D. L. S.’ letter of 23 December 1940 had left the door open. Dr Welch replied: “The position is now very difficult and will take a little time to straighten out.” The difficulty was that responsibility for the Children’s Hour period on Sundays was shared between Dr Welch and Derek McCulloch. “But much more”, Dr Welch stressed, “it belongs to the listening children of the country. I cannot accept the cancellation of these plays, which means the denial to the children of an entirely fresh portrayal of the life and teaching of Our Lord.”
D. L. S.’ reply shows that she was determined to strengthen her position:
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DR JAMES WELCH
2 January 1941
Dear Dr. Welch,
I do not greatly care about arguing business contracts on a religious basis; it is difficult to avoid the appearance of making unwarranted claims for one’s self. But you have appealed over the head of Caesar, and I will take you to the higher court if you insist.
When you say that a play by D. L. S. on this subject would be “a landmark in the history of religious education”, I am not clear whether you mean that my work would have a certain value, or that my name would have a publicity appeal. If the latter, I can only express the opinion that the Kingdom of God can probably scrape along without that particular form of advertising, and echo your words, that it does not matter by whom the plays are written or produced. So far as I am concerned, it can remain anonymous.
But if you are referring to the worth of the work itself, then I am bound to tell you this: that the writer’s duty to God is his duty to the work, and that he may not submit to any dictate of authority which he does not sincerely believe to be to the good of the work. He may not do it for money, or for reputation, or for edification, or for peace’s sake, or because bombs may fall on him or other people, or for any consideration whatever. Above all, he may not listen to the specious temptation which suggests that God finds his work so indispensable that He would rather have it falsified than not have it at all. The writer is about his Father’s business, and it does not matter who is inconvenienced or how much he has to hate his father and mother. To be false to his work is to be false to the truth: “All the truth of the craftsman is in his craft.”1
That other dramatists have re-written their work on request is irrelevant. I do not know their motives. They may have sincerely agreed that the change was for the better; they may have felt no particular sense of duty to their work; they may have been so anxious to get on the air that they were prepared to betray their truth; the work may have been of a kind that expected no high standard; they may have been so poor that even the B.B.C. pittance was a necessity for them. I am not their judge. But there is no law of God or man that can be invoked to make a writer tamper with his conscience.
To do Caesar justice, the general law of contract is devised to safeguard the writer’s integrity as far as possible. The B.B.C. (for some reason) refuses to give proper contracts. I think, however, my agents made it clear that I was prepared to work on the usual terms, viz:
1. The author to approve the producer and cast.
2. Nothing in the text of the play to be cut or altered without the author’s consent, such consent not to be unreasonably withheld.
As regards (2), I was (not so much asked as) instructed to make a number of alterations. Certain of these I refused to make – not, I think, unreasonably, since I advanced reasons which you admitted to be plausible.
In such a case, the management have only two alternatives: (a) to accept my decision; (b) to reject the play. They cannot compel me to alter. Owing, however, to the fact that in the Children’s Hour Department the management is combined with the production, they tried to enforce alterations in matter and style on the pretence that these concerned the production. This was an unprofessional proceeding, and I said so plainly.
I was, however, prepared to go on with the job. Miss Jenkin’s letter made this impossible. It is not correct to call this document “a purely personal affair”, since it stated unequivocally that the management proposed to override both clauses (1) and (2) of the contract terms, by claiming the sole right to decide what portions of my text should or should not be broadcast, and by forcing upon me, under certain circumstances, a producer not approved by me. This left me no course open but to break off relations.
Contractual obligations hold good for ail plays. There is also a recognized difference between work that is submitted by a writer on his own initiative and work that is commissioned. In the first case, the writer works at his own risk, and may expect to have it accepted upon conditions. But commissioned work is ordered at the risk of the management, which expects either to take what it gets or to refuse the work as it stands. This principle is accepted by all responsible professional bodies, and also by all responsible amateur bodies, such, for example, as the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral.
You say that my reaction was fierce and rude – but how is one to deal with a body that does not understand the terms of a professional engagement? You ask, why should I or anybody object to comment? – but the “comment” took the form of an instruction to alter, and in that form was an impertinence. I beg you not to use such expressions as “Dorothy Sayers is Dorothy Sayers” – I am not asking that rules should be broken in my favour; I am requiring that the common decencies of contract should be respected.
The notorious difficulty that professional people find in dealing with the B.B.C. is that it is usually quite impossible to discover who the contracting parties are. A piece of work is ordered by one department (e.g. yours), paid for by another department, and put on the air by a third; while the producer is not simply a producer, but also the head of an education committee and an unspecified fraction of the management. Under ordinary professional conditions, in a theatre, you would order the work, approve it or not, and, having approved, engage a producer to produce it, and you would be the party responsible, and to whom the other parties were responsible. As it is, I am not the only person to whom B.B.C. work is a sheer nightmare, because of the amateurishness, the confusion, and the preposterous overlapping of control. “Long experience in B.B.C. production” is not a professional qualification, because the B.B.C. (except on the engineering side) is not a professionally-run body, and has no professional standing.
Last night’s deplorable exhibition2 was typical. To summon “experts” in science and philosophy and subject them to a sort of penny-paper quiz on sailors’ trousers and the miscellaneous information one can get from a Handy Guide to Knowledge is bad. To call on them to deal with profound and intricate conundrums in physics under a three-minute time-limit is worse. To snigger archly about “the feminine line on the fourth dimension”, and follow this with a put-up piece of futility designed to provoke laughter is worse still. To pretend that this is done, “not as a ‘stunt’ programme but a serious attempt to provide useful information” is the worst insult of all. It’s not even amusing – unrehearsed, stifled in private giggles, it stutters and drags on lo no result, cheap, slip-shod, amateur, degrading, and contemptible. This is the official B.B.C. attitude to art, science, philosophy and learning. Do you wonder that Mgr. Knox,3 attacking the specious and the shoddy in the name of the only wise God, called his book “Broadcast Minds”?4 Do you wonder that those who have a respect for their calling are sometimes reluctant to associate themselves with the B.B.C.? Joad5 and Huxley6 lend themselves to these things. True. But would Eddington7 or Whitehead?8 The stigma that rests upon the place is that it is the spiritual home of the not-quite-first-rate — the artist, the scientist, the philosopher with one ear turned from the work to catch the crackling of thorns under the pot.9 This is not an outburst of personal spite: what I am saying is said by everybody; by everybody who has reverence for the mind.
You have appealed to God. and to God you shall go. When the B.B.C. treat art and learning like this, they crucify the Logos afresh and put Him to an open shame.
I am sorry to speak so strongly; last night’s performance was more than usually sickening. My husband, who is no great lover of learning, was quite revolted.
To return to the plays. We will not argue about denial and sacrifice; one may sacrifice one’s self, but not the work. If I am to go on, I must ask that there shall be one management, one producer who is not a secondary management, and one responsible contracting party, who understands the nature of contractual obligation. This ought not to be impossible.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 The words of the Prior in The Zeal of thy House, Scene 3.
2 A popular quiz programme known as the Brains Trust; cf. her letter to the Archbishop of York, 24 November 1941.
3 Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888 1957), author of detective fiction and literary comment.
4 Published in 1932.
5 C. E. M. Joad (1891–1953), professor of philosophy and prolific author; best known to the general public as a member of the Brains Trust. Asa Briggs, in The B.B.C.: The First Fifty Years (O.U.P., 1985, p. 200, note 1) reports that Dr Welch detested the way “Joad trots out stock answers to profound questions”.
6 Sir Julian Huxley (1887 1975), biologist and writer.
7 Sir Arthur Eddington (1882–1944), British astronomer. His best known writings are The Nature of the Physical World (1928} and The Philosophy of Science (1939). See D. L. S.’s “Dante’s Cosmos” a dialogue between Dante and Eddington, a paper given at the Royal Institution, 23 February 1951, published in Further Papers on Dante, Methuen, 1957, pp. 78–101, in which Eddington reads to Dante from The Nature of the Physical World.
8 Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), philosopher and mathematician. He collaborated with Bertrand Russell in writing Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), a fundamental study of the structure of mathematical and logical thought.
9 “As the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of a fool” (Proverbs, 6).
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO HER SON
2 January [1941]1
Dear John,
Thank you very much indeed for your charming present. I’m afraid I firmly cut Christmas out this year – partly with being rolled under with business and my secretary away, and having to type all my own mss. Curiously enough, the book2 I was just finishing deals to some extent with the point you raise about the connection between the personality and the work.
