answering your letter and thanking you for sending me your fine hymn. Perhaps I may answer briefly some of your remarks about my Christian News-Letter article:2
1. I do not think there is any contradiction in saying that a man may be a genius though a savage in manners and temperament – Herod the Great was undoubtedly both. (I was referring to him – obviously not to Caesar Augustus who did not die until very much later.) Even in the eulogistic pages of Josephus, Herod bears all the marks of the semi-civilized savage, though a military and political genius beyond any question.
2. There is, of course, something to be said for the argument about the painless birth – it has been said by St Thomas Aquinas – but the Mediaevals were in little danger of being unreal about the Humanity. Nowadays, the difficulty is to convince anybody of its reality.
3. I don’t believe in the “Gate” or “Rope” explanations of the camel going through the eye of a needle! I think it was a joke of the right Oriental flavour, just like the one about swallowing the camel.
4. I am charmed by your suggestion that the tables of the money-changers and of them that sold doves have a parallel in charity bazaars. I believe one of the complaints was that the purchasers got very poor value for their money, so that the parallel is only too painfully exact – I have paid some wicked prices at church bazaars.
I have not read either of the books you mention but will take an early opportunity of doing so.
With many thanks for the kind things you say about the article,
Yours very truly,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Of University College, Oxford.
2 Supplement No. 8, 20 December 1939. The article was entitled “Is This He That Should Come?”
TO MAURICE B. RECKITT1
21 February 1940
Dear Mr Reckitt,
Thank you so much for your letter. I have written to Mr Gollancz, asking him to send a review copy of Begin Here to “Christendom”. It ought to have been sent to you in due course, but I fear Mr Gollancz is not so knowledgeable about Christian journalism as about the other kind.
It is very good of you to be interested in the book – everybody seems to have hailed it as Christian propaganda, although I rather pointedly refrained from drawing any conclusion from my own premises!
Yours sincerely,
Dorothy L. Sayers
1 Maurice B. Reckitt (1888–1980), an influential figure in the development of Anglican thought. He founded a group known as Christendom and edited the quarterly journal of that name from 1931 to 1950. In 1968 he founded the Christendom Trust which endowed the M. B. Reckitt research fellowship at the University of Sussex. (See John S. Peart-Binns, Maurice B. Reckitt: A Life, The Bowerdean Press and Marshall Pickering, Basingstoke, 1988.)
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE BISHOP OF DERBY1
24 February 1940
My dear Lord Bishop,
Thank you very much for your letter. I shall be delighted to come and address your Association2 on Saturday, 4th May.3 It is very good of you and Mrs. Rawlinson to offer to put me up, and I accept your hospitality with pleasure for the Friday and Saturday nights. I am not quite sure just at present what my engagements for the following week will be; if there is a Sunday train, I may have to leave by that in order to get back to London on the Monday, otherwise I shall be very grateful for your kind offer to allow me to stay the week-end. May I let you know a little later which day I shall be returning to Town?
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 The Rt Rev. Alfred Edward John Rawlinson.
2 The Church Tutorial Classes Association, which was holding a biennial festival.
3 The address, entitled “Creed or Chaos?”, was published by Hodder and Stoughton on 10 June 1940. It was included in the book Creed or Chaos? and Other Essays published by Methuen on 27 February 1947.
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO HELEN SIMPSON
27 February 1940
Dearest Helen,
What a blasted nuisance! I was rather afraid it might work out that way, because I’d noticed that your face, while retaining all its original charm, had gradually been getting smaller and smaller – a curious and interesting phenomenon which, according to my observation, usually presages a visit to the hospital. Never mind! I expect you will feel much better now you have got rid of the beastly thing. (Not your face, of course.) I rang up the hospital last night, and was told that your “condition was very satisfactory”, which I took to mean, as usual, that the patient was feeling like death warmed up, and that the medicoes were gathered in the bar, congratulating one another, over a round of quick ones, on not having actually removed your liver by mistake for your kidneys.
Don’t worry about the lectures and things; we shall manage somehow. It’s tiresome, of course, and infuriating for you, but these things can’t be helped. Thank you for having dealt with John Armitage; I will try to get on to him when I am in Town this week. I shall also do my best to be allowed to come and bring you the statutory grapes – I will promise not to eat them myself, because I do not care very much for grapes.…
I have no particular news, except that the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral have decided to revive Zeal for the Festival, as Laurence Irving prognosticated. I shall therefore remove myself from the Lecture-list for June – and you can make up for your present inaction by delivering all my eloquence for me! Attagirl!
Well, good luck to it, my dear, and I’m most frightfully sorry and hope all will be well soon. Mac sends his best wishes. He went up to the War Office yesterday and returned in good spirits, having seen a general and two colonels, whereas his previous visit produced only a colonel and two majors. He hopes the next interview will be adorned by a field-marshal and two generals, after which he will only have to be presented to the King before being entered on a list for a job as 2nd. Loot1 in a training camp.
That fool, Hilda Matheson, has written asking me to give a Wireless Talk to France on “some aspects of religious thought in England”! I replied that (a) all I know about religious thought in England was that it was in a state of great confusion, (b) that in any case, I should only offend French Lutherans by my Catholicism and Catholics by my ignorant Protestantism, (c) that if the French had ever heard of me (which was doubtful) it was as the author of “romans policiers” and not of Zeal or Devil To Pay, and finally, (d) that I would talk about detection or nothing. I feel like the Scotch minister who said to his wife: “I’m aye thinkin’, Jeanie, the whole warld’s daft except you an’ me – an’ whiles I doot ye’re a wee thing daft yersel’”.
Best love to you, and be good and get well quickly,2
Yours ever,
Dorothy
1 American pronunciation of Lieut[enant].
2 Sadly, Helen Simpson did not get well. She died soon afterwards in a convalescent home of inoperable cancer.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO K. C. HARRISON1
4 March 1940
Dear Mr Harrison,
I am sorry you and your readers have been so much puzzled by Mr. Charles Williams’ book, He Came Down from Heaven.2 The particular chapter you quote either strikes people as being extremely illuminating, or else says nothing to them at all.
The sentence you ask about: “Men had determined to know good as evil”, links up with the passage on page 17 about God’s knowledge of evil: “Not by vision, but by simple intelligence” (St. Augustine).
Possibly a very simple illustration may make the line of thought clearer:
I am standing on the Hampstead and Highgate platform of the Underground at Piccadilly. So far, all the trains which go through the station are morally indifferent to me. But the moment I make up my mind to go to Hampstead, the Hampstead train is the “right” train for me, and the Highgate train is the “wrong” train. That is to say, by my decision to create a rightness in the one, I have inevitably created a wrongness in the other; but the wrongness is a purely mental concept and does no harm to anybody; but if I then proceed to step into the Highgate train, I have called the wrongness into active existence, with evil results to myself, (I shall get to the wrong place); to my husband, (who is waiting for me at Hampstead to go to the Everyman Theatre); for the audience in the theatre (over whose feet we shall trample after the curtain goes up), and no doubt for the tempers of everybody concerned.
This illustration3 is, of course, very much over-simplified, but it will serve to make the point Mr. Williams is dealing with. There are three things to notice:
(1) The wrongness is not in the trains themselves – to God or the Railway Company both are equally good trains.
(2) By my free choice to go to Hampstead I have created – I cannot help creating – a wrongness in all trains that go elsewhere, but I know this wrongness only by pure intelligence.
(3) But when I step into the wrong train, I know its wrongness, not as God knows it, by intelligence, but as man knows it, by experience, and the wrongness then becomes a real evil. That is to say, my ignorance, carelessness, or perversity, has caused me to know the perfectly good train as an evil train, and that is to create positive evil in the world.
That, roughly speaking, is what Mr. Williams means when he says that man had determined to know good as evil. I do not gather from your letter that you have yourself read the whole of the book, but if you will read the second chapter attentively, I think possibly my illustration may help you to an understanding of Mr. Williams’ thesis, which he has of course elaborated with much more richness and profundity than my parable is capable of carrying.
Trusting this may be of some assistance to you,
Yours faithfully,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Identity unknown.
2 Published by William Heinemann, 1938.
3 D. L. S. used this illustration again in a lecture on Dante: “The Meaning of Heaven and Hell”, given at Jesus College, Cambridge at the Summer School of Italian, August 1948. (See Introductory Papers on Dante, Methuen, 1954, pp. 64–65.)
TO DR JAMES WELCH
4 March 1940
Dear Dr Welch,
Many thanks for your letter of the 1st March. I am very glad you feel able to take this line about the plays and about the presentation of Our Lord, and greatly welcome the courageous spirit which, in order to get the reality of the Gospel across, is prepared even to “give slight offence to some adult listeners”! Under these conditions, I should like very much to tackle the series of little plays, and think I ought to be able to get down to it about July, when I shall have finished with the revival of The Zeal of Thy House which is to be produced at the Canterbury Festival, June 24–29.1 Between that time and this, I hope to be able to come and see you, to discuss details as to the episodes to be selected, and so forth. Between us, we should be able to think out something which shall be realistic in presentation, while giving as little offence as possible. …
1 The revival was cancelled owing to fears of a German invasion.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO LORD DAVID CECIL1
10 March 1940
Dear Lord David,
That’s a grand article in the Fortnightly2 – I whooped with joy when I saw it. And my God! how right you are about the hopeless attempt to abolish human passions by miracle! If only people would determine to use the existing machinery to deal with concrete evils they might get somewhere. But they will imagine that they can somehow devise a new kind of machinery which will automatically eliminate the devil without further effort.
Look! can you do anything to clear up a point that has been worrying me a lot lately, and that is the distinction which we find we have to make between men of intellect and the “intelligentzia”?3 The current contempt of learning and reason which drives men of intellect out of the control of human affairs is a new and bastard growth in the body of society. But if you tell people that society needs the man of intellect, they point to the gutless “intelligentzia” and say, “Look at that!” – and can you blame them?
Is it that, just because the power of “money and push” has driven the intellectuals out of public affairs, the intellect has turned inwards to feed on itself and produced this set of detached and unpractical rabbits, who run away from any situation when they see it developing itself in life and action? Just as so many of the poets took recently to chattering to one another about the books they had read, in terms unintelligible to the common man, instead of transmuting experience into poetry, as was always supposed to be their job?
It seems to me there really is a profound division today between two sorts of people, both with some claims to intelligence. One lot, like the Auden4 and Mitchison5 crowd, retire to America, or to some sort of soul-solitude, and denounce society from a distance, refusing steadfastly to be mixed up with the War. The others (like, shall we say, you and me and a good many more), who seem to have a more earthy and vulgar constitution, remain angrily scolding in the midst of the uproar, crying, “We told you what would happen, you adjectival idiots! but since it has happened, we suppose we’re all in it – give me that battle-axe!”
What I want to know is, what makes the difference? Is it just physiological make-up? Or is one lot really cleverer than the other? Or is it (as I am inclined to suppose) a difference of philosophy? And if so, is the difference between the intellectual man and the “intelligentzia” in fact a conflict of philosophies?
This beautiful piece of confused thinking was started by your opening paragraph. Can you cope with it in something sometime? (How about that book?)1
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Lord David Cecil (1902–1986), son of the Marquess of Salisbury; critic and biographer; Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature at Oxford University; known during this period for his Early Victorian Novelists (1934).
2 “True and False Values”, March 1940, pp. 296–303. D. L. S. quoted it in “Creed or Chaos?” (Methuen, p. 40) and in The Mind of the Maker (Methuen, p. 13, note 1).
3 Lord David Cecil’s article began: “To an ironical observer, the most curious feature of a hitherto uneventful war has been the collapse of the English intelligentzia – especially the intelligentzia of the left. Up till six months ago they seemed, with the exception of a few complete pacifists, to be united in a militant front against Fascism. To resist it was, in their view, the first obligation of every human being; their thinkers spoke with justified scorn of English weakness, their poets, headed by Mr Auden, adjured us to throw aside all other considerations and concentrate on ‘the struggle’. Now the war against Fascism has at last begun; and within a few months their morale is broken…Some, Mr Auden himself among them, are in America; others, like Mrs Mitchison, clamour forlornly for peace on any terms;…”
4 W. H. Auden (1907–1973), the poet, who emigrated to the U.S.A. with Christopher Isherwood when war was declared.
5 Naomi Mitchison (b. 1897), novelist.
1 D. L. S. had invited him to write a book for “Bridgeheads”.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO REV. T. A. O’NEIL AND REV. A. M. STACK1
21 March 1940
Reverend Fathers,
(This sounds rather like a speech at a public meeting, but the etiquette-books supply no handy formula for addressing two clergymen at once.)
Thank you very much for your kind letter, and for the somewhat alarming extract from Home Words. Well do I know that publication; it formed the internals of our own Parish Magazine many years ago, and was felt by my father, who introduced it there, to be a distinct improvement on its predecessor, called, if I remember rightly, The Dawn of Day. Its printing and paper were superior, and it was held to have a definitely “higher” flavour – without, of course, any whiff of Popery.
I can scarcely imagine anything more frightful than a competition in prayer-making under the liberal auspices of The Spectator – I may say, for your consolation, that I cannot at all imagine Wilson Harris lending his columns for any such purpose. Prayers should, in any case, appear anonymously – or at most attached to an author whose name is as remote and beautiful as St. Chrysostom’s. And I must say that the efforts to produce modern prayers for national crises are as a rule so ghastly in their results as to send one fleeing back to the “liturgical experts” of the past. It isn’t so much liturgical or theological knowledge that is lacking as the ability to write good English, and I refuse to believe that God is well served, or a spirit of worship promoted, by knock-kneed, broken-backed phrases that sound as though they were written by a tired journalist in a hurry. So far, the writer of the article is right – it takes a good writer to write good prayers; and they are, as a matter of fact, more difficult to write than anything in the world. T. S. Eliot or Charles Williams might manage it, though goodness knows what children would make of their petitions.
But it’s very unwise to dogmatise about children – how does one know what they make of anything? They don’t tell one. When I was a youngster, I might have asked the meaning of the phrase, “there is no health in us”, but what I should never have mentioned to any grown-up was the secret rapture with which I hailed the all-too-rare appearance in the programme of the Quicunque Vult.2 I had a feeling that they would not approve of this fantastic preference, and I knew they would say, in their shy-making and unimaginative way, “Oh, but you can’t possibly understand that!” Of course I couldn’t understand it, but it was grand. So mysterious and full of rumbling great words, and it made such a wonderful woven pattern. And it didn’t talk down to me, like those embarrassing hymns about being but little children weak. It was queer and exciting, like the beasts full of eyes, and the people casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.
Children have a disconcerting knack of not liking the things intended for their liking. Christmas was nice, because of the presents, and the story of the shepherds and the wise men with their myrrh (what on earth is myrrh?) and frankincense (what a lovely word) – but it couldn’t compare for fascination with the gloomy drama of Good Friday; besides, it too had that “children weak” touch about it. Some psalms were good (“sitteth between the cherubims”, “Og the king of Bashan”, “the mountains skipped like rams”), but not the 119th,3 which was dreary beyond description, or “The Lord is my shepherd”, which was rather smarmy.
You can’t generalise about children, except that talking-down is pretty well always fatal. And it’s probably true that if they learn the solid meaty stuff when they are young, they won’t have so much to blush for when they remember it later. I still enjoy the Quicunque, only now, instead of being magnificent and obscure it seems to be magnificent and lucid. But there are some morbidly sentimental hymns which I liked as a child and which now give me a stomach-ache to think of. They are just plumb bad, and whether they appeal to children or not, they have no business to be there. They produce a horrible reaction of loathing which the good stuff never does.
I agree to some extent about the archaic words and unreal sentiments, only I think this is rather a matter for explanation in sermons and instructions than for alterations in the liturgy. It’s no good running anxiously out with new words, trying to keep pace with changes in language – it takes all the running we can do to make words stay in the same place.4 We call a hospital for mad people a Bethlehem, and it soon becomes Bedlam, and a word of fear. We change the word to Asylum, and it goes the same way. We hastily abolish Asylum and call the thing a Home, and the same thing happens again. All we have got by the changes is that three beautiful words have become corrupted instead of one. It would be better to stick to Bedlam, and keep on reminding people of its original meaning. What have we gained by calling a dogma an ideology, except the totally false notion that an ideology is a more liberal thing than a dogma? I do think, though, that parsons and others might bear in mind that language does change, and that the meaning of words like Person, redemption, love, substance, worship and so on is not self-evident to the man in the street.
I seem to have rambled on at great length. Forgive me for being tedious. No, I don’t think I will enter for the competition – I am quite sure that if I did, the result would not satisfy the writer in Home Words.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 The “Reverend Fathers” had written from Clonroe Vale, Tinahely, Co. Wicklow, Eire.
2 Latin: “Whoever wishes…”, the first two words of the Athanasian Creed. Her memory of her reactions to the Athanasian Creed varied. In a letter from school to her parents, dated 22 May 1910, she wrote: “What a peculiarly ugly sort of chant [the creed] is sung to…like a very dreary litany, with, I am really very much ashamed to observe, a certain amount of comic relief. It is very wrong, of course, but I really do think it is comic in parts…” (See The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1899–1936, p. 43.) In The Mind of the Maker she said: “In my childhood, I remember feeling that this verse formed a serious blot upon a fascinating and majestic mystery. It was, I felt, quite unnecessary to warn anybody that there was ‘one Father, not three fathers; one Son, not three sons; one Holy Ghost, not three holy ghosts’.…I found myself blushing faintly at the recitation of words so wildly unrelated to anything that the queerest heathen in his blindness was likely to fancy for himself.” (Methuen, July 1941, p. 120)
3 Beginning: “Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord”.
4 Echo of Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE PROVOST OF DERBY1
21 March 1940
Dear Mr. Provost,
Thank you very much for your letter. I have received some further suggestions for titles from Miss Fone.
What I rather feel about all of them, including “Sound Doctrine for Critical Times”, is that they scarcely somehow suggest a faith that anybody would be prepared to live or die for. They seem to lack a challenge. A more ringing note is struck by Eric Mascall2 in the title of his book Death or Dogma?,3 but we can’t very well use that again. Christ (as usual) hit the nail on the head when he said “Ye worship ye know not what; we know what we worship”.4 The totalitarians do at least know what they worship, and that is their advantage; but Christians have too weakly acquiesced in a vague religiosity and the worship of nothing-in-particular. We have been so anxious to avoid the charge of dogmatism and heresy-hunting that we have rather lost sight of the idea that Christianity is supposed to be an interpretation of the universe.
Here are a few suggestions along these lines:
CREED OR CHAOS?
DO WE KNOW WHAT WE WORSHIP?
UNDERSTAND OR PERISH
A PEOPLE OF NO UNDERSTANDING
UNDERSTANDING AND ANSWERS (too subtle, perhaps)
THE ONLY WISE GOD
I don’t feel that any of them is quite right – the first two perhaps come nearest to what we want.
I am sending a copy of this to Miss Fone, hoping I am not too late. I have been rather addle-headed this week with the fashionable influenza-throat. In any case, I am quite ready to accept whatever title you decide to use.5
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 The Very Rev. P. A. Micklem, D.D.
2 The Rev. Eric L. Mascall, D.D., F.B.A. (1905–1993), theologian and mathematician, professor of Historical Theology at King’s College, London University, 1962–1973. See his article “Whatever Happened to Dorothy L. Sayers that Good Friday?” in SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review (published by Wheaton College, Illinois), vol. 3, 1982, pp. 9–18.
3 Death or Dogma? Christian Faith and Social Theory, 1937.
4 John, chapter 4, verse 22.
5 The title chosen was “Creed or Chaos?”.
TO IVY SHRIMPTON
22 March 1940
Dearest Ivy,
No – I’m sorry – it was my fault. It was rather a job getting any money in this quarter. However, now it is in I can send the money for the Easter holidays as well.
This last six months seem to have been nothing but influenzas, burst pipes and confusion. My secretary started the flu in November, and everybody I know seems to have gone on having it in waves ever since. Some people put it down to black-outs and shut windows, but I think it’s more likely to be camps and evacuation. However, by the time the War’s over I daresay we shall be hardened to these things. I seem to have spent my time delivering lectures and writing articles which nobody can afford to pay for, in the hope of stimulating the morale of the nation and all the rest of it. We are lucky to have known one war already – our generation stands up to it better than the generation next below; which is all at sixes and sevens. In the intervals one knits socks, an agreeable exercise which I thought I had left behind for ever!
Glad you got your claim to the missing £20 settled – the posts have been quite potty lately. I wish they would contrive to lose some of the nonsense written to me by perfect strangers! But they prefer to lose important papers and such!
Love,
D. L. S.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO ANMER HALL
15 April 1940
Dear A. B. H.,1
Thank you so much for your kind telegram of good wishes for Love All.2 We had quite a good First Night, in spite of clashing with Mr. Hitler’s gala performance in Norway and Denmark, and when I went in on Friday, I found a very good house, all roaring with laughter, so I trust we shall not do too badly. I do hope that you and Miss Scaife will be able to get in some time to see our little show – it is running for three weeks, with matinées on Thursdays.
As a rule, I make a firm resolution not to give away school prizes, but in your case I think I must make an exception, and shall be happy to come on the 19th July, and say what I can. It is very good of you to offer to take me, and perhaps you will let me know later on all about the arrangements.
I expect you will have heard that they have decided to revive The Zeal of Thy House this year for the Canterbury Festival.3 Harcourt Williams and Raf de la Torre will be playing their original parts, and by great good luck, most of the best amateurs are still available.
With affectionate regards,
Yours ever,
[D. L. S.]
1 See letter to Father Herbert Kelly, dated 7 February 1938, note 1.
2 The play had been put on at the Torch Theatre, Knightsbridge. It ran from 9 to 28 April.
3 See letter to Dr James Welch, 4 March 1940, note.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO SIR RICHARD ACLAND1
17 April 1940
Dear Sir Richard Acland,
Thank you very much for your letter, and for the copy of your book,2 which, indeed, I had already read with much interest.
I am glad you liked Begin Here,3 in spite of the fact that we do not see eye to eye about Russia! Capitalist or Communist, I cannot believe that salvation is to be found in any system which subordinates Man to Economics; but we need not quarrel about that, since there are so many things on which we can happily and fruitfully agree.
As to the “enforced leisure” which this rather odd kind of war has inflicted upon so many people, it is a very real problem, as you could not, I think, fail to realise if you did not yourself live a very active and busy life among those to whom war has naturally brought a great increase of work and activity. Some of the prevalent causes of boredom and discontent I have mentioned in my first chapter. Have you considered all the men and women who have to pass long hours in A.R.P.4 posts, or the hundreds of doctors and nurses immobilised in hospitals, deprived of their civilian patients and waiting interminably for casualties who, thank Heaven, have not yet materialized? The men who sit about all day and night looking after blimps5 and searchlights, often in remote places, almost entirely cut off from other society? Then there are those who, in the winter months, are too old or too timid to venture out in the black-out to visit their friends or the cinema, those who have had to put down their cars, and are forced back for entertainment on their own minds, quite untrained for any such exercise; those whose income has been so reduced that, even now that the cinemas are open again, they cannot afford to go; those townspeople who have had to retire into the country, and are quite unfitted for that kind of life; and those who are now unemployed through the readjustments in industry, and have not yet been reabsorbed. It is quite true that they ought not to be idle and bored, but the fact remains that they are, simply because they are the produce of a standardised civilization which does their thinking and feeling for them, and because it is a very long and difficult job for them to learn, at this late hour of the day, to think for themselves.
These are the people who write passionately to me, begging for more detective stories, “to keep their minds off the war”. I tell them, and have tried to tell them in this book, that they will be much happier, and much more useful citizens, if they will only put their minds on the war, and especially on the peace. Neither you, nor I, nor the Government, can do things for them – we have only too much to do already; they must learn to do things for themselves. There are plenty of people eager and anxious to do things – but what they chiefly need is to learn to think, and to be made to understand their own power. They need not be at the mercy of the bishops or the government or the press – they are the Church, they are the State, and they are the Public; but unless they are made to understand what they want and stimulated to go out and get it, they will remain a passive nation, ready to fall for the next Hitler or Quisling6 who comes along.
This is what you say yourself – but you go on to ask, What do I propose to do? It isn’t what I do that matters, but what I, and others who have done their “considering” can make the common man do. I can write and lecture and take the chair at committees, and in that way reach a number of people, but my political power is limited to a single vote, which has no more weight than that of the silliest nit-wit who can be cajoled into a polling-booth.
You say, xxxxxxxxxx the ways of doing the
(Sorry – something has happened to my type-writer ribbon!)
You say we must find ways of doing things “to force them to read and understand” – I only wish I knew any way of forcing people to read, let alone understand! If you have any plan for working that miracle I should be delighted to hear about it. I agree that the war has started a great outburst of real mental activity, and that we ought to catch the tide while it is on the flow, hoping to heaven it is not too late. I hope to be in Town at the end of this week and the beginning of the next, and should like very much to meet you and talk over what ought to be “done”. I will also tell you what small efforts my friends and I have already made to get in touch with people and fan the flame of their activities; we shall be very grateful if you can suggest ways in which we can help on the good work. On Monday evening, the 22nd., I have to be at Canterbury; otherwise I can come and see you almost any time. Will you send me a line, either to this address before Saturday morning or after that to 24, Great James St., W.C.I, suggesting an appointment?
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Sir Richard Acland (1906–1990) Liberal M.P., author and social commentator.
2 After the War: A Symposium of Peace Aims, 1940, edited by William Teeling.
3 Published by Gollancz, January 1940.
4 Air Raid Precautions.
5 Slang for barrage-balloons, so called after the non-rigid British airship of the first World War (B for British, limp for non-rigid).
6 Vidkun Quisling (1887–1945), the Norwegian traitor, appointed premier of the puppet government set up after the German occupation of Norway in April-June 1940.
In 1940 the London Zoological Society offered the public the opportunity to “adopt” certain animals in the Regent Park Zoo for the duration of the war. D. L. S. chose two porcupines and was duly photographed feeding them, as the following letter discloses:
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE SUPERINTENDENT
Zoological Society of London,
Regent’s Park, N.W. 8
18 April 1940
Dear Mr. Vevers,
I have now arranged with Mr. Suschitzky to be photographed with the Porcupines on Saturday afternoon, meeting him at the Zoo Offices at 3 p.m. No doubt you will be kind enough to arrange with the keeper that my adoptees shall be ready with their faces washed and their nails cleaned at the appointed time.
Dorothy L. Sayers with Stickly-Prickly
In view of the slight obscurity which veils the subject of Sex, it will be better to give them non-committal names, so as not to be embarrassed by the sudden birth of a family to the wrong partner. Was it of the Porcupine that Kipling wrote:
“Can curl up, but can’t swim,
Stickly-Prickly, that’s him”?’1
Because, if so, Stickly and Prickly would do very nicely. But I have mislaid my Just So Stories and am not sure of my biological data. Hedge-hogs curl, I know, but do porcupines?
I am hoping before long to get my christening party together. In the meantime I note that carrots, apples, and a simple vegetarian diet will be acceptable.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Kipling’s words are: “Can’t curl, but can swim –\ Slow-Solid, that’s him!\ Curls up, but can’t swim –\ Stickly-Prickly, that’s him!” The first two lines refer to the tortoise, the last two to the hedgehog. (Recited by the Painted Jaguar in “The Beginning of Armadilloes”, Just So Stories.)
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DR JAMES WELCH
29 April 1940
Dear Mr. Welch,
You will think I am very rude for not having suggested a meeting with you before this, to discuss the Children’s Broadcasts. I have, however, had so much to do this month, that I felt it would be quite useless even to begin thinking about a new venture at the moment. Anything we arranged in discussion would have been driven out of my mind by pressure of other things. I hope, however, to be able to arrange a meeting with you either in May or June, if you are going to be in London during that period.
There is just one thing I want to make clear before we start. The reason why the rate of payment is less for plays broadcast in the Children’s Hour than for plays performed to adults is, I understand, because it is customary to give the actors far less rehearsal when they are broadcasting to children. I think we shall have to say quite firmly that we are not going to allow these little plays to be rushed through without proper rehearsal. It is delicate and dangerous enough to introduce Our Lord speaking in person, without the additional complication of his having to be played by an actor who has only rushed through the part in a couple of readings. I feel sure that you will agree with me about this, and I think it would be as well to establish the point with the financial authorities before going any further. I will leave it to you to take the matter up, and if you require any support from me in the matter, I shall be glad if you will put me directly in touch with the Department responsible.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DR. J. H. OLDHAM
20 May 1940
Dear Dr. Oldham,
Thank you very much for your letter. I am very glad you were interested in the address1 I gave at Derby, and so far as I am concerned, I am delighted that you should quote from it in the Christian News-Letter. It will, however, be necessary, or at any rate proper, to obtain the consent of Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton who are publishing the complete address in sixpenny pamphlet form in the course of the next few weeks.2 If you will send them a line, saying how much you propose to quote, they will probably be happy to give their permission, on the understanding, of course, that you mention their name and the fact that they are publishing the pamphlet.
I must apologise to you for not having yet produced the promised paper on the Rights of Man.3 Several things have happened to delay me. First, there was the production at the Torch Theatre of a little play4 of mine which suspended my other activities for nearly a month while I was coping with rehearsals and production. Secondly, I found it, as I expected, very difficult to get my ideas into any sort of organised shape. The Derby address is, in fact, a preliminary effort in this direction and embodies, so far, the result of my cogitations on the subject. I gather that Mr. Wells’s pamphlet has not made quite the effect that was expected of it and, therefore, there is perhaps the less necessity to publish an immediate counterblast. Thirdly, owing to [these] various delays, I am very much behind-hand on a book5 which I had already promised Methuens to deliver to them by the end of June, and which it is really my immediate duty to get on with, since there is here a contractual obligation to fulfil. Finally, of course, the very nerve-racking condition of things in Europe has acted as a brake upon intellectual output – I find it extraordinarily difficult to put my mind to questions of principle when the pressure of the practical situation is so heavy. In plain language, we have all been very much frightened6 and one does not work well in fright.