As regards statesmen, whose life is part of their public work, it is very difficult for me to speak. But as regards artists of any kind the position is this: that all the self which they are able to communicate to the world is in their work, and is manifest in its best form in the work. To expect to get more out of direct contact with the man than one gets from his work is pretty well bound to lead to disappointment – the work is his means of expression, and is his genuine self. What is left over is the discarded stuff, or the lumber-room of raw material, so to speak, out of which the next work is going to be made. People are always imagining that if they get hold of the writer himself and so to speak shake him long and hard enough, something exciting and illuminating will drop out of him. But it doesn’t. What’s due to come out has come out in the only form in which it ever can come out. All one gets by shaking is the odd paper-clips and crum[p]led carbons from his waste-paper basket. If you notice, the first thing that usually crops up out of people’s biographies is the nonsense things about them; so that the general effect made is that the man wasn’t so very remarkable after all. Biographies are, of course, bound to be written – though in decency I think it is better to wait till the subject has been dead some time. But consider the number of writers (for example) of whose lives we know practically nothing – Homer and Shakespeare – or men like Newton, who seems to have had next to no private life – their work is none the less powerful. Indeed, it is more powerful. Nor do I think Byron’s work (to take a classical instance in the other direction) has benefited by the colossal réclame of his personality. During the uproar, it was boosted miles above its proper value, to be sure; now it suffers unduly from the weight of that preposterous legend lying upon it. What we make is more important than what we are – particularly if “making” is our profession.
It is curious how little people are capable of grasping this. I’ve had secretaries of societies actually say (when I asked them what sort of speech, on what sort of subject their audience wanted to listen to), “Oh, I don’t think they’ll mind what you talk about – they just want to see you”. The queer thing is that this is really intended for a compliment. The person, they think, must be more valuable to himself and to them than the thing, than the work. And the more one writes books to tell them that this isn’t so, the more they refuse to believe it.
Now look – here I am trying to say all this personally and rather badly at the end of a day’s slogging. But I’ve said it – said it once and for all as well as I know how to say it –
Let me lie deep in hell,
Death gnaw upon me, purge my bones with fire,
But let my work, all that was good in me,
All that was God, stand up and live and grow.
The work is sound, Lord God, no rottenness there
Only in me …3
and all the rest of that speech. That, you see, is the ultimate truth of the matter so far as I can tell anybody about it. … That is it – the truth about the artist – and that, in fact, is what the whole play is. “All the truth of the craftsman is in his craft.”4 …
You are bothered about education. So, in a sense am I – my trouble is that I don’t really agree with any of my wise contemporaries. I find it difficult to say that I gained very much from it myself, and I cherish a heretical notion that it can do little for one except (a) to implant a desire for knowledge and (b) to give one a rough machinery for finding out for one’s self the things one wants to know. I learned little at home – except, indeed, how to speak French; nothing at school – except, indeed, how to pass examinations; and at Oxford the only things I think I can say I was taught were the rudiments of Old French Grammar (which you wouldn’t think very useful) and a general attitude to knowledge which I can only call a respect for intellectual integrity. And between you and me, I doubt greatly whether a liberal education can impart much more than those two things: a reverence for the working mind, and a knowledge of method, applied to some subject, no matter what. But if I said this in public, all the advanced people would be shocked to the marrow.
Again, I am not at all convinced about this business of teaching people about contemporary events. If it is so taught as to rest on no basis of history, it is shallow and dangerous…and the trouble is that to understand the past we need not only knowledge, but maturity. That is the paradox about “the future being with the young”; by the time they are ready to deal with the future they are no longer young. The “directed education” of Nazi Youth is absolutely dependent on their being kept from any knowledge of the “real past”. But if one has learnt at all about the past, then presently the pressure of contemporary events will bring up the memory of what went before, and one can say, “Now I see what that meant”.
Where I am at odds with the pundits, you see, is in thinking that it is not so much the young who need education as the mature. Always supposing, of course, they have not become too ankylosed to learn anything. That, youth should be taught – that there is no such thing as “completing one’s education”, and that the mind is an instrument which needs constant use and reverent treatment.
I must stop this now – I haven’t really got it properly sorted out. But when it’s ready for presentation to the world I suppose I shall write it down, and everybody will be furious.
I enclose cheque for birthday and for a sort of Christmas–New Year present: £5 for you and £5 for Aunt Ivy.
With much love,
D. L. S.
Early in January Dr Welch had the misfortune to slip on an icy pavement and break his collar-bone. This helped to soften D. L. S.’s attitude and she replied as follows to his conciliatory letter.
1 The date in the original is 1940, but the contents of the letter show that 1941 was intended.
2 i.e. The Mind of the Maker, on which she was working during the autumn of 1940. It was published in July 1941.
3 From a speech by William of Sens, The Zeal of Thy House, scene 4.
4 See letter to James Welch, 2 January 1941, note 1.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DR JAMES WELCH
11 January 1941
Dear Dr. Welch,
Thank you very much for your kind and sympathetic letter. I am greatly relieved to hear about your collar-bone since the rumour was going about at Malvern1 that you had been put out of action by a bomb. I have no doubt that the correct version of the story was announced from the platform, but that was what it had turned into after passing through the bad acoustics of the hall and the imagination of the hearers. I was filled with that mixture of remorse and grievance which fills the person who has written an indignant letter, only to find that the recipient has been put in a position where it is cruel to jump on him. The fact that the indignation was righteous does not remove the sense of guilt; but one feels that destiny has taken an unfair advantage of one. I am, of course, very sorry about the collar-bone, quâ collar-bone; but if it has had the effect of getting you away for a bit from Hitler and the B.B.C. it may be what the authors of 1066 and All That2 call “a Good Thing”.
As regards the immediate practical steps. My agent has written a formal protest to the department with which the contract was made, and calling for the return of the scripts. I have held up this letter, and she is now sending it in a revised form, still insisting on the contractual obligation and all the rest of it, but saying she understands that the matter is being reconsidered, and leaving the door open to further negotiation.
I should be quite ready to accept either of the alternatives you propose, with a strong preference for (2).3 I feel that under (1), even if we could get Gielgud to consent, we might come up against the same problem of divided control, whereas he would be supreme in his own Drama Department. If (2) were adopted, I should still write the plays with the children in mind; I should not, that is, put in anything smart or sophisticated or involved or “unsuitable” – such, for example, as the discussion on Greek philosophy in He That Should Come, or, in the same play, the “Greek Gentleman’s” sneering wisecrack about the paternity of Christ. It is that sort of thing, not the mystical, which seems to me to be outside the scope of a child’s mind.
The Rev. Dr. James Welch
As regards the “professional” side of the thing: Yes, Adrian Boult4 is all right, bless his heart. But he didn’t get his professional standing from the B.B.C. – he brought it with him, from the “real” musical world, from Hugh Allen5, and the Royal College and the great professional orchestras. In fact, if my memory doesn’t deceive me, the B.B.C. Symphony Orchestra began with the subsidising or incorporation of one of the great orchestras – was it the London Symphony? – and inherited that outside tradition.6 Val Gielgud, too, is “real”, just because he is a Gielgud and a Terry;7 he came to the thing steeped in the tradition of “real” theatre. “Theatre” is, so to speak, just the professional word for what one means by the living tradition of drama; there isn’t, as Miss Jenkin suggests, one thing called “theatre” and another thing called “radio drama”. There are various kinds of media for drama – seen-and-spoken, which is the ordinary stage-play; seen-and-sung, which is opera; seen-and-not-heard, which is mime; heard-and-not-seen, which is radio-drama; but they are all “theatre”, only with different techniques appropriate to their media. And the first thing the professional wants to know about any play is, “Is it theatre?” – meaning, “Is it a right thing for actors to present in any dramatic medium?” And the second is, “Is it technically right for this medium?” – meaning, “is it suitably constructed for interpretation by the stage, or by unseen voices, or by silent players, or what not?” The professional producer is known by the fact that he puts these things first, leaving it to the author to decide what kind of “message” he wants to put over, but dealing very firmly with him in the matter of the play’s truth to its chosen medium.
Look, I think I can convey this sort of professional single-mindedness best by the concrete example. The Children’s Hour people wrote remarks like, “Your play is beautiful, dramatic, moving, scintillating” and so forth, “but we think there might be one or two children who mightn’t understand some of its beauties, so please remove those beauties”. Val never said a word about the beauties when we first met, but plunged into certain technical points about casting and production. After a bit, I said (timidly, because I knew I was new to the medium) “Do you think it will do, then?” He said, “Oh, yes; we’re going to have some fun with this”, adding, “I don’t know what the audience will think of it, but it’s the kind of thing I can enjoy doing”. He hadn’t got one eye on flattering the author and the other on placating the critics – he was only concerned with the play8 and production. He did remove one set of speeches, which were rather “difficult”, but using the technical arguments that they overweighted the play and that they would cause it to over-run the time-limit. I thought he was mistaken, but didn’t feel sure enough to insist. If they do it again, I shall hope to persuade him to give those speeches a trial – since, as it turned out, my estimate of the timing was correct. But his objections were made on technical grounds, so I had to respect them. Of course, on other occasions I have let producers make cuts that I knew to be wrong, knowing that we had three weeks of rehearsal, during which the actors would infallibly discover the wrongness for themselves – which they duly did. But in radio work, one hasn’t the time for that kind of game. But in all these cases, if I had absolutely insisted, the producers would either have given way or refused to produce – as they have a perfect right to do.