All these circumstances make it difficult for me to give a definite promise of another News-Letter Supplement. I will, however, do my best. If it is going to be possible to carry on with one’s prearranged plans during the next two months, I expect to be at Canterbury during June, dealing with the Festival revival of The Zeal of Thy House.7 This will again occupy my mind to some extent, though it has enabled me to put off numerous other distractions in the way of outside engagements, and since the play has been done before, I ought to be able to get quite an amount of time free to do some writing while I am there.
I am sorry to hear that the production of the News-Letter has reached a critical stage – I feared that this might be the case, in view of the paper and postage question. I hope to hear shortly from you that you find yourself in a position to go ahead – which reminds me to send you the extra two shillings and sixpence to make up my subscription to the full amount to the end of the current year.
With best wishes,
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 “Creed or Chaos?”
2 It was published on 10 June 1940.
3 Nothing is known of this paper.
4 Love All.
5 The Mind of the Maker, which was published on 10 July 1941.
6 By the defeat of the French in the battle on the River Meuse. This was followed by the surrender of France in mid-June.
7 See letter to Dr James Welch, 4 March 1940, note.
TO REV. ERIC FENN
11 June 1940
Dear Mr. Fenn
I suppose I ought to undertake to do the broadcasts on the 11th and 18th August, though I am increasingly uneasy about these personal appearances in the role of Christian apologist. The plays about the life of Christ are a different matter – that sort of writing is my job. When I use the direct appeal, I am constantly haunted by the feeling that I am running counter to my proper calling. I know it is my own fault for ever having started it; one spreads a net, and immediately one becomes tied up in it.
Will you please note that I have to speak in Westminster at 6 o’clock on the evening of the 11th August, so I should be grateful if the B.B.C. talk1 could be as early as possible, so that I may take a breath in between.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 The talks were entitled: “Creed or Chaos: Christ of the Creeds” and “Creed or Chaos: Sacrament of the Matter”.
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO HER SON
23 June 1940
Dear John,
Thank you for your letters and birthday wishes. Events have been moving so fast that it is difficult to keep up with things.
As regards the Harvest Camp – of course, there ought to be no question of asking my permission. You must do whatever the Government wants you to do, as we all must, without delay or question. Tell your school authorities so. Harvest camps are asked for, and obviously every able-bodied citizen of school age must take part.
Apart from that: stay where you are. You are probably as safe in Oxfordshire as anywhere. This part of the country is more immediately threatened. If I should be killed in an air-raid, you and Aunt Ivy must at once get into communication with my solicitors, Messrs. Hargrave Son and Barrett, 24 John St., Bedford Row, London, W.C.1, who have my will and know how to act. There will not be very much money, I am afraid – nobody will have much money when this is over, even if all goes as well as we can hope. It is not possible to plan out anything for the future. I shall try to pay the school fees as long as is necessary. In the event of a German occupation of this country, which is possible, though I think not probable, be careful not to advertise your connection with me; writers of my sort will not be popular with the Gestapo. If there should be any question of evacuating to the Dominions, on the other hand, I will take what measures I can. But we are in the front of the battle now, and the great thing is to stay put and work at whatever the defence requires. It may be that your next object should be to make your mathematics useful in connection with engineering or something of that sort. Keep this possibility in mind when the time comes.
Do not be troubled because you are afraid of being afraid. Everybody feels like that. It doesn’t matter, and is nothing to be ashamed of. Do what is asked for – that is all that matters.
Look now at the history you used to find so difficult. England is back now in the centre stream of her tradition – she is where she was in 1588 and in 1815. Spain held all Europe, France held all Europe, they broke themselves upon England; we have got to see that the same thing happens to Germany.1 Foch2 said towards the end of the last war that all would be well, “pourvu que les civils tiennent”.3 That is the truth again, but this time it means us. You have done well at school – do well in this business. If we can stick it out, then, as the vision of Christ said to St. Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all shall be very well.”4
With love and best wishes,
Dorothy L. Fleming
1 Compare her poem “The English War”, first published in The Times Literary Supplement, 7 September 1940. (Included in Poetry of Dorothy L. Sayers, ed. cit., 1996, pp. 120–122.)
2 Marshal Ferdinand Foch (1851–1929), Generalissimo of Allied Forces in the First World War.
3 Provided the civilians hold out.
4 Julian of Norwich: Showings, ed. E. Colledge and James Walsh, “The Long Text”, 29 (London, SPCK, and Paulist Press, New York, 1978).
The address which D. L. S. delivered in Derby on 4 May 1940, entitled “Creed or Chaos?” (see her letter to the Bishop of Derby, 24 February 1940), was published as a pamphlet by Hodder and Stoughton on 10 June 1940. Dr William Boothby Selbie, formerly Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, had previously published an article in The Spectator, entitled “The Army and the Churches”, in which he had said:
The rise of the new dogmatism, whether in its Calvinist or Thomist form, constitutes a fresh and serious threat to Christian unity. The tragedy is that all this, however interesting to theologians, is hopelessly irrelevant in the life and thought of the average man…
D. L. S. quoted this and another passage in her address, challenging his view. This prompted Dr Selbie to write to The Spectator as follows:
Doctrine is a Latin word, the root meaning of which is simply teaching, or that which is taught. Christian doctrine, therefore, is just Christian truth, that which is taught about the Christian facts. Dogma, on the other hand, is a Greek word, the root meaning of which is opinion. In theology a dogma is a religious opinion formally and authoritatively stated. Miss Sayers…[restates] some of the Christian fundamentals in a very interesting way and in terms more adapted to human needs than those of the ancient creeds. In other words she elaborates her own system of Christian teaching or doctrine. This is what she believes and how she believes it. Doubtless she would like others to believe it too, and to accept her statement of it, and she has every right to try and persuade them to do so. But she would probably hesitate to turn her teaching into dogma by making it an imposition of faith with the familiar words “This is the Catholic Faith: which except a man believe faithfully he cannot be saved”.…
D. L. S. replied as follows:
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR
13 July 1940
Dear Sir,
With reference to Dr Selbie’s letter: The dictionary meaning of “Dogma” (apart from its denigratory use) is: “Opinion; the body of opinion formulated and authoritatively stated; a doctrinal system”.1 The relevance or otherwise of Christian doctrine to human life and thought depends precisely upon the dogma, i.e. upon what opinion is held concerning the person of Christ. That is what I have endeavoured to make clear. The Church has formulated and authoritatively stated her opinion – that is, her dogma; and that statement is the statement which sums up all her doctrine, or teaching.
I cannot repudiate too strongly the suggestion that I have “restated some of the Christian fundamentals…in terms more adapted to human needs than those of the ancient creeds”, or that I have “elaborated my own system of Christian teaching or doctrine”. The terms are not mine: they are the terms of the ancient creeds; the doctrinal system is not mine; it is that of the Church. All that I have done is to explain, to the best of my ability, what those terms mean, and what that doctrine is.
It is preposterous to talk about “my hesitating to turn my teaching into dogma”. The teaching (which is not mine) is the teaching of the dogma – which is not mine either. As for the statement: “This is the Catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully he cannot be saved”, it is not usually realised that the operative word is “cannot”. That is to say, the Church here brings her statement of opinion to the bar of fact, saying: “Believe or not as you choose, but what judges you will be the unalterable nature of the universe”.
Yours faithfully,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 The definition given in The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE REV. ERIC FENN
14 July 1940
Dear Mr. Fenn,
I hadn’t even begun to consider thinking about the broadcast next month! I’m trying to finish a book on the Creative Mind,1 and some tomfool paper wants to know by next Friday “whether Hitlers have a place in the Divine scheme of things!”!! I know you wanted something on the lines of “Creed or Chaos?” but your letter is with my agents, and I can’t remember whether it was the importance of dogma or the nature of sin you wanted me to talk about.
Curse the publicity anyway. It only encourages people to think I am putting over some new doctrine or interpretation of my own invention. This personal angle on religion is getting on my nerves, and I think I shall have to stop it, and go back to writing nonsense.…
I will talk, if you like, about any of the following: The Christ of the Creeds; the Gospel of Sin; the Judgement of God; the Sacrament of Matter. You will find a convenient “summary” of anything I may have to say about them in “Creed or Chaos?”. But do make it clear that all I propose to do is to explain, to the best of my ability, what the Church thinks about those subjects, and that I am not bringing any “new” lights of my own to bear upon them. I am not a prophet, but only a sort of painstaking explainer of official dogma – “this is the opinion of authority, and what it actually means is this”. …
1 i.e. The Mind of the Maker, published by Methuen, July 1941.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DR JAMES WELCH
23 July 1940
Dear Dr. Welch,
Forgive my delay in replying. Life has been full of complications, including, among other things, a wistful magazine editor, anxious to know, instantly, briefly, and at the shortest possible notice, what place Hitlers and such have in the Divine scheme of things, and why – one of those easy little questions to which anybody may be expected to rattle off a reply on the typewriter without thinking twice about it.
What I have been considering with regard to the Children’s Hour plays on the Life of Christ is the general theme of the whole series. The thing must have a direction and unity as a complete work, apart from the unity of each separate play, so that [it] can build into a reasoned structure theologically as well as historically.
The theme I want to take is particularly that of the kingship of Christ. At this moment, even children can’t help knowing that there is a great dispute going on about how the world should be governed, and to what end, and I think they are fully capable of understanding what the meaning of the quarrel is, if the situation and arguments are put before them in a simple and vivid way. I shall make this business of the Kingdom the framework of the series, and choose incidents that will bring out this aspect of the story – much on the same lines as in He That Should Come, which is also a play about the Kingdom.
The first play will probably be the most difficult to get going on, because it has to set the key for the rest, as regards style, language, treatment, etc. I am trying to get to work on this now; as I said to you the other day, I rather want to start off this theme with the Magi, because there I get the earthly ideal of government – Rome and Herod – brought right into conflict with the Kingdom of God at the beginning of the story. I don’t want to do the Bethlehem shepherds again – partly because I find it difficult to do the same thing twice over, and because they may again repeat He That Should Come for the Christmas broadcast, and audiences would get rather fed up with having to hear me doing the same stuff a second time. But Herod would be breaking new ground; besides, I am rather strong on Herod, who was an engaging old ruffian, to whom the traditional mediaeval treatment has never done justice.
The real job, when the style etc. have been fixed, is making the separate episodes into coherent playlets, each with its own crisis and dramatic unity. I shall probably have to do a certain amount of rather bold dovetailing to get action and plot into each section. I mean, while one could make a pretty little piece of dialogue out of, say, Christ blessing the children, one couldn’t exactly call it a drama, unless one could set it in relation to something else. Certain high-spots, of course, we have ready-made for our theme: the Nativity, the entry into Jerusalem, and so on; and when we come to the Trial and Crucifixion we are, dramatically speaking, on velvet; but there are all sorts of little twiddly bits – such as the tribute-money, and the disciples arguing about who should be the greatest, and the parables of the Kingdom, which, while very relevant to the subject, are just fragments of teaching and dialogue, unless they can be worked into some sort of sub-plot, so to speak. It looks as though I should have to pull myself together and really make up my mind about Judas; – what did that man imagine he was doing? Pilate and Caiaphas and the rest are quite understandable, and from their own point of view highly respectable – one sees exactly what they were after – but Judas is an insoluble riddle. He can’t have been awful from the start, or Christ would never have called him – I mean, one can’t suppose that He deliberately chose a traitor in order to get Himself betrayed – that savours too much of the agent provocateur, and isn’t the kind of thing one would expect any decent man, let alone any decent God – to do. And He can’t have been so stupid as to have been taken in by an obviously bad hat; quite apart from any doctrinal assumptions, He was far too good a psychologist. Judas must have been a case of corruptio optimi pessima;1 but what corrupted him? Disappointment at finding that the earthly kingdom wasn’t coming along? or defeatism, feeling that the war was lost, and one had better make terms quickly? Or just (as the Gospels seem rather unconvincingly to suggest) money and alarm for his own interests? If we can get a coherent Judas we can probably get a coherent plot.
Well, all that is my artistic funeral; I only mention it as an example of the kind of difficulty one comes up against. …
1 Latin: the corruption of the best, which is the worst corruption.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE BISHOP OF CHICHESTER1
27 July 1940
My dear Lord Bishop,
Look! Here are the things I have contracted to do during the next three months or so:
Finish book on the Creative Mind (over-due);
Write and deliver two broadcasts on Christianity;
Ditto one broadcast on keeping up morale;
Choose, copy, and arrange vast religious Anthology (about one-third done);2
Write twelve broadcast plays on Life of Christ (not begun);
Write paper for Archbishop of York’s Conference (ditto.);
(?) Write broadcast detective drama (may not be wanted, but has not been cancelled);
Two articles for Guardian (promised, but not yet tackled);
Write “Anti-Rumour” pamphlet for M.O.I.3 (held up by violent quarrel with Ministry, but may be wanted);
Write and deliver talk at Chatham House on August 20th.4
I don’t really think I can honestly take on anything more; especially as I have now no secretary. I had one, but she has now left the district, her husband having been lost on the Scotstoun.5 (This accounts for my messy typing, for which I apologise.)
I would have liked to come to Brighton, but I think you will understand when I say that I simply cannot manage it.
With regrets,
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 The Rt Rev. George Bell (1883–1958), who as Dean of Canterbury (1924–1929) had encouraged the re-introduction of drama into the Cathedral. He was Bishop of Chichester from 1929 to 1958.
2 This work has not been traced.
3 Ministry of Information.
4 Not known.
5 The Scotstoun, 7,046 tons, was a liner built in 1925, converted in 1939 as a Royal Navy armed merchant cruiser. She was sunk in the North West approaches north of Ireland on 13 June 1940 by a torpedo from U25. (See British Vessels Lost at Sea 1939–1945, 2nd edition, 1983.)
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE REV. ERIC FENN
28 August 1940
Dear Mr. Fenn,
Many thanks for your letter. I am glad you thought the second talk came over all right. I have not yet seen the notice in the Listener,1 but I am glad to find that I succeeded in satisfying the Church Times; I was afraid I might get trounced for making the basis of the Sacramental position too broad, but it is a job to address talks like these to all the various Christian sects, without offending any of them.
I have offended some people, of course, but as a number of these appear to be candidates for the loony bin, I am not too much distressed. A number of people have written complaining that the talks were not published in the Listener and asking whether they are to appear in pamphlet form. I believe the Listener has the option on first publication, but if they are not going to take this up, I will turn the matter over to my agents and get them to approach the publishers.
I am afraid you have been seeing and hearing a good deal lately of Mr. Hitler’s friends. They have looked us up once or twice lately, and the other day staged a very noisy dog-fight over our back garden. My husband was much affronted because it all took place above the clouds, where he could not see it. Personally, I don’t want to see it and retired to the cellar with my knitting.
With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 15 August 1940. Under “The Spoken Word”, p. 248, W. E. Williams wrote: “In the way of accomplished exposition I have seldom heard anything more admirable than Dorothy L. Sayers on the essentials of Christian belief (August 11). She tackled a most recalcitrant theological topic without making any concessions to mere piety. In one of his moods of elephantine obstinacy Dr Johnson once ridiculed the notion of a woman in the pulpit. I’d back Dorothy Sayers to put the case for Christianity better than many of our wireless padres; and if she will promise to abate a wayward high note in her voice I will gladly listen to her for a month of Sundays.”. See letter to Eric Fenn, 11 June 1940, note. See also letter to Cardinal Heenan, 31 August 1940.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO FATHER PATRICK MCLAUGHLIN1
28 August 1940
Dear Father McLaughlin,
Forgive my delay in answering your letter, I have been kept rather busy with preparing talks and speeches and also in struggling with a series of broadcast plays on the Life of Christ for children, which has got very much behind hand.