It’s difficult to convey just that difference in attitude which either gives or destroys confidence in a person’s professional competence, though one can feel it in the first word they say, so to speak. It has something to do with the thing I have called the “autonomy of technique” – a mutual assumption that each bloke knows his own job, and knows where it begins and ends; and it has a great deal to do with singlemindedness about the thing-in-itself – the autonomy of the work within its own sphere. The practical hitch is that the “professional” people talk a different language from the others – or rather, use a different category of thought, so that even if both use the same words they don’t mean the same thing by them. It’s like when one says: “The Incarnation means nothing unless one insists on the real humanity of Christ”; and the other person replies: “Oh, I do agree with you – if only we had the loving spirit of Jesus we shouldn’t need all this theology”. And you realise that it’s all quite hopeless, because they don’t understand what the word “humanity” means, and that when they think they are agreeing they haven’t even begun to see what the question is.
As regards the B.B.C. in general, I should very much like to discuss this some time, because it’s bothering me quite a lot. What you say about the mixture of Civil Service and commercial Fleet Street is exactly what one feels about it. I shouldn’t have said it was an “official” attitude, because, as you say, there is no real attitude – only a taking-over of second-hand and second-rate standards. But the peculiar position of the B.B.C. gives these a sort of official stamp and sanction in the eyes of the common man. It’s not only that the Civil Service mentality prevents the saying of anything that could conceivably give offence to anybody – there are arguments for that, within reason. But it also prevents the saying of anything that could conceivably be unintelligible to the lowest mentality. You must not only refrain from using, say, a theological term that can’t be understood by a simple person interested in theology; you must refrain from using any theological term that can’t be understood by a stupid person who is not interested in theology, so that the fairly intelligent person who is interested in theology never gets catered for at all. Then you get this awful business of “attractive presentation”, like the Howard Thomas “Any Questions?”, intended to lure and trap and titillate people into thinking that learning is a kind of smart little parlour game. The net result is that the one great lesson is never learnt – the necessity of reverence for all wisdom and of humility in face of the facts.
I don’t know what one can do with it. When – in peacetime, I mean – they first started broadcasting alternative programmes, I hoped they meant to make them really different in quality – a sort of junior and advanced grade, so to speak; but it all withered away into nothing. But I believe this would be the right thing to do. A “popular” programme, much what it is now, though perhaps so directed as to encourage people to look for something more satisfying; and a “specialised” programme, in which the performers and speakers could treat their work seriously, addressing only those who were genuinely interested in the subject and already knew something about it. In this programme one would aim for at least the standards of the University Extension Lecture, and pay no attention to criticisms from “Man in the Street” and “Suburban Housewife” and the log-rollers of the penny-press – except to tell them that if they wanted popular chat they could get it on the popular wave-length. One would then hope for serious reviewing from the respectable dailies and weeklies and from the professional men interested in the subject. Similarly, if people said that “Mourning Becomes Electra”9 was too “heavy” for the tired stockbroker, one would reply firmly that it wasn’t meant for him, and that he should leave that wave-length severely alone as he already leaves the bookshelves of the British Museum, and then it wouldn’t hurt him. The same with music. But one would have to be absolutely firm and consistent about this policy, and never mix the wave-lengths. It is disconcerting for the stockbroker to find Einstein on Relativity intruding on Musical Comedy and Beethoven bursting in on Vic Oliver.10 I know the theory is that the stockbroker, having accidentally found himself switching in to Beethoven may become so absorbed that he remains to be educated – but in practice he merely switches off again with a loud snort of fury. Whereas, I daresay, if you urged him to avoid wave-length 349 like the plague, he would tune in to it out of sheer curiosity. Of course, one would have to explain exactly what one meant to do, and stick to it. It’s the wavering from one policy to another that does the damage.
What makes one weep is that the B.B.C. has such a grand opportunity for doing the good, uncommercial stuff, because it is state-supported. It could do the sort of thing one always wants from a National Theatre, but which the commercial theatre can’t do for lack of security. Boult has grasped the possibilities of this on the musical side; and with a wave-length of his own to play with could do still more, without bothering about the people who tot up the number of hours given to “classical” music in the general programme, as compared with the hours consecrated to jazz and Variety. I’m not at all sure that the B.B.C. couldn’t, on these lines, actually run a National Theatre, as it now runs the Queen’s Hall concerts.11 I mean, if the State could be persuaded to take the theatre seriously enough to finance the overheads, the State-Theatre-and-B.B.C. body could run its permanent stock company, giving public performances in the theatre (with occasional broadcasts from the theatre) and also running the radio drama with the same company, thus making full use of the actors’ time and getting good value out of them. The actors to be, of course, on regular salaries under a three years’ contract. As things are, the B.B.C. grossly over-pays its actors, as the actors are the first to acknowledge. Their attitude is: “Of course, the B.B.C. is money for jam – otherwise one wouldn’t do it, because one can’t take it seriously. But you don’t have to work – only read things through after a few sketchy rehearsals and draw your money. But any of us would far rather do something worth doing, if only we didn’t need the pennies so badly.” What’s more, they would cheerfully work harder for less pay, if the pay was regular and the work interesting – but they demand, and get, the high fees for B.B.C. work, because they despise it so that they wouldn’t touch it for less. The authors, on the other hand, are so grossly underpaid that the serious ones can’t be bothered to do things for the B.B.C. unless they get the free hand which makes the thing worth while to them as artists.
Forgive my rambling on – giving you something to read in bed, as you might say – but the possibilities are all there, and so big that it seems a pity they should go to waste in this ramshackle way. Government Boards have an absolute genius for elaborately wrong organization – I don’t know how they do it. Their institutions are a perfect example of the materialist’s universe, formed by the random tumbling about of atoms according to the Principle of Least Action. They seem to have no Directed Purposes at all. There’s a terrific appearance of Activity – again like the materialist’s universe – the atoms rush round and collide madly and never have any time to spare; but where they are going they never think of asking. They make me feel like Lady Macbeth: “Infirm of purpose – give me the daggers!”12 An old army man13 said to me sourly the other day that he attributed Wavell’s14 success in Libya to the fact that he was a very long way from Whitehall, and that instructions might easily fail, in some unaccountable way, to reach him. The B.B.C. is less fortunately placed.
Well, anyway, we’ll try to get a new start on this show. I’ve asked my agent, this time, to get the form of contract so definite in black and white that nobody can misunderstand it. It’s characteristic that there is no real awareness in the B.B.C. mind that forms of contract exist, apart from the little thing they send out when one is going to speak one’s bit – nothing, I mean, that governs them when they are commissioning the actual work, but we’ll have it clear this time that you are the person who has to approve the play, and that I and the producer have our usual theatrical rights, and that no third party can put spanners into the works. With Gielgud, of course, I know there would be no misunderstanding on the principle of the thing, and if we disagreed we could do it in a nice, gritty, technical way, with enjoyment and mutual respect.
By the way, though I didn’t bother to go into this with Miss Jenkin, I have taken some pains, though she might not think it, to ascertain what “the” elementary-school-child15 of eleven may be expected to understand. As it happens, we have an evacuee elementary [-school] teacher in the house, and I consulted him on the subject. He said there was nothing in the play that his kids wouldn’t be able to understand on their heads, even if it was only read aloud to them – and that the mystical bits would be no more difficult for them than for the average adult. He added that, in his experience, there were only two things one could be sure the average small boy would enjoy – one was mystery and the other was cruelty – a grim thought, but I know what he means. I also consulted a friend16 who is English mistress in a big girls’ school17 – and her opinion was that you couldn’t pontificate about “the” school-child at all, but she was sure that many of the children would really feel the questions Balthazar asks about the riddle of fear and poverty and all that, because of the war, and bombing, and one thing and another. I don’t believe there’s no such a person18 as “the” school-child, and I don’t think one should talk about “the” elementary-school-child as if he was something odd and inferior; I wouldn’t expect him to understand Noel Coward, because Coward’s plays deal only with a very restricted range of human experience. But what is meant by this unchristian distinction between the elementary and the secondary in the sphere of religious apprehension?
I hope both you and the Director of Programmes19 will soon have recovered. The sooner the B.B.C. is removed from Bristol the better. And Manchester. What you want is a quiet place in the country, with an underground cable!
Yours, etc.,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 The Malvern Conference, presided over by Archbishop Temple, was called to consider what role the Church should play in social reconstruction after the war. D. L. S. opened the second session on 8 January with a paper entitled “The Church’s Responsibility”.