I should like to give a broadcast talk for you if possible, though I hate broadcasting and am always dried up by the atmosphere of Langham Place. My correspondents, by the way, seem to be getting quite annoyed (some of them), by the way the Church “ropes in”, as they express it, the outsiders to talk about religion, the implication being that the Church consists only of the Clergy, and that the outsiders have no business to lift their voices.
I don’t know whether the subject of Preparation for Death is one I should choose myself – I have a strong objection to dying – possibly you may feel that this is an excellent reason why I should talk about it, but I can’t honestly pretend that I am of the stuff of which martyrs are made. I am, however, quite prepared to uphold the Chestertonian view about the time when
death and hate and hell declare
that men have found a thing to love2
and if you really want me to do it, I will do my best with it.
I am extremely glad to see that somebody is dealing with the heresy of economic man. I am always very much distressed by the total neglect by Socialists, as well as by Capitalists, of the question of the value of work done, as apart from the price paid for the work. There is certainly a screw loose somewhere in the economic aspect of society. We seem to have got as far as considering the importance of Man, but nobody seems to feel that they have any sort of duty towards Matter.
May I take this opportunity of saying how very highly I think of the Signposts series.3 They all seem to me excellent, with the possible exception of Bentley’s Resurrection of the Bible,4 which seems to be unnecessarily fundamentalist. It has puzzled and bothered a good many people and is likely perhaps to lead us into further difficulties with the opponents of Jonah and the Whale.
I agree with you about the Writers’ Guild.5 I certainly think it would be a good thing to have more meetings, but like you I feel that we don’t get on with the job as well as we might. I feel we need to do something rather more definitely. Perhaps some day when you and I are both in Town, we might meet and think up a few suggestions for getting the Guild to take a more active line. There is a little obscurity about our ends; if these are only to pray and eat lunch, all is well, but if we are also supposed to “bear witness” in our writings, then we ought to try and organize our efforts a little.
Perhaps you would send me a line telling me when you are likely to be available in London.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Father Patrick McLaughlin (1909–1988), Vicar of St Thomas’ Church, Regent Street, with whom D. L. S. collaborated on the work of St Anne’s House, Soho, a centre of discussion between Christians and agnostics.
2 The Napoleon of Notting Hill, from the dedicatory poem to Hilaire Belloc, stanza 4.
3 “Signposts” was the name of a series of books on Anglo-Catholic theory and doctrine, price one shilling.
4 Geoffrey Bryan Bentley. His book was published in 1940.
5 The Guild of Catholic Writers.
HIS GRACE THE ARCHBISHOP OF YORK1
York
30 August 1940
Your Grace,
Thank you very much for your letter and your suggestion that I should write a play for the Youth Council. Although as a rule I am ready to snatch at any opportunity of writing plays, I am in rather a difficulty about the next three months.
I have madly undertaken, in addition to my other work, to write a series of twelve short broadcast plays on the life of Christ for the Children’s Hour. I am only just tackling the first of these in which Herod has to explain, in words of one syllable, the extremely complicated situation in Judaea and to rage characteristically in language suitable for the nursery! If this effort pleases the authorities I shall then have to write the eleven other plays, in which case I don’t think I could honestly undertake to do anything about Wilfred or Alcuin this side of Christmas, even if I knew anything about Wilfred or Alcuin, which I can’t say I do. Of course, if the religious powers at the B.B.C. don’t like Herod, then I shall be released from the undertaking, but I cannot count on their disapproval, so I am afraid I shall have to say no, much as I should have otherwise enjoyed the task if it had come at a more convenient season.
I hope Herod will not get mixed up with the appalling questions with which I am faced at the conference in November!2 In spite of Mr. Kirk’s pleading for practical suggestions, I don’t know that I can offer much of a “solution”. Everybody wants “solutions” to world problems, as though they were some kind of detective story and by some simple trick you can discover [one] and there you are. However, I will do my best about it.
I am, your Grace,
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Dr William Temple (1881–1944), Archbishop of York from 1929 to 1942, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 to 1944; author of Readings in St John’s Gospel (1939) and Christianity and Social Order (1942).
2 The Conference called by Archbishop Temple, deferred until January 1941 and held at Malvern to be out of the way of air-raids.
D. L. S. asked Dr. James Welch if it would be posssible for Val Gielgud to produce her plays on the life of Christ; she had enjoyed working with him on the broadcast of her Nativity play He That Should Come. Dr Welch replied that it would not be possible for Gielgud to produce the plays as they would be broadcast from Bristol by the Children’s Hour Department. He thought it would be appropriate to invite Derek McCulloch (known to listeners as “Uncle Mac”) to produce the plays as Head of that Department, “if after meeting him, you can confidently trust the production to him”. He asked if she would go to Bristol to meet him.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO REV. DR JAMES WELCH
30 August 1940
Dear Dr. Welch,
Thank you so much for your letter. I am sorry about Val Gielgud, because, as you know, he and I understand each other’s way of working. However, if it can’t be I suppose it can’t be.
To be quite plain with you I would really rather not come down to Bristol for discussions. Quite apart from the time and energy wasted on the long journey, it is my experience that to talk over any work which one is doing has the curious effect of destroying one’s interest in the work itself. I will finish the first play, after which if you pass it from the religious and general point of view, as regards the subject matter, the only person I shall really want to see is the producer. If Mr. McCulloch can’t get up to Town then I shall have to come and see him, but I must leave all this until the first play is done. I am taking it that I may allow myself on the average from eight to a dozen actors, plus crowd effects if required, with small musical effects, such as a sung hymn, or a little playing on the harp or lute, if it seems necessary. If later on I can manage to get down for rehearsals I shall try to do so, because there I may be able to make myself useful. It is only discussion beforehand that is apt to get in the way of the job.
I am getting on with the Magi and struggling at present with the difficult job of sketching in briefly, and in language which the children understand, the political situation in Judaea. This is very important, because in some ways Judaea was so much like Hitler’s idea of a territory protected by the Reich, but the way in which the Christmas story is usually presented to school children, and indeed to grown-ups too, usually leaves out all the historical background. I never remember being at all clear about the position of Herod with regard to Rome, or what Augustus Caesar had to do with it, or why he was taxing people, or why Herod should have been in such a rage at hearing of the birth of a Messiah. When you come to think of it, the Magi must have thought that the heir whom they were sent to announce would be a Prince of Herod’s house, or why did they go to Jerusalem and ask Herod to produce him? I have got the poor men hastening in, full of enthusiasm and expecting to be very well received with their gifts and what-not, and much taken aback by the consternation into which the Palace is thrown. If I can once get this idea about the earthly kingship properly fixed at the beginning of the series, then the later working out will be very much easier.
I am sure you will understand my reasons for not wishing to come to Bristol at the moment, and not consider me in any way ungracious.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE REV. J. C. HEENAN1
31 August 1940
Dear Dr. Heenan…
I enclose the scripts of the two broadcast talks. The one on Sacraments was difficult to do, because it had to be made reasonably acceptable to all sorts, from Catholics to Quakers. I expected to be roared at by the “spikes”2 for making the sacramental basis of life too broad; but I got away with it in the Church Times, so I suppose it is all right. Oddly enough, no teetotallers have yet written to protest about the sacramental drinking of healths – they must have accepted the rubric about the permissive use of lemonade and tea! Also, to my surprise, the passage about praying with candles provoked no more violent opposition than the one pamphlet abusing “Infallible Popes” (the printing of which was undoubtedly a “sacrilegious abuse of matter” within the meaning of my last paragraphs).
I know, of course, that the foolish public would always rather hear about religion from a detective novelist than from an ex officio expert; I try to do as little as possible, for fear of being classed as a “religious writer”; but it’s difficult to refuse. I think one of the troubles is that so few parsons are really trained in the use of words. They use the standard technical phrases without quite realising how they sound to the ordinary reader or listener. The result is that when the trained writer restates an old dogma in a new form of words, the reader mistakes it for a bright new idea of the writer’s own. I spend half my time and a lot of stamps telling people that I have not been giving them fancy doctrine of my own, but only the same old doctrine that they have heard and ignored a thousand times. Typical of this is the woman who writes to say: “I can’t agree with you that Christ is the same person as God the Creator”. One can only say: “It isn’t a question of agreeing with me – I have expressed no opinion. That is the opinion of the official Church, which you will find plainly stated in the Nicene Creed, whether or not you and I agree with it.” I do wish, by the way, that the word hypostasis3 had been translated by anything but persona, or that the word person had not acquired such a “personal” meaning in the vulgar tongue. It makes so many explanations necessary and lays so many traps for one’s feet. But that is now past praying for. But who was the Anglican bloke who carried on that long correspondence with Haldane4 about religion, during which they argued for many weeks about transubstantiation, or dividing the Substance, or some such subject, without any effort on the Christian’s part to inform Haldane that “substance” in theology had no connection with material structure, or to ask him whether, by “the substance of a document” he really meant the ink and paper that composed it?
Forgive my rambling on so long. It is very kind of you to tell me how many people liked the talks. Most encouraging, after the gentleman from Oxford!
With many thanks,
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
P.S. Got it! the “Anglican bloke” was Arnold Lunn.5 He was in process of conveying himself over to Rome during the controversy – perhaps they will have taught him there a little polemical tactics.
1 Cardinal Heenan (1905–1975).
2 Slang, for people who are extreme in Anglo-Catholic belief and practice.
3 She interprets this term as “mode of being” in her letter to D. G. Jarvis, 18 October 1940.
4 J. B. S. Haldane (1860–1936), physiologist, author of The Sciences and Philosophy, 1929 The Philosophy of a Biologist, second edition 1936.
5 Sir Arnold Lunn (1888–1974), writer and ski champion.
On 8 October 1940 Derek McCulloch made his first approach to D. L. S. about the series of plays on the life of Christ. He began by asking if she had heard a recent series on Paul of Tarsus by L. Du Garde Peach.1 He referred to an article of hers which he had read in The Guardian2 of 15 March, entitled “Divine Comedy”3 on the subject of Christian drama. It was crammed, he said “with irrefutable advice: I particularly like the line ‘At the name of Jesus, every voice goes plummy’ – we have been on our guard against this danger of humbug for more years than I care to remember.…Mutual confidence is everything between author and producer. Your article, quite apart from all your other work, makes me feel sure that we shall establish this at the outset. Thank you for writing it”.
1 L. du Garde Peach (1890–1975), author of over 400 plays, mainly for radio, ranging from historical and Biblical pieces to contemporary comedies. He founded an amateur theatre group in Derbyshire, known as the Village Players. He was awarded an O.B.E. in 1972.
2 Anglican weekly which ran from 1846 to 1951
3 Later published in Unpopular Opinions (Gollancz, 30 September 1946).
The situation looked promising. D. L. S. replied:
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DEREK MCCULLOCH
11 October 1940
Dear Mr. McCulloch,
Thank you so much for your very kind and most encouraging letter. I was very glad to hear from you and to find that you as Producer and I as Author were obviously going to see eye to eye over this series of plays. I had been feeling very guilty for not having let you have the first one earlier, but I am now very thankful, as I had somehow gathered from Dr. Welch that the time was only 30 minutes, probably it was my stupidity in misunderstanding him. 45 minutes is a great improvement and I shall not now have to cramp the Bethlehem scene so much by comparison with the Herod scene.
Unfortunately I missed the Paul of Tarsus plays. I wish I had heard them. I am particularly interested to know from you that the children found them enthralling and exciting, because Mr. Fenn suggested that some people had thought them a little too advanced for youngsters, and I was afraid the same criticism might be made of the one I am now doing. When you are writing for children of all ages it is difficult to hit on the highest common factor of their combined intelligence, but I always think it is far better to write a little over the heads of the youngest rather than insult the older ones with something that they think babyish, and I believe Dr. Welch agrees about this. Also I gathered from him that one of the ideas is to catch adults in the net that we spread for the children, and if that is so, then we shall have to get a little above the quite simple and pretty-pretty. As I wrote to Dr. Welch, I am trying to base the whole series on the idea of the Kingdom and I have started by attempting to make real to the listener the complicated political position of Judaea under the Roman Empire. This is so very like that of a tributary state today, either under the British Empire, or in some cases under the Reich, that intelligent children of reasonable age should, I think, be able to grasp the awkwardness of Herod’s position. I know that when I was a child it was never really explained to me why Herod should have been so angry about the birth of a Messiah and it would have made the whole story much more intelligible if somebody had told me. You will have to let me know whether you think, as I have written it, it will be comprehensible to the “middle-aged children”: we cannot really address ourselves for 45 minutes to the toddlers.
As regards the cast: I have allowed for a cast of about 12, some of whom will double so that the bits and pieces of Herod’s court can do duty as supporting characters in the Bethlehem scene. I hope you will not think this is too much of a company. In this play we are embarrassed with three Kings, which rather bulk out the number of actors required.
There are a few characters, of course, who will have to run through more or less the whole series of plays, though they may not appear in each one – such for example as the Blessed Virgin, St. Peter, St. John, and of course, Christ Himself; others will be character parts appearing only in one or two plays as occasion arises. I have also got in the first play a Roman Centurion, who is useful as symbolizing the power of Rome at Jerusalem, and I think he may run all through the series and become at the end the Centurion who said “Truly this was the Son of God”. Gordon McLeod played this kind of part extremely well in He That Should Come. My Herod is a Cecil Trouncer part, but he I think is at Manchester and I don’t know whether we could get him. Our big trouble will be to get a Christ; Raf de la Torre has some claims on this part and his voice is beautiful, but from the producer’s point of view he is difficult. He is very slow at rehearsal and fearfully argumentative. Nobody would be better if one could work on each play for a month. Under present conditions you would perhaps prefer a quicker study. Of course, I don’t know what scope they give you to engage real stars; if you have carte blanche, I think Michael Redgrave3 would be quite a possibility, but of course I have no idea whether he would come and whether they would pay for him, but I do think if we are going to put on Christ that they will have to make an effort to get somebody really first-class. After all, it is a very experimental thing to do and we shall get into the most dreadful trouble if there is anything not quite first-class about the performance.
I have done the Herod scene and as soon as I have recast and expanded the Bethlehem scene and the final tail-piece in which Herod orders the Massacre of the Innocents, I will send the manuscript along for you to look at.
In the meantime may I say that after your letter I look forward very much to working with you.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
3 (Sir) Michael Redgrave (1908–1985).
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO ANTHONY GILBERT1
17 October 1940
Dear Anthony Gilbert,
Many thanks for your letter, I enclose the cheques signed.
It is very sad about Helen Simpson. I had been afraid for a long time that things were going that way. I did not think it was much use doing anything about flowers, she died in the country, but they did not tell me when or where the funeral was to take place and I felt that by the time we had got the details and despatched a wreath, it would be too late, but there is no reason why we should not send something to be put on the grave if we can find out where this is. It was stupid of me not to ask her secretary at the time. She rang me up from London but had had some difficulty in getting through and I did not quite get my wits about me. It is a frightful job to get calls to Town from here2 but if you would like to ring up the Children’s Hospital, I expect they would be able to tell you about it.
I have just sent out a notice to the Club3 saying that this does not seem a good time for Dinners, but that if anybody would like a Lunch, I should be glad if they would communicate with me. I am glad to know that you are all right so far. I imagine that the Club premises are still standing since nobody has told us they are not. I don’t know whether we ought to put the Minute book and some of those prints in a place of greater safety, and I don’t quite know what place is of greater safety. We have a good cellar in Gt. James Street4 but just at present I understand we are surrounded by time bombs,5 but I will leave it to you to take any action you think desirable.
It might be a good thing to send the Minute book down here. We get a few bangs and bumps in the neighbourhood most nights but not in such profusion as London.
Wishing you safe and sound,
Yours sincerely,
[D. L. S.]
1 Anthony Gilbert (1899–1973), a woman detective novelist. Her real name was Lucy Beatrice Malleson. She had two other pseudonyms: J. Kilmeny Keith and Anne Meredith.
2 Owing to war-time congestion on telephone lines.
3 The Detection Club.
4 Beneath her London flat at No. 24.
5 This is the time of the Blitz on London.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DR. W. W. GREG1
18 October 1940
Dear Dr. Greg,
Thank you so much for your kind note. We shall feel the loss of Helen Simpson very much; she had one of the finest minds I know and an extraordinarily vivid personality. I don’t think I ever met anybody who was so intensely interested in every kind of person and thing she encountered on her passage through life, and I feel that her death at this moment is a blow not only to her friends but also to the country; she would have taken a vigorous part in the post-war re-building.
Muriel Byrne, who is staying with me, I hope for some little time, thanks you very much for your message and asks me to send her love and say that she is writing to you and hopes very much to come and see you before very long. She is finding this place rather more peaceful than London, though to be sure we get a series of bumps and crashes most nights, but not quite so loudly or so persistently as they do in Town.
With again much gratitude for your kind thought and hoping that you are all keeping safe and well.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Sir Walter Wilson Greg (1875–1959), mediaevalist and Shakespearean scholar.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO D. G. JARVIS1
18 October 1940
Dear Miss Jarvis,
Thank you for your letter; I am glad you were interested in my little pamphlet, “Creed or Chaos?”
The doctrine of the Trinity is, I think, not nearly so puzzling as it sounds, but it would take rather a long time to expound it in a letter. (As it happens, I am writing a short book2 which has some bearing on the subject, from the point of view of the creative artist, who keeps a kind of “working model” of the Trinity inside his own mind, forming a useful analogy to the Great Trinity that created the world.)
I think the two points about which one is most likely to get confused are: (a) the word “Person”, which does not mean, theologically, what it means in every-day English – i.e. an entirely separate character, but is a (not very happy) translation of the Greek hypostasis, meaning, rather, a distinct mode of being; (b) the phrase “Son” of God, which tends to suggest that the Second Person of the Trinity begins and ends with the human Jesus. That, of course, is not what is meant at all – Jesus is God the Son manifested in human nature, but the Godhead of the Son existed and exists eternally, and is the Creator “by whom all things were made”. In some ways I think St. John’s phrase “the Word of God” is easier to understand than “the Son of God”. If you try taking – let us say, any beautiful line of poetry in which the thought is perfectly expressed by the words, and try to distinguish in your mind between the thought and the word, you will probably get some idea of what is meant by saying that “the Father” and “the Son” are the same and yet distinct (or, as the theologians put it, two Persons but the same Substance). If you then try again to distinguish the Thought and the Word from the Meaning which they have for you, you will get some idea of what is meant by saying that the Spirit is also a distinct Person, but still the same Substance. Or take a book – any book – and ask yourself: which is the actual book – the general idea of the book in the author’s mind, the succession of words and scenes that make up the book as he planned it all out, or the book as you read it yourself? You will probably find it hard to decide, and may end by saying: Each is the book, and the whole book, and all three together are one and the same book – and I can only know any of them because one of them (the second) has been manifested in material ink and paper (the second person incarnate).
The theory that Jesus was only a very good man is, of course, perfectly tenable – but, for the reasons given in “Creed or Chaos?” it gets one precisely nowhere, and can scarcely be called “Christianity” in the sense that the Christian Church understands the word.
Yours very truly,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Identity unknown.
2 i.e. The Mind of the Maker.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DEREK MCCULLOCH
25 October 1940
Dear Mr. McCulloch,
Very many thanks for sending the St. Paul plays,1 which I shall very much enjoy reading.
I am driving on with the Magi, who are getting rather talkative – owing no doubt to the sudden expansion of their Lebensraum2 to twenty minutes instead of ten! I think Robert Donat3 would probably be a very good choice; as it happens I don’t know his work very well except on the films, but I believe he is a very intelligent and sympathetic actor, which is what we want. In addition to those qualities I feel that the third indispensable thing is a voice which is essentially alive and flexible. Technically the most exacting feature of the part is the immense range of expression it will demand, from the fieriest denunciation to the most compassionate tenderness all telescoped into a very few minutes.
The one kind of Christ I absolutely refuse to have at any price whatsoever, is a dull Christ; we have far too many of these in stained-glass windows.
I am so glad you can count on Robert Farquharson,4 he is an excellent actor and I am sure he will be sympathetic because he so much enjoyed being the Greek gentleman in He That Should Come. The Virgin Mary always presents a certain amount of difficulty – again in getting rid of the stained-glass window touch; that is, she has got to be sweet without being sentimental. The part itself presents difficulties in this way, especially as we have to cope with the feelings of Roman Catholics, to whom she is almost as divine as her Son, and deeply dyed Protestants, who regard everything about her with the deepest suspicion. However, that is my funeral. I hope to let you have the script of the first play next week.
With best wishes,
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 By L. du Garde Peach. See introduction to letter to Derek McCulloch, 11 October 1940, note 1.
2 German: living space.
3 Robert Donat (1905–1958), stage and film star.
4 Robert Farquharson (1877–1966). He acted the part of Ephraim, a Gentleman of Herod’s Bedchamber, in the first play.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO REV. DR JAMES WELCH
25 October 1940
Dear Dr Welch,
I am anxious to find out whether there is a regular Evening Hymn sung by Jewish families in their household devotions. I want it to finish off the Bethlehem scene in the Children’s play. I think you told me you had a Jewish friend1 who would be ready to furnish details of this kind and I should be very glad if you could ask him whether there is such a thing and whether he can supply the traditional words and music. If there is no such thing, I will write one myself.
I have been in communication with Derek McCulloch, who has been very nice, and it looks as though we should be able to work together very well.
Trusting you are carrying on in reasonable comfort, despite Hitler,
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Dr Welch enlisted the help of the Chief Rabbi, Dr Hertz, who supplied the traditional airs which are used in plays five and seven.
TO THE EDITOR OF TIME AND TIDE
26 October 19401
Sir,
MR WINSTON CHURCHILL
I should like to voice my appreciation of Maurice Collis’2 article on Winston Churchill. We cannot be told too loudly or too often of the need for restoring to the man of vision the control of public affairs. For a long time, many of us have watched with distress and alarm a growing tendency to entrust our national destinies to the heedless hands of the “plain man”, while despising the man of vision as a visionary. That, when the inevitable doom was fulfilled and our agitated repentance took place, we should have found the right man ready and waiting seems almost more than we deserved.
Mr Churchill has reaffirmed in us the classic virtues; is it perhaps a little exaggerated to say that these are “very distinct from Christian virtues”? A certain sentimentality in our religious attitude sometimes leads us to forget that the four “natural” virtues, recognized by the Schoolmen as the Cardinal Virtues on which all the rest depend, are Justice, Prudence, Temperance (i.e. Measure), and Fortitude – and these have a strongly “classical” sound. We might do worse than adopt them as a national watchword. The three “theological” virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity are more mystical and paradoxical – to believe when all is betrayed, to go forward when things are desperate, and to love the unlovable. Two of these, at any rate, are not altogether absent from our present leadership; and we shall probably need to learn the third, if the next European settlement is not to go the way of the last.
Finally, may I take this opportunity of congratulating Time and Tide on its careful observance of the cardinal virtue of Temperance in dealing with ministerial and other errors at the present time. Criticism is an excellent thing, and the corner-stone of our liberties; but when it degenerates into malignant and indiscriminate abuse, it not only outruns Prudence, overthrows Justice, and undermines Fortitude, but defeats its own ends by evoking an obstinate and resentful antagonism to criticism of any kind. From this intemperate virulence, your paper has kept singularly free; and that is no small achievement.
I am, etc.,
Dorothy L. Sayers
1 The date of publication.
2 Maurice Collis’ article on Winston Churchill was published in Time and Tide on 19 October 1940. D. L. S. evidently had it in mind when she wrote her own article on Churchill, “They Tried to be Good”, first published in World Review, November 1943, pp. 30–34, later republished in Unpopular Opinions (1946).
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO J. E. SPICE
28 October 1940
Dear Mr. Spice,
Forgive my delay in answering your very kind letter of the 21st. I am, of course, greatly honoured by your invitation to become an Honorary member of the Oxford University Society of Change Ringers. I have pleasure in enclosing my cheque for half a guinea in payment of this year’s subscription.
I am afraid it must be very difficult for Ringers Societies to carry on under present conditions, but one can only hope that the bells will not be silent too long.1
Wishing you all success,
Yours sincerely,
Dorothy L. Sayers
1 Church bells were not rung during the war until November 1942, in celebration of the Battle of Alamein.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DEREK MCCULLOCH
5 November 1940
Dear Mr. McCulloch,
Sorry I couldn’t send this last week. “It turned out as I knew it would be”; the thing, suddenly released from compression within thirty minutes, shot out like a joyful jack-in-the-box, and had to be captured and brought back. So I spent an angry week-end trying to resqueeze it into its box. It’s still about a page and a half longer (by count of words) than the second “St. Paul” play; but there are not so many shipwrecks and effects to allow for. But I took the opportunity of the extra 15 minutes to enliven things with a bit of crowdage and shoutery by introducing the famous episode of the Golden Eagle. This seemed good to me, as counteracting the necessarily rather pious and domestic effect of the Bethlehem scene. (I hate coping with this baby stuff – thank Heaven, one can only be young once, whoever one is!) It also gives Herod a good kick-off for his fury in the matter of the Massacre of the Innocents. It’s important that this shouldn’t be looked on as a mere piece of meaningless savagery. It was a perfectly reasonable political step, if you once allow that the good of the State is more important than the rights of the individual. The thing one wants to put up against the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven is the idea of the political kingdom, not the caprice of one wicked man. And finally, it gives Herod a final flare-up in his best manner – he handled that business rather well – and, as you will perceive, I have a weakness for the brilliant old ruffian. To the actor, of course, he is money for jam. I don’t think anyone could go wrong in playing Herod, though I do rather see Cecil Trouncer in it, if he’s available. I hope the allusions to his past – the Mariamne stuff and the political pretensions of the Hasmonaeans – [are] not too obscure. After all, children who have done any English history must have some acquaintance with the idea of the pretenders to the throne, and the claims of rival houses.
At this point, I have been depressed by a letter from Dr. Welch, saying that the “St. Paul” plays appeal “rather to adolescents and adults” than to children, and wistfully hoping that my plays will be understandable to youngsters “from 8 or 9 upwards”. I feel that 45 minutes of a religious play, every word of which is to be understanded of the eight-year-old, would be intolerably tedious to the twelve-year-olds. Besides, children differ so much. My own fancy, at that tender age, was for good, rumbling phrases, whether they meant anything or not. I should have liked the Kings’ astrological speeches, and the mysterious prophecies about the Victor-victim, and the three parallel dreams. Nor should I have minded a little pleasing melancholy – in fact, in my youth I rather wallowed in gloom, and liked to have the myrrh along with the gold. It’s the grown-ups who demand this everlasting brightness. But you will judge. My practice, when confronted with possible opposition from the religious authorities, is, first to satisfy the producer and enlist his support; then to sit back and watch while he fights it out on my behalf. This is called strategy.
By the way: I have two “things” about broadcast plays, both of which add greatly to my own troubles. One is, that I have a rooted conviction that all plays, even when broadcast, should explain themselves within their own dialogue. I don’t like to hear the Narrator expounding the situation. This may be a prejudice inherited from stage practice. But the thing irritates me – just as I am irritated by those complicated ballets, where an acre of small print on the programme is required to inform you that when the Huntsman leaps in and executes three chassées and a pirouette, he is really telling the Princess that he is the disguised rightful heir who was ousted by the wicked step-mother and left in the wood to be eaten by a bear, but for the intervention of a kindly charcoal-burner. I feel that if that information is so necessary to the understanding of the action, it ought to be conveyed in the action. Consequently, I have cut down the part of the Narrator to four brief Bible texts. The first three merely indicate the scene-changes; the fourth summarily concludes the story, and spares us a second domestic scene, and another angelic intrusion. One really cannot have two warning dreams in one episode. The choice was between cutting the Kings’ dreams and reducing Herod’s second scene to an outline, so as to give a scene to the Flight into Egypt, on the one hand, and doing as I have done – elaborating Herod and the Kings and cutting the Flight. I chose to do it this way, (a) because Herod is good acting stuff and (b) because there wasn’t very much that Mary and Joseph could say or do in the Flight scene, except be a couple of ordinary parents in a fright – and I don’t think one should bring Mary in unless one has something really important for her to say and do. By the way, you will notice that I have put into the Kings’ salutation a suggestion of the “Hail Mary”, but only the bit that will please the Catholics without offending the Protestants. (Let no one try to stampede us into accepting that the phrase “Mother of God” is Papist! It is not Latin, but Greek, and the people who object to it are Nestorian heretics,1 which is a very shocking thing to be!)
But I am wandering. The second “thing” I have about any series of plays, broadcast or otherwise, is that each should be, as far as possible, a complete and self-explanatory play in itself, with a beginning, a middle and an end of its own, and not just a slice out of a long narrative. This, again, is part of my prejudice against the Narrator, doing his bit of synopsis at the beginning: “Well, children, last week we saw how,” etc. This is going to make things awkward in the middle of the series, because it means constructing each play at the same time as a self-contained unit and also as a structural unit within the series. It means some careful “planting” and also that each plant should have its own root and leaves. But if it can be done, I think it is worth while, because it makes everything much easier for the listener who has happened to miss an instalment here and there. I don’t know whether I shall be able to manage it. Of course, I may not have to! You and/or the other authorities may not care for the first play, and then I shan’t have to do the rest.
Having now read the “St. Paul” plays, I’m sorry I didn’t hear them. I think it is exceptionally awkward material – a continual succession of shipwrecks and sermons – very gallantly handled. His dialogue is always excellent. I feel my usual irritation with the narrator, jerking us back to the question of what we know, or do not know about the subject. An author has no business to button-hole the audience to explain the defects in his knowledge – it makes him into a school-teacher at once. And I do feel – as I nearly always feel with Christian plays and films – that it suffers from a certain lack of theological guts. After all, it wasn’t a new idea that there was only one God (the Jews had had that, and got into trouble with the State before), and it wasn’t the idea that we should all be nice and kind all round (the Greeks had had that) that gave the thing its terrific dynamism. It was the sense that something which was the power of life itself had gone through the world like a thunderbolt and split time into two halves. I don’t say that is quite the way to convey it to the children, but it’s the feeling one wants to convey somehow. And you don’t quite get it by making the characters say: “There’s something funny about you blokes”, at every turn. And I do wish Paul didn’t address everybody as “Friend”, like a Communist writing to his comrades!