2 An amusing parody of the teaching of history by W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman (Methuen, 1930). It was adapted for the stage, with words by Reginald Arkell and music by Alfred Reynolds. A London West-End success, the show is still performed.
3 i.e. of removing the plays from Children’s Hour.
4 Sir Adrian Boult (1889–1983), conductor.
5 Sir Hugh Percy Allen (1869–1946), conductor and musical administrator. He was conductor of the Oxford Bach Choir, of which D. L. S. was a member. In 1918 he was appointed Director of the Royal College of Music.
6 The London Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1904, the B.B.C. Orchestra in 1930.
7 His mother was Kate Terry Lewis (1844–1924).
8 i.e. He That Should Come.
9 A play by Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953), a re-working of Aeschylus’ Oresteia in the context of the American Civil War.
10 Vic Oliver (1898–1964), film and stage entertainer, who married Sarah, daughter of Sir Winston Churchill.
11 Conducted by Sir Henry Wood (1869–1944). The Queen’s Hall, in Langham Place, London, was destroyed by bombs in May 1941. The famous Promenade Concerts which took place there were later continued in the Royal Albert Hall.
12 Lady Macbeth’s words to her husband, Act II, scene 2.
13 Possibly D. L. S.’ husband, Major Atherton Fleming, who had served in World War I.
14 Field-Marshal Lord Wavell (1883–1950), British army officer, and leading figure in World War II. He defeated the Italians in E. Africa and liberated Ethiopia.
15 The elementary school, now termed primary, provides teaching for children from 5 to 11 years of age.
16 Marjorie Barber.
17 South Hampstead High School.
18 Echoing the double negative in the phrase, “I don’t believe there’s no sich person”, in which Betsey Prig casts doubt on the existence of Sarah Gamp’s mythical friend in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, chapter 49.
19 Mr B. E. Nicolls, who had been injured in an air-raid.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO F. BLIGH BOND1
17 January 1941
Dear Mr. Bligh Bond,
Thank you very much for your letter. If the News Agency that reported the Malvern Conference had reported honestly what my speech was about you would have seen that it was directly centred about the whole question of intellectual integrity. It is, however, practically impossible to get reporters to pay any attention to any matter to which they cannot attach some kind of sensational interest.2 I believe that all the speeches made at the Conference will be published in full before long and if you get hold of the volume you will find that I did not neglect the important point you raise.
It was very nice to hear from you again after all this long time. Have you had any further communications from the other side of the “Gate of Remembrance”?3
With kindest regards and all good wishes,
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Yet another voice from the past. F. Bligh Bond, F.R.I.B.A. (1864–1945). See The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1899–1936, letters dated 11 July and 2 August 1917.
2 See her article “How Free is the Press?”, Unpopular Opinions, Gollancz, 1946, pp. 129–130.
3 A reference to Mr Bligh Bond’s interest in psychical research.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE REV. ERIC FENN
The B.B.C.
Bristol
21 January 1941
Dear Mr. Fenn,
Many thanks for your letter. I will do my best to get out a synopsis,1 provided you clearly understand that this is a kind of thing I do very badly and that I seldom stick to the synopsis! Will you ask the contract people to remember to get in touch not with me but with my agents, Miss Nancy Pearn, Messrs. Pearn, Pollinger and Higham, 39/40 Bedford Street, Strand, W.C.1. I say this every time and every time they write to me.
May I take this opportunity of passing on to you an interesting criticism made by an outsider to a friend of mine. This woman complains that the brand of Religion emanating from the B.B.C. is much more theist than Christian. She says it is all concerned with God the Father and not with God the Son, and that God the Father is presented too much in the aspect of a divine dictator managing things from above. I was interested in this, because, as you may remember, I ventured to mumble the same sort of criticism to Canon Cockin when we were discussing that other series of Broadcast talks. As it comes from a quite independent source you may feel that there is possibly something in the criticism. My own feeling is – as I have mentioned before on various occasions – that we are still fighting the Arian heresy2 and that we are inclined to divide the Substance rather in the manner of Dr. Pearks (if that is his name), (I mean John Hadam, who rose up so passionately on the first evening of the Conference), and leave people with the impression that there is somebody called God and a subsequent, inferior, but more sympathetic person called the Son of God, who had nothing to do with creating the world, and whose part in running it is rather that of a foreman of the works sadly put upon by the management. Possibly this has something to do with the “neutrality” and confusion of “Religions behind the Nations”.3
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Of a talk entitled “The Religions Behind the Nations”. See letter to Val Gielgud, 24 February 1941, note 1.
2 See letter to Father Kelly, 4 October 1937, note 2.
3 See letter to Val Gielgud, 24 February 1941, note 1.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO EDWARD HULTON1
28 January 1941
Dear Mr. Hulton,
Thank you for your letter and prospectus of the 1941 Committee. I am, of course, always interested in any effort towards reconstruction, and there are some details in your scheme to which I should, naturally, assent. But I could not ally myself with it, because I know it to be based upon the wrong assumptions – upon ideas which are not merely false, but already dead and discredited.
Here are all the nineteenth-century liberal fallacies that led the world into its present confusion – the “progressive” fallacy; the Utopian fallacy; above all, the economic fallacy; the schemes for the secure, prosperous, insured life, and the extension to the whole people of the delusions that have rotted the middle classes.
Economic socialism is not the revolt against capitalism; it is the final form which capitalism takes in the desperate effort to stave off collapse. We must not go on thinking in terms of the last generation but one; we shall have to be far more drastic than that.
That is why I am very dubious of attempts to “define our aims” – because any such definition is liable to be couched in outmoded frames of thought, by men who do not grasp how far the real leaders of thought have moved on. I won’t ask you to grapple with Reinhold Niebuhr and the great Christian thinkers, who got there before the secular socialists started. The others are catching up; Peter Drucker1 has issued his warning on the negative side; and Lewis Mumford, in his Faith for Living,2 published today by Seeker, sees clearly the way things are going.
Also, as a purely practical point, I think that if we start now to put out a lot of ideological propaganda, it will be automatically discredited as propaganda. Propaganda, like every other vice or virtue, destroys itself by its own inward corruption; and the public hawking of rival New Jerusalems has pretty well reached the point of dissolution.
I won’t go further into all this now. Perhaps some day we may get an opportunity to discuss the matter.
Yours very truly,
[D. L. S.]
1 (Sir) Edward Hulton (1906–1988), founder of Hulton Press, proprietor of Picture Post, author of The New Age, 1943.
1 Author of The End of Economic Man, recommended in Begin Here, under “Some Books to Read”, where it is described by D. L. S. as “the most interesting and original book I have read recently. It deals with the failure of the economic state to provide man with a satisfactory and reasonable world to live in. Incidentally, it offers a really intelligible explanation of that very puzzling thing, the working of totalitarian economics”.
2 Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
By February 1941 Dr James Welch had succeeded in freeing the plays on the life of Christ from the control of the Children’s Hour Department and Val Gielgud had agreed to produce them. Though they were to be broadcast on an adult network, the listening time would be suitable for children and it was understood that D. L. S. would bear them in mind. It is apparent from her letters and also from the first few plays that she continued to do so.
TO VAL GIELGUD
24 February 1941
Dear Val,
If I hadn’t been so stupefied with flu, I’d have written before to say Thank God you’d consented to produce the Life of Christ plays I’m trying to write for Dr. Welch. (It did occur to me that I’d look an awful ass if you walked out and refused to have anything to do with them or me, after the way I’d been roaring that over He That Should Come everybody had behaved like perfect gents, and never anything in the nature of words passed between us – handing myself out certificates of good conduct in your name, so to speak! I’m sure the Bristol people think I’m possessed of a devil, but honestly I began by being as good as gold; only somehow we didn’t seem to be talking the same language. And then God got sort of dragged into it, which is always so tiresome; it’s easier if one just treats plays as plays and contracts as contracts and leaves God to run His own end of the show.)
Look, which days are you likely to be in Town? I was so sorry I couldn’t come up last week, but I was still all wobbly and peculiar. But I should like to have a talk about this show, because it bristles with difficulties – more than any of them realise. I mean, it’s difficult if one is trying to make the thing theatre, and not just scripture lessons in dialogue. That’s why I thank God you’re going to do it, because then it will be produced as plays; I heard a bit of a Children’s Hour thing about Absalom the other day which sounded as if everybody was in the pulpit (miaou! miaou!). Have they shown you the script of the first play, or given you any idea about the rest of the series? I did write several explanatory letters to Derek McCulloch about it, but it would be easier to go into it by word of mouth. I’ve got to be in London on the 5th. to do a bit of religious twaddle on the air,1 and I shall be passing through again on the following Monday. Or I could run up practically any day you were going to be there, if you would send me a line. I’ve only done the one play2 so far, having become rather discouraged; but I will now begin to encourage myself again.
How is everybody? Please give my love to Billy Williams3 and all the other of my friends in your company. And all the best to yourself, and don’t let a bomb get between you and the production, or I shall become finally discouraged and abandon the position.
By the way, I never did that detective thing I promised you, did I?4 I didn’t forget it, but I didn’t seem able to get hold of an idea in that line. It may come yet, if you still want that kind of thing.
Yours ever,
[D.L.S.]
1 “The Religions Behind the Nations”, a talk delivered at 7.40 p.m., 5 March. It was later included in The Church Looks Ahead: Broadcast Talks (Faber and Faber, November 1941), with a preface by E. L. Mascall. The other talks were by J. H. Oldham, Maurice B. Reckitt, Philip Mairet, M. C. D’Arcy, V. A. Demant and T. S. Eliot.
2 “Kings in Judaea”.
3 The actor Harcourt Williams.
4 See letter to Val Gielgud, 13 February 1940 and note 2.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE BISHOP OF SHREWSBURY1
3 March 1941
My dear Lord Bishop,
Thank you very much for your letter. I don’t know whether I am at all the right sort of person to talk to a Moral Welfare Association. I am not at all good at talking to people about morals, but perhaps I could embroider the theme that morals are not entirely confined to the question of getting drunk and who goes to bed with who.2 May the 15th is I am afraid quite impossible, but there is a chance I could manage May the 1st. I cannot tell just at this moment because I shall have to see whether I could fit this in with another engagement, the details of which are not yet fixed.
So may I leave it open for the moment and write to you as soon as I hear.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 The Rt Rev. Eric Knightley Chetwode Hamilton.
2 Compare her four lines of verse: “As years come in and years go out\ I totter towards the tomb,\ Still caring less and less about\Who goes to bed with whom.” (See Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul, p. 363.)
TO VAL GIELGUD
3 March 1941
Dear Val,
Your letter just received. Oh, thank you, Mister Copperfield, for that remark! It is so true! Oh, I am so much obliged to you for this confidence! Oh, it’s such a relief, you can’t think, to know that you understand our situation, and are certain (as you wouldn’t wish to make unpleasantness in the family) not to go against me!1
Quite providentially, a speech I was supposed to be making at Brighton on the 14th. has been transferred to another date,2 so I will come up to Town and lunch with you with joy and alacrity. There are going to be lots of snags in this thing – in particular, the invention of ordinary, human, connecting dialogue for Christ. It’s all right making up conversation for the disciples and people, but it’s difficult doing it for Him; and if one doesn’t, we are going to get just the effect one wants to avoid – namely, a perfectly stiff, cardboard character, different from, and unapproachable by, common humanity, doing nothing but preach sermons. He must be allowed to say at least things like, “Good morning”, and “Please”, and “Thank you”, whether they are in the Bible or not. Also, it’s going to be a job to make each play a more or less complete bit of theatre in itself. If you look at the New Testament, it’s full of disconnected episodes – often quite good theatre in themselves (e.g. the raising of Lazarus or the little gem of domestic drama about the blind man at the Pool of Siloam) but not tying up together. Except, of course, the Nativity Story and the Passion.
It’s not made easier by the fact that I still don’t really know how many plays they want. They began by saying twelve, which would cover the ground pretty well. Then Dr. Welch startled me by saying they would want “six at least”. I pointed out that in that case we should either have to give up the Ministry altogether, or deal very summarily with the Passion. He then said we had better compromise on “about ten”. It doesn’t seem to occur to people that one writes each play of a series with a view to its relation to the whole series.
The general theme of the series is to be the Kingdom. That seemed a suitable line to take on the thing just at this moment, when everybody is bothered about what sort of government the world should have. That means that we have got to get in certain things, whatever happens. We must, for instance, have the Temptation, in which Christ is faced with the choice between a kingdom of this world and a Kingdom of God in this world. This, I am sorry to say, involves us with the Devil – always an awkward character to make plausible. Also, it means we must get in one or two of the Parables of the Kingdom, which necessitates a certain amount of preachment. Further, we can’t focus on the Kingdom and leave out the Entry into Jerusalem, which is the sort of queer ironic counterpart to the Temptation – the moment when it looked as though the kingdom of this world might be grasped after all. So at present we seem to have the following fixed points:
Nativity Play – kingdom of Herod, and the sort of fairy-tale kings of Orient.
Temptation – worked in with John the Baptist as forerunner of the Kingdom, and the Baptism of Christ.
Jerusalem – Entry into, with other episodes.
Last Supper – including the arrest at Gethsemane.
Trial Scene – Caiaphas, Herod, Pilate, with record of crowing cock for Peter.
Crucifixion – where the conflict between realism and suitability for children is going to become acute.
Resurrection – ending, I think, with that amazingly atmospheric appearance at the Sea of Tiberias (last chapter of St. John).
There, whatever Dr. Welch says, I propose to stop, and not go into what became of the Disciples and the Church afterwards. I know what we are leaving out, the Ascension and Pentecost. But I don’t really see how anybody is to go up into Heaven by wireless. I could do it in a film, or even at Drury Lane; but in my opinion – my ‘umble but fixed, opinion – the thing that speech-without-sight is least capable of conveying is physical movement of an abrupt and unlikely kind, and I fear the general effect would be that of the ascent of Montgolfier’s balloon3 amid the running commentary of a bunch of sight-seers. Nor do I feel that the “speaking with tongues” would sound like anything but a cross between a row at the League of Nations and the Zoo at feeding time.
Even as it stands, that gives us seven plays; and, if ten is the maximum,4 the whole Ministry between the Temptation and the Last Supper will have to go into three plays. That would be all right, only there is a certain difficulty about getting the characters properly set and prepared for the final catastrophe. Judas is the real difficulty. Nothing in the New Testament gives one any real idea of what that unhappy man was driving at. He just comes on with his mind all made up to be villainous. I’ve got a rather subtle idea about him, but whether it can be made intelligible in the time at our disposal I don’t know. He’s got somehow to be the Corruptio optimi pessima5 – the man with the greatest possibilities for good, and the very worst possibilities of corruption. If he hadn’t had good possibilities, why was he ever called as one of the Twelve? I mean, it’s got to sound plausible if one isn’t to make Christ look either a fool or something worse. And there’s not much time in which to depict the gradual deterioration of Judas. And I won’t have those awful explanatory bits by the announcer, saying “We do not know what motives led Judas to – “or, “But, alas! there was among the little band of the Disciples one who –” because it’s that kind of thing that jerks one out of the theatre into the schoolroom. All this is my trouble and not yours, of course, but it may influence us if we want to make a combined stand about the number of plays, or anything like that.
I’m glad you like “Kings in Judaea”. I think we ought to have some fun with the Herod scenes. (Billy Williams6 will want to play Herod, because I once light-heartedly said I would write him a Herod play some day, but I don’t think this Herod is his meat; I rather had Cecil Trouncer7 in mind – he can do a good line in threatening sarcasm – only we mustn’t tell Billy I asked for somebody else.) Proclus the Centurion will turn up again in later plays – as the chap who said “Surely this was [the] Son of God”8 at the Crucifixion; and perhaps as the one whose servant was healed – you know, he said he knew all about being under authority – that one.9 Mary is the world’s worst snag; she has to be at the Crucifixion; she has no lines given to her on that occasion; and she only turns up in between at Cana in Galilee – which would make a charming scene if only we had time for it.10 We shall want a good Peter and a good John (the Beloved Disciple, I mean); and a good bluff Thomas Didymus.11 We can work Thomas into some of the earlier scenes, being literal-minded and stupid, and asking to have things explained.
We are going to be badly off for female relief – nothing but male voices. I wish most of Christ’s female friends had been rather more respectable; but we must get in Mary Magdalen, however delicately we skimble over her profession. She really is fearfully important, because of the Resurrection; so I shall try to do the Lazarus-story and the household at Bethany, and if possible the precious ointment episode. (I don’t care if the critics have said that Mary Magdalen and Mary of Bethany were different people – Church tradition has always made them the same, and [we] can’t have all these hopelessly disconnected characters.)
I’m going to try and do as little as possible with effects and noises off. Du Garde Peach’s plays on St. Paul are a perfect orgy of shipwrecks and camel-drivers. Some crowds we must be bothered with, I’m afraid, because “the multitudes” are always being mentioned. The two really important ones will be the ones shouting “Hosanna” in the Jerusalem scene and the Jews crying “Crucify Him!” in the Trial scene. Then there’s the students in the first play, and a crowd of people being baptised in the second play and of course there will have to be some crowds to be preached at and to be astonished at miracles and things. That just can’t be helped. Will it do if I keep to about the same number of speaking parts I’ve got in “Kings in Judaea” for each play? It’s difficult to keep the numbers down when one is encumbered with all those disciples and Pharisees and so on. But all the decor shall be kept as simple as I can.