However, I’ve no business to criticise other people’s plays, since mine will probably be no good at all. And I shall certainly be told that I have put in too much theology, too much obscure and mystical theology, too much offensive and Catholic theology, and far too little “simple Gospel” and plain, practical morality.
I’ve added a few notes on the characters. They must be real people – except the Kings, who are rather fairy sort of people. I think that is right. Tradition has bound the fairy-tale atmosphere upon them, and they come and go in a perfectly unexplained, magical way. By comparison, the Shepherds and their angel-vision are as plain as pie-crust. But what does come clearly out in the Gospel story, if one reads it carefully, is that they quite obviously thought they were bringing their message to Herod’s own household. Else why should they ask him to show them “him that is born king of the Jews”? It was the natural assumption to make. And hence the elaborate gifts of gold and myrrh and incense – the usual sort of present from one kingly court to another. The upshot of the thing must have surprised them – though I haven’t stressed this, since surprise is apt to sound comic. Actually, I don’t suppose Herod showed them how greatly “troubled” he was; the interview with the priests probably took place in private; but that would have been too undramatic. Also, it’s interesting that “all the people was troubled with” Herod. That supports the idea that the Kings made no secret of their (as they supposed) welcome mission; and that it was taken up by the people, and by Herod, as an exciting rumour about the possible new Messiah. And that would excite Jerusalem at that moment, when Herod was dying, when a religious revolt was already seething among the Pharisees, and when there were at least three claimants to the crown. (Almost Herod’s last act was to execute the wretched Antipater.)
In the hope that you may find the play workable, I will proceed to the next. I’m alarmed by the sweat this one has taken, and feel that time is short. The next one ought, logically, to cope with the Temptation in the Wilderness (since that was the moment when the idea of the wrong sort of kingdom was definitely faced and rejected). That means coping with the DEVIL – always an embarrassing character to make credible.
I hope you like the general title of the plays. It is an old fairy-tale title, and tells the story in six words.2
Hitler seems to keep fussing in and out today. One of these days our local siren will wear its whistle out. I hope Bristol hasn’t been too much bothered lately. If things go well, and you do the plays, I should like very much to attend a rehearsal or two. The job is that with trains as they are it’s a sort of pilgrimage to get anywhere these days.
The local warden has just come in to say that there is a time-bomb across the street, which “looks as though it might go off any minute”. He adds that “the police and the military are surrounding it” – as though it were a truculent parachutist. It’s a mild one, I gather – about 250 lb. But I had better retire from the window3 and put the MS of the play in the air-raid shelter.
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Those who adhere to the heresy of Nestorius (5th-century Patriarch of Constantinople) who attributed distinct divine and human attributes to Christ.
2 The title, “The Man Born to be King”, was also used by William Morris for one of his poetical legends. (See The Earthly Paradise. D. L. S. read this at school.)
3 Her desk was in the window of her library on the first floor, overlooking Newland Street.
TO MARJORIE BARBER
11 November 1940
Dearest Bar,
So glad the jersey fits all right. Muriel’s has turned out quite satisfactory too, I think – I don’t like her round neck quite as well as your square one, but she chose that and it seems to suit her all right. I thought, what with the weather and the war, we might as well have the wool, in case Christmas never comes. Though here I am again encouraged by Winston, who seems to think 1942 and even 1943 may arrive in due course.
I expect M. has told you that she arrived back here to find a truly homelike atmosphere. About one hour before she came, the cook came up and announced that Mrs. Pork-Butcher just opposite had been out in her garden and found a hole in the ground. Mr. P-B went to inspect it, and said: “Ho! I shall report that to the police”. So the police came and looked at it and said, “Ho! We shall report that to the military”. So the military came and looked at it and said: “Ho! that is a 250 lb. time-bomb”. Having looked at it, and spoken thus, they went away. So the police said to the Pork-Butcher, “Would you rather evacuate your house and shop?” And the P-B said to the police: “Will I hell? Balls to you”. So the local plumber-and-decorator came to tell us all about it, and the cook told me, adding that the bomb “looked as though it would go off any minute”, but that no doubt it would be a harmless neighbour, since the military and the police were “surrounding it” – as if it were a truculent parachutist. The plumber-and-decorator then went and had a drink with Mac, who came in to tea later, with the information that the bomb had grown to 500 lb. We were much interested, and predicted that by the morning it would have increased to a land-mine. But evidently the swelling was not what we supposed; for the following evening my secretary came in and announced that the creature had apparently kittened in the night, as (according to the latest reports) there were now three or four of it; moreover, a quite separate one had turned up in the field behind her garden. That night, about 11.55, a heavy explosion was heard, followed by several more. Some of us thought the whole litter must have exploded simultaneously, but I thought not, and said it was a stick of bombs dropped at Braintree. Later, someone told us that a stick of bombs had fallen at Coggeshall; and my answer was adjudged correct, till our evacuee came in and said that somebody had told him that our bomb had gone off the night before at 11.30. This was as confusing as a detective story, because, owing to the conflict of evidence about the time, the bomb could prove an alibi, and the time that we heard the explosions could be proved by me, because I had the wireless on, waiting for the midnight news. Also (circumstantial evidence) the Pork-Butcher still had his shutters up – a measure adopted as an anti-time-bomb precaution, and we supposed that if it had gone off just behind his premises, the shutters would by now be either taken down or blown out. Finally, the cook thrust her head into the sitting-room to announce (from the P-B’s own mouth) that the Bomb Had Not Gone Off Yet. So we suppose it is still there. So is the Pork-Butcher’s. And so is the New Post-Office next door to the Pork-Butcher’s. And some of us think that the bomb must have been rendered fairly harmless, since the Government has only just finished the Post-Office at vast expense and wouldn’t want it blown up. But Mac says, No – it is built with public money, and they wouldn’t care whether it was blown up or not. Anyway, it is a very ugly building and much higher than our house. So if the Bomb goes off, the Post-Office will probably shield us from the blast, but come and die heroically on our roof. So we hope it will not go off; but, this being the country, nobody bothers at all one way or the other.…
Best love,
Yours ever,
D. L. S.
Muriel’s best love – She says she knows she has something to say to you, but can’t think what it is.
On 5 November 1940 D. L. S. sent off the first of her plays to Derek McCulloch. He acknowledged it but said he had not yet been able to read it. Only one copy had been sent, for fear lest others might be destroyed in an air-raid. He reported that “my staff tore it from me to read in relays, but judging from their excited remarks the general opinion seems to be ‘favourable’, as publishers with their extreme caution are fond of saying”.
Everything seemed promising and D. L. S. began work on the second play. Derek McCulloch was obliged to go to Glasgow for a few days. In his absence, the Assistant Director, Miss May E. Jenkin, wrote to D. L. S. about the play. She began by saying: “We have now all read it and let me say at once that we are quite delighted with it. It seems to us admirably dramatic, and both profound and beautiful.” She went on to say, however, that certain speeches would be over the heads of children and that in some places the idiom was too modern: “We wonder if you will allow us discreetly to edit? If you would prefer to make these small alterations yourself, I will send you the play back, but we are anxious not to delay having the copies duplicated and posts are so slow at the moment. We would, of course, get your O.K. for every change before the broadcast.”
D. L. S., who had herself expressed to Derek McCulloch some doubt as to whether she was writing above the heads of children, reacted irascibly, evidently because she sensed that her work was now being judged by a committee.1
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO MAY E. JENKIN
22 November 1940
Dear Miss Jenkin,
Thank you for your letter. I am glad you like “Kings in Judaea”. I shall now proceed to be autocratic – as anyone has a right to be, who is doing a hundred pounds’ worth of work for twelve guineas.
I don’t think you need trouble yourselves too much about certain passages being “over the heads of the audience”. They will be over the heads of the adults, and the adults will write and complain. Pay no attention. You are supposed to be playing to children – the only audience, perhaps, in the country whose minds are still open and sensitive to the spell of poetic speech. The two passages you mention are those which I had already dealt with in my letter to Mr. McCulloch; because I knew that they would present a difficulty to adults – though not to children – and that your first impulse would be to cut them.
But you are not children. The thing they react to and remember is not logical argument, but mystery and the queer beauty of melodious words. To you and me, for instance, the poetry of de la Mare2 is both obscure and fragile, because it evades all attempts at interpretation and breaks when forced into an intellectual pigeon-hole. But that does not worry children. Nor do children feel any particular religious awe at the Sermon on the Mount; what fascinates them is the mysterious Trisagion of A & M 160,3 and the beasts and the wheels of Ezekiel. I don’t suppose it would occur to you to put on a reading of the Athanasian Creed as an attraction for the Children’s Hour; yet I know of a small boy of seven who urgently demanded this of his mother as a special birthday treat. It is the language that stirs and excites: “Not three incomprehensibles and three uncreated; but one uncreated and one incomprehensible.”
As regards Melchior’s astrological speech: they will like the sound of the planetary names and the unusual words. The grand noise will convey its message without any need for understanding. (Read Greening Lamborn’s4 account of the effect on a class of elementary school-children of Homer in the original Greek.) It is true that the children may not grasp the implications of the “imperial star” and the “constellation of the Virgin” – does that matter? If they hear and remember the words, one day they may suddenly light upon the meaning. Though, actually, some of the older ones may be a good deal better up in astrology than the rest of us, since the poor little wretches have to do Chaucer’s Prologue with notes, as a set book for Matric.,5 besides coping with Spenser and God knows what. But the important thing is the magical sound of the words, not what their brains make of it.
The same thing goes for the “Mortal-Immortal”. I will swear that no child has ever heard unmoved, “[So] when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality”.6 What does he know of corruption? Nothing. But it is moving to him precisely because his mind and ear are not corrupted like those of people who read the penny papers.
I knew how you would react to those passages; it is my business to know. It is also my business to know how my real audience will react; and yours to trust me to know it.
Nothing will induce me to let you put in explanations and bright bits of information at the beginning. If you do it here, you will want to do it at every change of scene. If you think the references to the Kings’ visit do not set the scene enough, you must add a line in the text:
Ephraim: You have all the luck … . (querulously):
They oughtn’t to allow these disturbances
right under the Palace windows … .
Rumours? Rumours? What about it?
Joseph’s idiom: This is entirely a matter for the actor; that is why I never give more than the very slightest hint of dialect. Let the actor settle his own accent and turn of speech, according to the particular dialect he can do. If he decides on a touch of Yorkshire, for instance, he will not say “it do be”, but use some other form. When he has settled this, then, if he finds that “conduct you to your tent” is too formal for the speech he is using, he can say “see you to your tent”, or “bring ‘ee to your tent”, according to the speech he is using. This is a matter for rehearsal, and you must learn to consult the actor. Since most of Joseph’s speeches, after the beginning, consist of quotations from the Old Testament, these must obviously be dealt with by accent, and not by dialect phrasing.
Modern Idiom: Nonsense. The whole thing is packed with modern idiom. Why not? “I deeply distrust his intentions” is, as a matter of fact, far more formal than everyday modern speech. “Do as you like” – well, there is the choice of “Do as you choose”, which is a jingle, and “Do as you will”, which is good Wardour-Street,7 but gives you two “will’s” in one sentence. “Like” is right.8 As for Proclus, he is as modern, prosaic, and matter-of-fact a person as you could find in a month of Sundays. That is what he is there for. He speaks like a soldier of any time and place, and the more modern he can be, the better. Why should an Army Captain talk Wardour-Street? Do you suppose they had no blunt speech or slang in ancient Rome or Palestine? The common Roman referred to his pal’s face as “testa” – “your mug” – exactly like the common Englishman. If I wrote that, would you complain of my “modern idiom”?
Actors: For goodness’ sake, handle Billy Williams9 tactfully. He will expect me to ask him to play Herod. He could play a Herod – and I once started to write a Herod play for him – but that was a different Herod, more lyrical and less political. Try not to let him know that I asked for Trouncer, or he will be hurt in his feelings.
It takes two months, generally speaking, to write a play of this kind. So I can hardly promise to produce them at the rate of one a fortnight, though I will try to get ahead as quickly as possible, so as to have something in hand.
I was asked for twelve plays. That was your arrangement. But if there is any doubt about it, you had better let me know. And quickly. I cannot possibly select incidents and arrange their place in the series, unless I know for certain how long the series is to be, and what proportion each is to bear to the whole.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Cf. her comment concerning Thomas Lovell Beddoes’ willingness to conform to the criticism of friends: “It is true that the majority of these drastic reconstructions were never carried out; but what writer whose trinity was strongly co-ordinated would even dream of revising his work to conform with the majority report of a committee?” [Italics added.] The Mind of the Maker (Methuen, 1941), p. 130.
2 Walter de la Mare (1873–1956).
3 Trisagion: a hymn beginning with a threefold invocation of God as holy. The hymn referred to is that by Bishop R. Heber, beginning “Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!”, no. 160 in Hymns Ancient and Modern.
4 Edmund Arnold Greening Lamborn (1877–1950), Headmaster of the East Oxford School, author of articles on education and other subjects. The reference is to The Rudiments of Criticism by E. A. Greening Lamborn (Oxford Clarendon 1916, 2nd edition 1925), p. 20: “I lately heard a ‘Greats’ man read a passage of Homer to some boys of twelve who knew no language other than their own; they listened breathlessly and then told him that there had been a challenge, a fight and a song of triumph – which was really the ‘substance’ of the passage. He then read some lines of Vergil and they said ‘it was a cavalry charge’; ‘passer mortuus est’ [the sparrow has died] of Catullus and they suggested that ‘someone was speaking of a dead child’”.
5 Matriculation, the examination which corresponded to the General Certificate of Secondary Education.
6 1 Corinthians, chapter 1, verse 54.
7 Pseudo-archaic diction, from the name of a street in London where imitation antique furniture was sold.
8 In the printed version, D. L. S. had accepted “Do as you will” (Gollancz, 1943, p. 61).
9 Harcourt Williams.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
LADY BOILEAU1
22 November 1940
Dear Lady Boileau,
Thank you very much for your letter. I am so glad you liked “Creed or Chaos?”. I do this kind of thing mostly to order and if anyone demands something on the Incarnation, no doubt I shall deal specifically with that subject some time – though in fact, anything one does on these lines is naturally based on a doctrine of Incarnation. The impression I get – I don’t know whether you will agree with me – is that the average Englishman has no idea whatever what is really meant by the term, so that a great deal of Christian doctrine is completely incomprehensible to him. The fulminations of one Minister of Religion who announced that I had shocked all thoughtful Christians by the suggestion that God Almighty was crucified, suggest that some of our Pastors and Ministers know as little as their congregations. I meant to tell this gentleman that he apparently believed either that Christ was not God (in which case he was an Arian heretic) or that His divinity was withdrawn from him before the Crucifixion (in which case he was a Manichean2 heretic). But it was too much trouble.
It is very sad about Helen.3 I agree entirely with you that I have never met anybody who equalled her in vivid personality and in the intense interest she brought into her contacts with people and things. I don’t really quite know just what was the matter, but immediately after her operation, I gathered that things had not gone well and that they had found something more extensive than they expected, so that from the beginning I rather feared the worst. Of course, one could not get anything out of Browne4 – in any case, one does not like to try and pump people too much. I am afraid I don’t know where she was buried; of course I wrote to Browne at the time but equally of course, he has not written – she died down in the country and under present circumstances I should think it likely she was buried there.
With again many thanks,
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 An administrator in the Voluntary Unit Training Centre, Women’s Transport Service.
2 Relating to the heresy of Manichaeus (3rd century), who held that Satan was co-eternal with God.
3 Helen Simpson.
4 Her husband, Denis Browne.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO MARGERY VOSPER1
27 November 1940
Dear Margery,
I have been having the usual struggle with the play at the B.B.C. What happens is that the Producer goes away and a yammering kind of letter is sent me by some female he has left in charge who thinks it her duty to tell me how to write English and how to write for the stage! I have been firm about this but I expect we shall have ructions, especially as I wrote rather a stiff letter pointing out that they were buying about £100’s worth of work for twelve guineas – and intimating that they had to put up with what they got!
Meanwhile it is only proper that you should know what they have got and enclosed is a copy. They seem to have more or less accepted it, their objections being mostly the fiddling and unnecessary kinds. …
With all the best,
Yours sincerely,
[D. L. S.]
Derek McCulloch, returning “somewhat travel-battered” after a 19-hour railway journey from Fife to Bristol, found D. L. S.’ reply to May Jenkin. He supported all his assistant’s comments and urged D. L. S. to come and visit them in Bristol: “You do not know us, but we flatter ourselves that by meeting each other we might soon sweep away all obstacles”.
D. L. S. replied:
1 Her dramatic agent.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DEREK MCCULLOCH
28 November 1940
Dear Mr. McCulloch,
Oh, no, you don’t, my poppet! You won’t get me to do three days of exhausting travel to Bristol in order to argue about my plays with a committee. What goes into the play, and the language in which it is written is the author’s business. If the Management don’t like it, they reject the play, and there is an end of the contract.
If travelling is at all possible, I am ready to meet the Producer and the Actors in rehearsal. Then, if there is any line or speech which, in rehearsal, I can hear to be wrong, or ineffective, or impossible to speak aloud, I will alter it, if I think the objection to it justified. (But if the actor is merely being tiresome, I say, “No, darling, Mother knows best”, and he has to get on with it.) And if the actor puts the accent in the wrong place (as from time to time he inevitably does) I assist him to get it right. And if neither actor nor producer is sure which way a thing is meant to be said, I explain as placidly as possible. And if either of them makes a good suggestion, I listen to it, and adopt it if possible. Anything that has to do with Production I am always prepared to modify – as in the matter of Joseph’s dialect, or the extra lines required to set the scene.
But the business of getting my ideas across, and the writing of the English language, is the affair of the playwright; I will give you my reasons for what I do, but if you do not accept them, I can only say, “Take it or leave it”. After all, if I am asked by the B.B.C. to do a play for you, it is because they think I can supply a quality of some kind which they cannot get from their staff. That is why outside writers of standing are asked to do things. This always involves the risk that the outside writer may do something which is different from the routine thing which the staff is accustomed to do – and this difference is the thing for which the outside writer is engaged and paid. If the writer’s authority is not to be absolute in his own sphere, there is no sense in approaching him; he is approached because of his authority, and for no other reason.
You are the producer. Where production is concerned, I will respect your authority. But this is not a matter of production. It falls within the sphere of my authority, and you must respect mine.
You see, it is not merely a question of what children will, or will not, understand. This ground of defence is cut away by the attempt to tell me what sort of English idiom I should, or should not, use. You are, I know, bound to back up your colleagues and subordinates; but you must allow me to tell you that this kind of thing, phrased as it is phrased in Miss Jenkin’s letter, is a blazing impertinence. If I am asked to write a play for you, it is because I have the reputation of being able to write. Do you think I should have that reputation if I allowed my style to be dictated to me by little bodies of unliterary critics?
I must also make plain to you that I am concerned with you as a producer for my play. In that capacity, you are not called upon to mirror other aspects of your work at the B.B.C.; you are called upon to mirror me. If you prefer to act as the director of a committee of management, well and good; but in that case, you cannot also exercise the functions of a producer. You can reject the play, in which case the matter is closed; or you can accept it, in which case you must offer me another producer with whom I can deal on the usual terms, which are perfectly well understood among all people with proper theatrical experience. I am sorry to speak so bluntly; but I am a professional playwright,1 and I must deal with professional people who understand where their appropriate spheres of action begin and end.
I am writing to Dr. Welch to make the position clear to him; and shall suspend all work on the succeeding plays until the matter has been put on a more satisfactory footing.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 She had by then written five plays: Busman’s Honeymoon, The Zeal of Thy House, Love All, He That Should Come, and The Devil to Pay, all of which had been performed. “Kings in Judaea” was the sixth.
TO DR JAMES WELCH
28 November 1940
Dear Dr. Welch,
I am sorry to say I have reached a sort of impasse with Mr. McCulloch. His first letters were sensible and friendly, and proper as from a producer to a playwright.
Unfortunately, while he was away, an excessively tactless letter from a Miss Jenkin obliged me to insist on the author’s right to be sole judge of matter and style where his expert work was concerned. Mr. McCulloch (who is, as I quite understand, bound to back up his subordinate) now seems to have stepped out of the part of a producer into that of a Director, and to think it is part of his business to teach me how to write.
This will not do. He can, as a Director, reject the play. Or he can, as producer, undertake to interpret the play. But he cannot do both. Two objections which had legitimately to do with production, I have already dealt with, so as to meet his views. The other questions, which have nothing to do with production, are a matter for my judgement. These I have said I will not alter, and I have given reasons. This is as far as I am prepared to go. I am not prepared to accept the judgement of a committee upon my English style; though I am always ready to alter in rehearsal any phrase which presents difficulty to the actor.
The details of this controversy are not your affair, and I need not bother you with them. But the point is this: if the B.B.C. calls in an outside writer of standing to write its plays, it is because that writer has a quality, and an authority, which does not belong to the hack writers on the permanent staff. It must therefore take the risk of getting something different from the routine work of the department; in fact, this difference is the very thing it has engaged and paid for. That being so, it must trust its outside expert to know his own job.
Also, having called in a professional playwright, it must give him a professional producer who knows where a producer’s job begins and ends. The producer’s job is to deal with the play in rehearsal, and not to act as the Management. In his own sphere the producer is God – but he is not God in the author’s sphere. The author is God there; and the producer’s business is to produce the play.
No professional producer of standing has any doubt about where the dividing line comes. I have never yet had the slightest difficulty with a competent professional producer, nor he with me. But the thing that makes work impossible is this trail of amateurishness over the B.B.C. departments, which results in interference by everybody in everybody else’s job; and that I cannot put up with.
I knew at the beginning that this kind of trouble was likely to arise. That was why I made strong representations about getting Val Gielgud, who is a professional, and does know his job. I have never had any kind of impertinence or stupidity from him, nor (I think he would tell you) he from me. Although he is a writer himself, he never thought of informing me how I might improve my style; probably, being a writer,1 he knew better. He would, of course, make suggestions in rehearsal, but always in connection with the acting, and in a proper manner, and I was always ready to listen and adopt them. But then, he knows his theatre inside-out, and is not an amateur.2
Theatre, you see, is theatre. It is because these little committees of the Children’s Hour have no experience of the theatre that they never succeed in producing theatre, but only school lessons in dialogue. And I cannot do with it. Get me Val, and I will go to Bristol or Manchester or anywhere and work twenty hours a day, with the actors. But I must have a producer who is a professional producer and nothing else, and who can talk the language of the theatre.
If there is any more nonsense, there is an end of the plays and the contract. I have stopped work on the series, and shall do no more till this business is put on a proper professional footing.
I am sorry for all this, which is in no way your fault. You see now why I am disliked at the B.B.C., and why Gielgud enjoys (or so I am told) an extraordinary reputation as a Sayers-tamer! He knows his job; that is the secret of that, as of many other remarkable reputations.
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Val Gielgud wrote novels and plays, as well as an autobiography, Years of the Locust (London, Nicholson and Watson, 1947).
2 Val Gielgud had a comparable respect for D. L. S. In Years of the Locust, p. 178, he wrote: “Miss Sayers is professional of the professionals. She can tolerate anything but the shoddy or the slapdash. Of all the authors I have known she has the clearest, and the most justifiable, view of the proper respective spheres of author and producer, and of their respective limitations. She is authoritative, brisk, and positive”.
TO NANCY PEARN
28 November 1940
Dear Bun…
I am in a state of complete fury, with which you will sympathize. The Children’s [Hour] plays I was doing for the B.B.C. have got held up owing to the usual violent struggle between myself and that body. As you know, the Director of Religion asked for the plays to be done in the Children’s Hour and asked me about a Producer. I said the only Producer – and indeed the only person at the B.B.C. – for whom I would give a groat – was Val Gielgud. Val, however, being at Manchester, they offered me instead Derek McCulloch, who is one of the Directors of the Children’s Hour. So far so good, and he and I exchanged very amicable letters about the play. Then he goes away on business and in bursts a female with a patronising and impertinent letter criticising my matter and begging me to improve my English style in places where “we” (whoever we are) felt it to be inadequate. I replied firmly to this gorgon that matter and style were my business, that I knew as well as “we” what children would be able to understand, though I should be willing to meet them on any point connected with the production, which in fact, I did.
Now comes a letter from Mr. McCulloch, backing up his subordinate and having turned from Producer into a kind of Committee of Management! I replied to him that he cannot be both and must be one or the other; but that if he is going to be a producer he must accept my authority for everything which does not concern production. At the same time I wrote a ferocious letter to the poor religious bloke1 telling him what has happened to his play and saying that no professional writer of standing can get on with the B.B.C, just because of this frightful trail of the amateur smeared over all their departments!
So you see we are having a lovely row. Next time you see Val, if he comes to London, tell him that he is still the only person at the B.B.C. who can tame the tigress Sayers and I have told Dr. Welch that if I could have Val I would readily go and be bombed at Bristol or Manchester and work twenty hours a day with the actors, but that I will not be come over by amateurs in the Books for the Bairns department.
I know this will please you since you were instrumental in handing me over to Val and were pleased with the results.
God blast these twirps!
Yours affectionately,
[D. L. S.]
Dr Welch wrote, expressing dismay:
When [Derek McCulloch] wrote to you as producer, you and he seemed to understand each other, and everything seemed to augur well for a happy and successful production. My own suggestion is that we should ignore the comments made on the play as a work of art, that you and McCulloch should pick up where you were before Miss Jenkin’s letter, and that McCulloch should make such comments as he wishes including those made by Miss Jenkin during the production itself.
1 i.e. Dr James Welch.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DR JAMES WELCH
30 November 1940
Dear Dr. Welch,
Thank you so much for your kind letter. I am sorry it did not reach me yesterday, before I wrote to you and to Mr. McCulloch, as it would have enabled me to take up a less autocratic position. In any case, I am very grateful to you for supporting me in the attempt to put over to the children a mystical approach to Christianity by means of poetic language, and also for the tacit confidence you place in my work by the assumption that, having called on a writer to do something, you will leave him to have a shot at it in his own way. These are, of course, the two points in dispute.
I must say that, in the beginning of our correspondence, Mr. McCulloch seemed quite ready to go the whole way with me as regards the former point, quoting the expression: “Preach to the Sixth Form, and let the others pick up what they can”. So much so, that I said to him – rather as a joke – that if you complained that I was writing over the heads of the eight-year-olds I should rely on him to fight my battle with your department! The next thing was the letter from Miss Jenkin, written as from a committee of the Children’s Hour, requiring me to make six alterations. Two of these concerned precisely the “mystical” passages, on the grounds that they could tell me what would appeal to their audience. I replied that I must be the judge of my approach to the audience, and gave good reason for thinking that children were not incapable of appreciating strange and beautiful words, even if they could not take the whole thing in with their intelligence. Two of the others informed me that “we” the committee did not approve of the “modern idiom” that I was using in places. I replied that it was not their business to criticise my idiom – as indeed it is not, since if I have any reputation as a writer, it is for my ability to handle idiom. (Incidentally, it is by the use of modern idiom that I have from time to time been able to galvanise the public into the realization that events in the Bible took place in times very like our own, and were concerned with real people.) If, in rehearsal, I hear that something I have written doesn’t sound right, it is my duty and pleasure to alter it; but I really cannot allow that I am to write to the instructions of a B.B.C. committee. If they want that sort of thing, they must get plays written by their own staff, and not by writers of standing in letters and the theatre. The other two alterations demanded concerned production; this was legitimate (though they should have been requested by the producer and not by the department). I replied by at once making one of the alterations – though on my own lines and not in the way they suggested; and by explaining that the other would have to be settled in the course of rehearsal, for reasons which I gave; viz: that this was a matter which primarily concerned the actor.
Mr. McCulloch then wrote, supporting Miss Jenkin, and asking me to come down to Bristol immediately in order that they might persuade me that the Children’s Hour Department was a faithful mirror of its audience. I did not argue about this, but made it clear that, if he was going to produce this play, his business would be to mirror me, and not anything else; and that it was impossible for me to treat him at the same time as my producer and as the head of a department that undertook to teach me how to write. I also said bluntly that I considered Miss Jenkin’s letter an impertinence.
The actual passages at issue may appear trivial; but I think you will understand that it would be quite impossible for me to write a series of plays, especially on so difficult and dangerous a subject, if my matter and style had to conform to the practice of a departmental committee. If any body of persons entrusts work to an outside expert of standing, it is because precisely, they look to him to supply something outside their normal practice. In a case like this, there are three authorities to which an author must be ready to submit: (a) that of the Church, if it can allege and substantiate that the matter complained of is heretical or blasphemous; (b) that of the State, if it can show that the matter is likely to lead to open schism, a breach of the peace, or the disturbance of international relations (e.g. anything likely to involve a Governmental department such as the B.B.C. in difficulties with the Catholics, the Jews, the Mohammedans, or what not); (c) the producer, if he can show that the lines and effects cannot be managed by the actors and effects department, or cannot be done in the time allotted, and so forth. But this is for the producer only, in his capacity as producer, and not for a department; and it must be conveyed personally, in connection with the production, and not as the ukase1 of an editorial committee.
I am not at all unreasonable about alterations. I have rewritten almost an entire act at the request of a very young actor, doing his first production; but on that occasion the approach was very different. The issue was one of sheer dramatic construction, not of ideas or language; it was proved to me in rehearsal that I had made a mistake; it was done in collaboration with the actors, who felt the weakness in their parts; and I made the alteration along my own lines when I had seen for myself what was wrong. But I was not required to submit my judgment.
This kind of thing is the usual theatrical practice; and it is my experience that where the author knows his job, and the producer knows his job, and each will trust the other to know his job, all differences can be amicably settled. If anybody says, “The B.B.C. is not the theatre”, the answer is that, if they call in professional playwrights, then it is the theatre, and they must supply a professional theatrical production. Radio technique is not quite like that of the theatre; but there was here no question of radio technique, but only of style and subject-matter.