Dr. Welch has just written to say he will be in Town on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of next week. We had better have a talk with him, hadn’t we? He really has been very nice and helpful and very patient with my screams of rage. But I should like to have a go at the problems with you in private so that we can deal with the technicalities unhampered. Shall I just refer him to you for the actual time of meeting? I can get to Town by about mid-day, if Hitler doesn’t choose Thursday night to blow up the line, and can be at your disposal as and when you choose.
Don’t bother to answer all this; I’ve just put it down to give you a line on the way I’m trying to work it out.
Yours ever,
[D. L. S.]
1 Echoes of Uriah Heep, in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.
2 See letter to the Editor, The Sower, 21 April 1941, note 1.
3 In 1783 Jacques Etienne and Joseph Montgolfier, brothers, who were paper manufacturers, filled a large bag with smoke from a straw fire and saw it rise to a great height. Others soon made use of the principle but the earliest experimental flights, first with animals and later with humans, were made with Montgolfier hot-air balloons.
4 There were ultimately twelve.
5 Latin: the corruption of the best [is] the worst corruption.
6 Harcourt Williams.
7 See letter to The New Statesman, 17 February 1937 and note 5.
8 Mark, 15, 39: “And when the centurion, which stood over against him, saw that he so cried out, and gave up the ghost, he said, Truly this man was the Son of God.”
9 Luke, chapter 7, verses 2–9.
10 Time was made for it. See the third play, “A Certain Nobleman”.
11 Thomas the Twin, known also as Doubting Thomas.
TO LADY FLORENCE CECIL
12 March 1941
Dear Lady Florence,
Thank you so much for your letter. It is very kind of you to enquire after a new novel, but at the beginning of the war I rather rashly made a vow to write no more detective stories until the Armistice. It is true that I am pretty busy on other things, but also it has been borne in upon me that people are getting rather too much of the detective story attitude to life – a sort of assumption that there is a nice, neat solution for every imaginable problem. I am now spending my time telling people that real difficulties, such as sin, death and the night-bomber, can’t be “solved” like crosswords!
I have just finished a curious sort of book about the creative mind called The Mind of the Maker,1 which Methuen will be publishing shortly. It is about the way the artist’s mind works all mixed up with the doctrine of the Trinity. I can’t imagine what the parsons will make of it, or the artists; however, it has been very entertaining to write.
With all good wishes,
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 It was published on 10 July 1941.
In March Eric Fenn again invited D. L. S. to contribute to a series of broadcast talks on the Christian faith. The subject of the talks, intended for the Forces Programme, was the Nicene Creed. He asked D. L. S. to provide six, each to last ten minutes, on the theme, the Son of God. D. L. S. preferred the title “God the Son”. Delivered on 8, 15, 22, 29 of June and 6, 13 July, they were: “Lord and God”, “Lord of all Worlds”, “The Man of Men”, “The Death of God”, “The World’s Desire”, “The Touchstone of History”.
TO THE REV. ERIC FENN
20 March 1941
Dear Mr. Fenn,
I am sorry to have kept God the Son waiting all this time. I think I could manage to do it on the dates you mention, if, as you kindly suggest, some of the talks could be recorded.1
I have roughed out a possible line to take on most of the points, though I think I am going to have trouble with the clauses about Judgment. There are already such a lot of people who write passionate and slightly potty letters about the Second Coming, that I tremble at the thought of my correspondence. Still I fear that we cannot remove a clause from the Creed for my convenience.
My last talk2 seems to have produced a more than usually fruity crop of candidates for the loony bin! There are two good souls who want to have the talk to read. I gather this series is not being printed in The Listener – or is it?3
Yours very sincerely,
[D. L. S.]
1 Only the first was given live.
2 “The Religions Behind the Nations”, delivered on 5 March. See letter to Val Gielgud, 24 February 1941, note 1.
3 These talks were not published.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE REV. ERIC FENN
26 March 1941
Dear Mr. Fenn,
I am sending you the rough draft of the first two talks on God the Son. I have tried to keep them at about the same intellectual level as the talks on the Christ of the Creeds and the Sacrament of Matter,1 which you liked. It is difficult to hit upon the exact right level for the Forces, since everybody seems to be in the Forces nowadays, including those who know everything about everything and those who know nothing about anything. Also I did not realise before what a shocking lot of purely technical theological terms the Nicene Creed bristles with. Can you tell me whether the bloke who is following with God the Father, is going to be so obliging as to deal at all with the Trinitarian formula? Or is he just going to talk about the Fatherhood of a loving Creator and leave me to introduce the subject of the three Persons with no previous preparation? Similarly, is he going to tackle the meaning of the word “Heaven” which always requires a little cautionary definition, lest anybody should suppose us to mean by it a palace above the clouds!
I realise, of course, the special awkwardness of any wireless series, namely, that you cannot ever take it for granted that one single person who is listening to talk number three, has listened to both, or either, of talks one and two, or that he will then go on to listen to talks number four and five. Bearing this in mind I have tried in the second talk to bring in again the definitions of technical terms proposed in the first talk, so as to make each talk, as far as possible, complete in itself. I only hope that talk six will not be so taken up with recapitulations of previous talks as to have no room left in it for the subject matter!
Will you let me know if you think these suggestions are along the right lines. I have written them to a ten minute length, although in your letter you said that we might be able to get fifteen minutes. I only hope they are not too “packed”. The Creed itself is packed as much as an egg with meat, and it’s rather a job to unpack it, when you have to try to explain everything in everyday language. The extraordinary difficulty of explaining what is meant by the word “Person”, without giving the impression that God the Father has arms and legs and a beard, may have caused me to veer dangerously towards the Scylla of Sabellianism,2 but that is probably a lesser danger in these days than the Charybdis3 of Arianism.4
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 See letter to Eric Fenn, 11 June 1940.
2 See letter to Father Herbert Kelly, 4 October 1937, note 4.
3 Scylla and Charybdis are a rock and a whirlpool between Sicily and Italy, used as a metaphor signifying two dangers. To avoid one is to fall into the other.
4 See letter to Father Herbert Kelly, 4 October 1937, note 3.
Eric Fenn sent her a 7-page, 1500-word commentary, proposing, in particular, that she should begin “straight off with a question: Has it ever struck you how very oddly the Creed starts off its second main division?”…against which D. L. S. scribbled in the margin: “Children’s Hour touch!” She replied as follows:
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE REV. ERIC FENN
4 April 1941
Dear Mr. Fenn,
Many thanks for returning the scripts and for your careful and valuable criticism and suggestions.…
I will go over my stuff again in the light of what you say. One thing, however, I’m afraid I shall be a little disappointing and tiresome about. I’m not good at the direct personal appeal – “Has it ever struck you – ?” “How about your own children?” “I want you to think about –” It always makes me embarrassed, and I can feel my voice getting that awful, wheedling, children’s-hour intonation – very bright and encouraging, like somebody trying to screw rational answers out of an idiot school. Flat statement and argument is my natural line, and I shall make a ghastly mess of the other if I try it. For the other points:
(1) I gather from Mr. Williams1 that Neville Talbot2 is only doing the preliminary talks on why we believe or want to believe; “the particular bee at present buzzing in his bonnet is the idea that credal statements are cold and clammy unless you first get fired by the red-hot experiences and agonising questions which they are the answer to”. So I expect he will cope only too earnestly with the question about why the Church believes. After the sort of opening he will produce, it may be rather a good thing to have a sober statement of what she actually does believe! The thing that horrifies me is that anybody should harbour such ignorant repulsive fantasies as, e.g. Ivor Brown,3 whose latest outburst in The Literary Guide has been thoughtfully forwarded to me – no doubt as a rebuke to my article on “Forgiveness”4 in The Fortnightly. It shows pretty clearly that the expression “God the Son” is one he has never separated from the historic Jesus. He is, of course, an old-fashioned and ignorant “rationalist” of The Freethinker type, brought up on Robert Blatchford;5 but his ideas are the ideas which his generation has handed down to the younger generations as being the Creed of Christendom.
(2) The theology of “The Father” is, apparently, being handled by Fr. John Murray. Being a Jesuit, he will probably give a proper dogmatic basis from which to work, and erect the scaffolding for the Trinitarian formula. All the better.
(3) Opening sentences of each talk – It’s difficult to begin brightly in the middle of the subject, when one remembers that half one’s audience will not have heard the previous talks. If the “Summary” of where we get to and what we are talking about could be transferred to the Announcer’s introductory remarks, it might help.
(4) “Father and Son” – I’m frankly a little afraid of stressing the “one of the family” idea too much, because of the Ivor Brown kind of misconception. (I have just written an entire book6 on Trinitarian analogy – of which a whole chapter is devoted to clearing up errors about analogy and metaphor!) What I feel is that if one gives them the metaphor of a “family likeness”, one is going to establish the concept of two personalities – whereas the point towards which I am getting is rather two persons with one personality. (Yes – I know you are thinking – “Sabellianism”!7)
(5) I will put this more clearly, and again explain that this expression is not concerned with the human Jesus. I can, I think, do it in a sentence – I can’t add very much anywhere, because of the time-limit, even allowing for my galloping rate of speech, which so confuses the official B.B.C. mind.
(6) The same applies to Nicaea. I like your phrase – “people fought about this word”; though I expect we shall only be told that this just shows how Christianity leads to riots, persecutions, wars and the Spanish Inquisition! I don’t mind that – except that it adds a good deal to one’s correspondence. Actually, that particular talk is the shorter of the two, so I might be able to squeeze in my favourite bit of rhetoric about the power of words, and the Power of “the Word”.
You know, there is scarcely a word or phrase in the Creeds that doesn’t bristle with technicalities when one comes to examine it. An hour’s careful instruction on every clause might succeed in clearing away some of the more rooted misconceptions about these things.
I heartily approve your suggested instruction-classes for the B.B.C. Controllers. May I attend them and watch Duff Cooper’s8 reactions?
I have always thought it unfair to put “Lift Up Your Hearts”9 just before the eight o’clock news, so that one can’t escape it – like the vicar waylaying the congregation at the church-door. But now that Derek McCulloch has started in on the six o’clock, I am foaming at the mouth, and the blasphemy in my household would shock Satan himself. I won’t be prayed at over and round like this; it’s slimy, that’s what it [is].…
1 The Rev. J. G. Williams, assistant to the Religious Director, B.B.C., from 1946.
2 The Roman Catholic Bishop of Nottingham.
3 Ivor Brown (1891–1974), leader-writer for the Manchester Guardian and dramatic critic on the Saturday Review.
4 “Forgiveness and the Enemy”, published in The Fortnightly, New Series, vol. 149, no. 892.,
5 Robert Blatchford (1851–1943), author of God and my Neighbour (1903), a rationalist credo. He was the editor of The Clarion, a Labour journal. G. K. Chesterton crossed swords with him in an essay contained in The Doubts of Democracy.
6 i.e. The Mind of the Maker.
7 See letter to Father Herbert Kelly, 4 October 1937, note 3.
8 Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich (1890–1954), was Minister of Information from 1940 to 1941.
9 Title of a daily brief religious talk, which preceded the 8 a.m. news, later replaced by “Thought for the Day” or “Prayer for the Day”.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE REV. V. A. DEMANT1
4 April 1941
Dear Father Demant,
I am afraid I have had to refuse Canon Baines. I have had to do so much talking and lecturing lately, what with H.M.’s Forces and various well-meaning societies and assorted Bishops, that I am getting seriously behind with work and must refuse everything during the summer months. I have undertaken to do a series of plays on the life of Christ for the B.B.C. They hung fire during the winter on account of a ferocious quarrel between myself and the Children’s Hour Department. After an unchristian display of temper and pride on my part,2 I succeeded in getting the production of the plays transferred to Val Gielgud. Having got my way about this I must now really do the plays and do them properly.…
1 Vigo Auguste Demant (1893–1983), an Anglican priest, associated with the Christendom Group. (See letter to Maurice B. Reckitt, 8 May 1941, note 1.) “Of all the able men and women…associated with the Christendom Group none was at any time more admired and trusted than Demant.” (John S. Peart-Binns, Maurice B. Reckitt: A Life, Bowerdean and Pickering, p. 77.)
2 A nice touch of self-assessment! Cf. her letter to C. S. Lewis, 13 May 1943.
TO THE REV. V. A. DEMANT
10 April 1941
Dear Father Demant,
How very good of you to write so large a letter with your own hand especially right in the middle of your busiest weeks! I am most grateful – and should have hastened to thank you earlier, but that when your letter arrived I was just starting off to address R.A.F.’s and W.A.A.F.’s at Mildenhall.
I am extremely glad you like the book,1 and very much relieved, because I feel sure you would have detected anything unsound or over-strained or fundamentally insincere about it. From the writer’s end I think it is all right, but it is fatally easy, when drawing analogies, to be run away with by the intellectual elegance of one’s own conceits and make the thing too neat to be convincing.
You feel this is the way theology should be written – and that is particularly gratifying, because my literary friends don’t look upon it as theology at all, but as an experiment in literary criticism. This encourages me to hope that I’ve so far succeeded as to get theology and letters where I want them – as two expressions of a single experience. The other books in the Series2 won’t at all take that line – it isn’t a specifically Christian or religious series, and the writer of the book on medicine3 is rather anti-religious than otherwise – but I hope all the writers will take what I rather vaguely feel to be the Christian attitude to their work, viz: that it is or ought to be the outward and visible sign of a creative reality. (This is a sort of Christian “attack by infiltration” – one must learn from the enemy.)
I’m beginning more and more to think that this business about Vocation in Work is absolutely fundamental to any proper handling of the “economic situation”. I have been hammering at it now, in a rather groping sort of way, since the War started, and I think I had better go on hammering. I’ve tapped at the W.E.A.4 and thumped deafeningly at Brighton5 (on Point 9 of the Archbishop’s Manifesto6), and I have written this book, and now I am chiselling away at the troops; also I shall hammer at the Sword of the Spirit meeting on May 11th, and at a Welfare Workers’ meeting in Leeds. It seems to be a thing I can make a shot at saying something about, so unless I am silenced by bombs, or by being carried away to the asylum labouring under the impression that I am a woodpecker, I shall hammer unceasingly. I am persistently knocking away at Tom Heron7, in the hope that I shall be able to knock a book out of him for the Series; because he does understand what it’s all about – as very few employers of labour do; and if he can’t write the thing himself, he can give us the stuff, both from the men’s point of view and his own.
One is hampered by the abominable phrase “vocational education”, which usually means the very opposite of what it says. It shows how far we have lost the very idea of “vocation” in work, that we give the name to a training which is chiefly designed to train people for employment. We ought to recognise the profound gulf between the work to which we are “called” and the work we are forced into as a means of livelihood.
I’m rather at a loss, too, about the “theological criterion”. Basically, I see perfectly that an Incarnate Creator is the fundamental sanction for looking on all man’s work in a sacramental light – the manifestation of his divine creativeness in matter. And that this is all tied up somehow with a proper reverence for man and matter, and is opposed to the exploitation of the soil and of men’s labour. But apart from that, which is somehow implicit in the dogma, I can’t find much explicit theological doctrine about it. I recognise the ruthless imperative vocation in the visit to the Temple and in the injunctions to hate father and mother and let the dead bury their dead, but it’s all somehow taken for granted. Is it that it was only in these latter days that the inalienable divine right of man’s calling came even to be questioned? What workers say, when faced with the difficulty, is that “human needs” come before the “worth of the work”; and it is difficult to persuade them that one of the first human needs is, precisely the conviction of a purpose in the work they are doing.
I am persuaded that no economic schemes for giving workers more wages and more leisure will do any real good if their sense of their own purpose is so corrupted that they can neither get satisfaction from their work nor employ their leisure in creation. And what is the use of preaching sexual morality to people whose lives are so deadened and embittered that a dreary promiscuity offers them their only chance of even a semblance of purpose and pursuit? Look at Charles Morgan,8 fumbling away about single-mindedness in The Flashing Stream. If his male and female mathematicians had been really single-minded about their practical mathematics, they wouldn’t waste three acts arguing about the ethics of going to bed, and whether or not they should humiliate themselves to a Government department as the price of getting on with the job. They’d have cheerfully allowed the War Office to think anything it chose, so long as the work was done, and they’d have been too busy to bother with the bedchamber crisis. The old, hackneyed stuff about “la femme jalouse de l’oeuvre” was much closer to reality: it is the person who hasn’t got a real job to do who sticks the personal feelings and the human needs like so many spanners into the world’s work.
We haven’t begun to tackle the “woman-question” either. It’s no good trying to bring the men back – or forward – to a sense of the sacredness of work if the women are left as an exploiting class to suck the heart out of them and demand that they should make money for money’s sake. After the war there’s going to be another drive by the Trade Unions to push the women out of “the men’s jobs” and back into “the home” in the name of economics. But the women’s jobs have in the meantime been collared by the men – they’ve disappeared from the home into the breweries and bakeries and jam-factories and distilleries and spinning-mills and power-looms;9 there’s nothing left in the home for the women to be vocational about, except one baby instead of nine and the job of “keeping” her man by exploiting his labour, and taking out her share of the loot in lip-stick and emotional crises.
It seems to me that the “planners” are getting further and further away from these root realities in their post-war schemes. It’s only the Churches who appear to have the first glimmerings of a notion what the real question is. They must have got the idea from somewhere, so I conclude it is at least implicit, if not explicit, in their theology. But it seems to have to [be] looked for and shaken into view, and never to have been put into a handy formula.