As I said before, I am extremely sorry that this should have happened; and I think – though of course I do not know – that it is largely the result of applying Civil Service methods to the Arts; the same thing, in fact, which wrecked the propaganda side of the Ministry of Information. This happens when a department requires the outside authority to conform to its routine practice, and when it is thought necessary that every tactless error made by a subordinate must be backed up by the head of the department in order to secure solidarity. What happens, of course, is that the outsider, having nothing to lose and no axe to grind, walks out, leaving the department to reflect that it is useless to present ultimatums (ultimata?) unless one carries the guns!
The brutal fact is this: that I consented to do these plays, representing about 100 pounds’ worth of my work apiece, for a derisory sum, merely because I so much liked the idea that I felt it would be a pleasure to do them. But if I cannot do them in my own way, it will no longer be a pleasure; and I may say that, even if the pay were adequate, I should still refuse to do them except along the lines which I feel to be artistically right. There is no money in the world that I would accept at the cost of surrendering my right of artistic judgment to the dictation of a committee – this is why dictators have to put artists in concentration camps.
The worst of the trouble is that, whatever happens now, I shall be faced, in Mr. McCulloch, with a sulky producer, which is the most desperate thing that can happen to a playwright. Here, again, I am all right; I withdraw the play, break the contract, and proceed with the arrears of my other work. But you will have lost your series of plays, and it seems rather hard lines. That is why I am bothering you with two long letters, in the hope that you may be able to exert some pressure somewhere or other. I am sorry I cannot send you copies of all the correspondence; I have sent it to my agent. However, I have no doubt you can get it from the Children’s Hour people. You will see that everything was as harmonious as possible up to the moment of Miss Jenkin’s interference. My reply to her was not conciliatory, I admit; but I knew that I had come to the point where to cede an inch was to cede the whole territory.
I apologise for adding my bombardment to that of Hitler; I’m afraid you have been having a stiff time lately.
Yours very sincerely
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
Of course, all this is hanging up production. I doubt whether, under the best of circumstances, I should have been able to get the plays done at the rate of one production a fortnight. The first request was, I think, for twelve plays. Then they asked me how many I wanted to do. Now you suggest six. If I am to go on, I must know, because each play has to be written with reference to its place in the whole series. You couldn’t plan a series of sermons unless you knew whether your doctrine was to be cramped into a Lenten mission or spaced over the whole year!
1 Arbitrary order (from Russian: imperial command).
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO NANCY PEARN
2 December 1940
Dear Bun …
You will be entertained to hear that the B.B.C. have surrendered foot, horse and artillery! Dr. Welch rang up this afternoon saying he thought the best way would be to cancel the original arrangements for production and hand the whole thing over to Mr. Val Gielgud. I said with mild surprise that I had understood Mr. Val Gielgud was not procurable. He replied that in case of dire necessity heaven and earth would be moved to get hold of Mr. Gielgud and induce him to take over. I said that in these circumstances all would no doubt be well. So there you are, you see. In the meantime, production has been postponed, which is a great blessing, since as I gently pointed out to them, the writing of a play, if you write it properly, takes about two months and not two weeks as they seem to imagine. …
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO HER SON
5 December 1940
Dear John,
No, I don’t think so – I really don’t know, but I fancy the conference is by invitation – bishops and parsons and people with official interests.1
You needn’t think it odd that you should only hear of my professional activities in the papers. Nobody ever does otherwise. Why should they? It isn’t a personal matter. In fact, if anybody tries to make it so, I am quite unscrupulous in my efforts to choke them off! The last thing I should ever do is to send tickets or invitations to relations and friends.…
I can’t altogether explain my violent dislike of personal interest, except that I connect it with the atmosphere of solicitude which surrounded me in childhood and from which I have been trying to rid myself ever since. So much so that I can’t be civil if I am told that I [am] missed when I am away or welcomed when I return, or that I ought to take care of my life because it is precious to other people. I should very much dislike being bombed, but there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be; I am no more important than anybody else. Solicitude only adds to the victim’s discomfort by embarrassing them with a sensation of guilt.
I have always been sorry that I ever used my own name for my books or allowed my personality to become known at all, or ever appeared on a public platform. The fool newspaper public starts pushing one’s self into one’s work and exploiting interest in one’s personality, which is intolerable. It can’t be helped now, but it’s a pity. The grass should grow over the living as well as over the dead, and there should be no memorial except the work. I have just had to write a “character sketch” of a dead friend2 – a job that I hated and that one ought not to have to do. At least there are no lies in it, as there are in all the other obituary notices – the most silly and nauseating lie being the assertion that she and I were close friends at Oxford, where we never met.3 Why should I be dragged into it? You may well ask. Because the blasted journalists thought that, since they knew nothing about her work, they could make their columns more spicy by connecting her with a “well-known personality”. It makes me sick. I have killed the lie, anyhow – which is the only excuse for the article.
Let be, let be. Go on being interested in public affairs. That is needed. We have bottled up our lives into our own tics and our own emotions and let the res publica4 go from bad to worse. There is no love for the thing – only a general solicitude of a vague kind for nice people, and an indefinite general kindness that doesn’t like to think of anybody having to suffer. The best possible recipe for producing the greatest suffering for the greatest number.
Yes – I suppose we shall have to deal with exams and things some time. But God knows there’s no money for anything these days. I am not making it as I did. The detective market – thank Heaven – has fallen off; I say, thank Heaven, because it was getting bad for people; encouraging them in the delusion that there was a nice, complete, simple, one-and-one-only solution to everything. There isn’t. There is a solution to murder mysteries only because the murder is made to be solved.
I doubt, in any case, whether I shall be more than the one night at Malvern.
Yours affectionately,
D. L. S.
1 John Anthony, then at school at Malvern College, had asked if he might attend the Malvern Conference at which his mother was invited to speak on 8 January. He had read in the newspaper that she would be speaking. The Conference was held at the College during vacation.
2 Helen Simpson. D. L. S.’ “sketch” was published in The Fortnightly, January 1941.
3 D. L. S. wrote: “I first met Helen de Guerry Simpson about ten years ago, when she was elected to membership of the Detection Club” and went on to express exasperation at the determination of journalists to maintain that they had been closely associated at Oxford.
4 Latin: public affairs.
On, 4 December Dr Welch wrote to D. L. S. referring to a telephone conversation they had had. It had proved impossible after all to engage Val Gielgud as a producer of the plays. Dr Welch hoped that despite her misgivings D. L. S. would accept Derek McCulloch as a producer. He said:
Two hours after we had spoken, we had a hideous five hours of horror in Bristol, and what happened during those hours has rather upset one’s scale of values.… All that seems supremely important at the moment is that we should broadcast to the children of the nation as perfect a picture of Our Lord as possible through the medium of your plays, in the belief that at least one or two children, and possibly hundreds, will get a picture of Our Lord from our broadcast of your plays which may be decisive for them in determining their attitude to Christ and the Church.
D. L. S. replied:
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DR JAMES WELCH
7 December 1940
Dear Dr. Welch,
Many thanks for your letter. I was rather afraid you would find it difficult to get hold of Val Gielgud.
Of course I shall be delighted to meet Mr. McCulloch, if he can possibly get to London. (That would mean only one day’s travelling for me instead of three or four, which at the moment I simply can’t afford time for.) I greatly appreciate the generous attitude he has taken; and, as I said to you at the time, I never felt there ought to have been any real difficulty so far as he was concerned. My feeling was that he was backing up a colleague in an ill-judged action, according to the departmental code. And I didn’t say I wouldn’t have him as a producer – only that he must decide to be either a producer or a department, but not both.
I am quite prepared to believe that Miss Jenkin has a great experience in the Children’s Hour; but when you entrusted the job to me, you were taking the adventurous step of cutting out the juvenile experts, and trying a new experiment – that of giving the children “professional theatre”. I think we must stick to the terms of that experiment, and deal with the thing on “professional theatre” lines. “If we fail, we fail”, but we must try it out properly and not mess about with it.
I do sometimes wish that the experts would have a little more respect for their infant material. You remember Niebuhr: “Every child is a born theologian, which may be one reason why moderns regard theologians as obscurantists”. Young children continually ask questions to which there is no answer possible except a mystical answer. I believe one should respect them enough to give them the true answer and not withhold it until they can understand it with the reason; because, by that time, the reason is already so corrupted as to refuse anything outside its own scope.
I really did take some pains to estimate in my own mind what weight of the mystical the uncorrupt mind might be expected to carry. I think it is greater than is generally supposed, and I am sure one must not depend too much on the criticisms of parents and teachers, or even on the expressed opinion of the children. I know I should have never dared to confess to any of my grown-ups the over-mastering fascination exercised on me by the Athanasian Creed. They were kind, but not so exceptionally sympathetic as the mother of the seven-year-old I mentioned to Miss Jenkin, and I felt instinctively that they would be surprised and amused, and say, “Surely you can’t understand that”, and tell each other about it as a quaint thing I had said. So I hugged it as a secret delight.
Children hate being told they can’t understand. There was quite a little row at Canterbury when some well-meaning person said the school-children oughtn’t to have been taken to see Charles Williams’ play, Cranmer of Canterbury. The children were bitterly offended, and wrote a letter, insisting that they had understood it perfectly! It is an excessively difficult play, but I am prepared to believe that, though they can’t have understood it with their heads, they got more out of its rhythms than the average adult. Charles Williams seems to be a sort of test case. Educated audiences find his Seed of Adam almost incomprehensible; but Fr. MacLaughlin saw it played to a totally uneducated rural audience, who not only heard it with rapture, but were able to explain quite clearly and sensibly what it was all about. The same sort of thing happened when some people took their little R.C. servant to see T. S. Eliot’s Family Reunion. They asked her if she understood the end of it – which was what all the reviewers and liberal rationalists found so baffling and repulsive. “Oh, yes,” she said; “he was going out into the wilderness to make his soul, and then he would come back and do good.” That, no doubt, was the effect of always having been given the mystical interpretation of life; it was taken as perfectly natural.
I am certain that it is desperately important to get the mystical and poetic approach to life accepted naturally at an early age or when the mind is uncorrupted by rationalisation – children and charwomen are the only audience to whom these things appeal directly; the adult and the educated can only make the difficult and perilous approach of the “twice-born”, and may never get there. Even if they do, it is easier for them if they have had it once at first hand.
Now, if anybody had said that the political part of “Kings in Judaea” was rather hard going for children, I think he would have had a case. But I want to try it on them, because that side of it may catch and interest the older ones, who have already got beyond the direct appeal of rhythm and mystery, and are ready to use their reason about a human and historical situation. They must all hear a lot about international questions these days; and one mustn’t forget that weekly attendance at the cinema had made them far more sophisticated than we ever were at their age. Incidentally, it is interesting that a friend of mine, teaching in an evacuated school, finds that, now that the children can no longer indulge in the accustomed cinema-crawl, they are far more interested and delighted by poetry than they were before. Which means, I suppose, that the age of sophistication has been set back.
Of course, one has got to remember that, with plays, it’s impossible for the whole audience to get the full value out of every word. If, out of 800 people who find the show good entertainment, 8 are so thoroughly stirred that the thing becomes an experience in their lives, the playwright has done more than he has any right to expect. But he may hope that perhaps another 80 or so may carry away something – a word, a line, a situation, a picture – that may remain in the memory and later on come to mean something, when experience is ready to interpret it. I sometimes think that the B.B.C. is too much inclined to attempt the impossible task of pleasing everybody and offending nobody, and so producing that harmless mediocrity that vaguely insults everybody and stimulates nobody. You can’t really follow the line: “It would be a pity if some children didn’t understand”; you can only say, “If one child fully understands, then praise God for a miracle”. The highest common factor of human intelligence is not so very high, and if a thing is fully understood by everybody, it is seldom worth understanding. But everybody may grasp bits here and there, and that’s worth it. My guess is that the young children will like the mysterious bits, while the grown-ups will like the Little Zillah and the baby-talk – which I only hope to God will not alienate the children!
Anyway, let’s try. I’m frightfully sorry all this has set us back, but by all means let us pretend that Miss Jenkin never happened, and return to the starting-point. When the next plays come along, I will send a copy direct to you (I should have done so before, but I gathered you had handed the whole thing over). Then, if you have any blasphemy, heresy or schism to complain of, we will get it mended, and the script can go to Mr. McCulloch as producer, without any committees, for his technical criticism about production. To that I’m always ready to listen. Honestly, I’m not out to be obstructive. What happened was that Mr. McCulloch and I got put into a false position, and it seemed necessary to do something to force the issue. This, in the theatre, is the process known as “Throwing a fit” – after which everybody bursts into tears and kisses everybody, and they all behave like lambs. Such behaviour is not usual, of course, in Government departments. A pity, I sometimes think. I should love to see a good theatrical fit thrown in the M.O.I.,1 for example.
It’s distressing that all this should have boiled up just when Hitler was making all other considerations seem so petty. But things do happen like that. He dropped a beautiful stick of incendiaries across Witham on Wednesday night, and I prepared to make a dash to safety, clutching a ms. on the Creative Mind under one arm, and John the Baptist (half-finished) under the other. Fortunately, the A.F.S.2 got the things put out before the heavy stuff could follow them up.
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Ministry of Information.
2 Auxiliary Fire Service.
Thus all seemed well and D. L. S. continued work on her second play. Unfortunately, Miss Jenkin, who had read the correspondence which had passed between D. L. S., Dr Welch and Derek McCulloch, felt moved to defend herself against charges of “impertinence, tactlessness and literary ignorance” which D. L. S. had made against her. She also made it clear that in the absence of Derek McCulloch it would be her responsibility to take over the production of the plays. And she concluded: “We cannot delegate to any author, however distinguished, the right to say what shall or shall not be broadcast in a Children’s Hour play”.
Two days before Christmas D. L. S. replied:
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO MAY E. JENKIN
23 December 1940
Dear Miss Jenkin,
THE MAN BORN TO BE KING
Under the circumstances you outline, I have no option but to cancel the contract. Kindly return all scripts of “Kings in Judaea” immediately. My agents will communicate with you.
Yours faithfully,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
TO DR JAMES WELCH
23 December 1940
Dear Dr. Welch,
I am very sorry indeed to disturb your holiday with unpleasant news, but I think I had better let you know before you hear it from other quarters that I have been obliged to cancel the contract for the plays. Just after I had written to you I received a most unfortunate letter from Miss Jenkin which really left me no option. I am distressed about this. I hoped we were getting everything nicely smoothed out but her letter makes it clear we were back exactly where we were before your diplomatic intervention. I also gathered from her that in case anything happened to Mr. McCulloch she would expect to produce the plays herself and this, of course, I could not permit, nor if anything happened to me would my literary Executor1 permit it.
The position is an awkward one since it was primarily yourself who commissioned the plays. If the Children’s Hour Department insists on full control of what is broadcast during their periods, no doubt they are within their rights, but I am also within my rights in refusing to work under those conditions.
I need not say how very much I regret all this. Possibly at some future time you may be able to make another arrangement more satisfactory to all parties.
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Muriel St Clare Byrne.