Whatever “vocation” is, it is imperative. But I think it is often obeyed quite intuitively and without conscious tenacity. It works by a series of instinctive but peremptory rejections. Sometimes it is only in looking back that one sees quite a track of purpose made by one’s self across time. While one was going along, one seemed to be darting about in aimless zig-zags, but seen in retrospect the track runs like the path in the Pilgrim’s Progress, “straight as a rule can make it”,10 never deviating, and with no fundamental error anywhere in its course, whatever nasty messes there may be to right and left of it. Some of the messes turn out to be the peremptory rejections – which links up with your quotations from Denis Saurat.11 I must get that book; it sounds as if it made sense.
Artists, who are emotionally sensitive to pain and suffering, are the last people who ought to have any intellectual difficulty with it, because their whole life and work consists in making sense of it. They do experience the difficulty, but that is largely because they are not consciously aware of their own creative processes. They make vocal the outcry of the bewildered common man, but in their hearts they know otherwise; – and in their actions they display the same ruthless purpose which they protest against when they see it in the universe; or, if they do not, they are false to their calling.
There is something in this which religion should be able to see and interpret for the common man; but some necessary link of understanding has been lost.
I seem to be spawning a whole shoal of half-warmed fishes12, with which I ought not to bother you.
In the meantime, thank you again very much, and not least for your kind assurance of practical support. If, when the book appears, you could see your way to
(a) reviewing it anywhere in the theological and\or religious press (they are not quite the same thing) or steering it into the hands of a reviewer who will see what it’s meant to be about;
(b) defending it against the assault of the Philistines in any correspondence that may arise;
I shall be deeply grateful.
With all good wishes,
yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 i.e. The Mind of the Maker. D. L. S. had sent Father Demant the typescript.
2 i.e. “Bridgeheads”.
3 Denis Browne, the husband of Helen Simpson. His book was never written.
4 Workers’ Educational Association.
5 See letter to Editor of The Sower, 21 April 1941, note.
6 Issued by Dr William Temple, Archbishop of York, after the Malvern Conference held in January 1941.
7 Thomas Milner Heron (1890–1983), a socialist-minded entrepreneur of Leeds who tried to improve conditions of employment in the clothing industry. He was also committed to the National Guilds League. He began a book for “Bridgeheads” but did not complete it. (Cf. letter to the conveners of the Theological Literature Association, 28 November 1941.) He had previously written a pamphlet, Christian Vocation in Industry and Marketing. 1926.
8 Charles Morgan (1894–1958), novelist and playwright, drama critic of The Times from 1926 to 1939 and contributor to The Times Literary Supplement under the pseudonym of “Menander”. The Flashing Stream (1938) is a play.
9 Cf. “Are Women Human?”, an address given to a Women’s Society in 1938, published in Unpopular Opinions (Gollancz, 1946, pp. 106–116); see particularly pp. 109–110. See also “The Human-not Quite Human”, first published in Christendom: A Journal of Christian Sociology, vol. XI, no. 43, September 1941, pp. 156–162, later republished in Unpopular Opinions, pp. 116–122.
10 The Pilgrim’s Progress, First Part, Good Will to Christian: “Look before thee; dost thou see this narrow way? That is the way thou must go…it is as straight as a rule can make it.”
11 Denis Saurat (1890–1958), professor of French, London University. The book mentioned may be Regeneration, 1940, or Watch Over Africa, 1941.
12 An echo of the phrase attributed to the celebrated Dr Spooner: “a half-warmed fish”, by which he meant “a half-formed wish”.
TO THE EDITOR
The Sower1
21 April 1941
Dear Sir,
CHRIST CARPENTER
I am greatly obliged to you for sending me the April number of The Sower, with its reference to my suggestion (made in an address at Brighton)2 that a church might at some time be dedicated to “Christ Carpenter”.
I particularly welcome the emphasis you lay upon “the kind of work which is not just ‘a job’ … but is indistinguishable from play, an end in itself, like the Holy Mass”. This sentence, in fact, summarises the argument of my address, which was directed to show that the “economic” concept of work adopted alike by the representatives of Capital and Labour was corrupt, unchristian, and contrary to the true needs and nature of Man. The Divine joy in creation, which Man should inherit in virtue of his participation in the image of the Godhead, has been largely destroyed, persisting today almost alone among artists, skilled craftsmen, and members of the learned professions; and it is this loss of “the sense of a Divine vocation” in “Man’s daily work” which lies at the root of our social and economic corruptions. In a letter to The Catholic Herald (18 April) I have briefly stated the theological grounds for my attitude; I am also taking the liberty of sending you a copy of the address itself, in the hope that you may find time to glance at it.
I am most anxious that nothing said by me should be supposed to commit me (still less, by implication, the Church of England) to the kind of political significance which has so unfortunately become attached to the word “Worker”. In particular, the attempt to draw a distinction between manual and mental labour is disastrous, and calculated to make the reintegration of Man and Society impossible. As for its theological corollaries – the horrid suggestion that the Divine Person of Christ should be used as a kind of emblem in a class warfare, or should be so sub-divided as to effect a virtual opposition between the Galilean Workman and the Eternal Logos – I can only call them so blasphemous and so heretical as to shock any Christian conscience. Any devotion to “Christ Worker” which starts from a limited political and economic concept of Work is unsound. A true devotion must find its theological basis in that Divine Energy “by Whom all things were made”, Who knows no necessity to work except His own delight in creation, and after Whose image and likeness Man’s proper nature is made.
Yours faithfully,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 No periodical of this name has been traced. It may have been a church magazine. The address of the editor was 763 Coventry Road, Birmingham.
2 Entitled “Work and Vocation”, given at the Dome, Brighton, 8 March 1941; reprinted in part as “Vocation in Work” in A Christian Basis for the Post-War World (Student Christian Movement Press, May 1942) and as “A Plea for Vocation in Work” in Bulletins from Britain (New York, 103, 19 August 1942, pp. 7 10). Later entitled “Why Work?”, it was included in Creed or Chaos?, Methuen 1947, pp. 47–64.
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO HER SON
7 May 1941
Dear John,
I have been galloping round the country addressing meetings, carrying your letter with me in the hope of getting it answered, but I never seemed to get a moment for thinking in.
I’m glad you find the book1 interesting. I think your first difficulty is due to your having extended the analogy beyond its terms of reference. It applies to “the mind of the artist engaged in an act of creation”, and (for the purposes of the book) is restricted to that and nothing else – i.e., it doesn’t set out to deal at all with the personality of the artist.
It could, of course, be used so as to apply to that. In that case “the Father” would be what one might call the “timeless self”, comprising the whole of the man’s existence, “the end in the beginning” – the permanent or eternal selfhood so to speak. “The Son” would be the whole of the self as expressed in action (thought, word, deed, etc.) including the manifestation in space and time, from beginning to end. (This is all we ever see or know directly of the personality – “the Father can only be known by the Son”.) “The Ghost” would be the man’s self-awareness and other men’s awareness of him, including the power of his personality exercised in history. So that there is no “trinity behind the personality” – the trinity is the personality.
I didn’t use this particular image because it is more involved and difficult than the more restricted image. Also, when it came to including the creative work of the personality, one would have to define and display it in so many different and vague senses; the ordinary man’s personality is a rather feeble “image of the Creator”, whereas that of the-artist-creating, though more restricted, is more definite and satisfactory.
Rather similarly, the difficulty about God. It’s not quite enough, theologically, to say that God “has will” – He is will, just as He is beauty, goodness, justice and so forth. The theologian’s phrase is that “God is all that He has”. It is true that God’s will always issues in creation – He is creativeness. That is what is meant when people say that “God’s creation is necessary to Him” – so it is: though not necessarily this or any particular creation. Thus one may take “the Resurrection of the Body” in the widest possible sense – not applying it merely to the power of the creature to remake its own form, but to the continual power and will of the Son to create, and manifest Himself in Form. I thought of writing a chapter on this, but the book was too long already. This is God’s experience: but the Father cannot experience evil; the Son experiences it – or the results of it – in His manifestation by continually transforming it into good.
I hope this makes things a little clearer. Of course one can’t limit God’s Trinity to this one creation; why should one? Even the human creator isn’t limited to a single work – not even to a single work at a time, though he doesn’t enjoy God’s infinite freedom in this respect. Since, however, we have no knowledge or experience of any creation but this one, we cannot very usefully argue about others.
I have been trying to drive the thing about “the integrity of the work” into the heads of the multitude – all very difficult. They always want the economic system altered before they begin to think what they want it altered to or for, and consequently, they end with exactly the same economic tyranny, rather differently administered. Except, of course, the pure mystagogues, who assume that as soon as control of the means of production passes into the hands of the workers, the whole of society will automatically become, not only selfless and virtuous but endowed with intellectual discrimination and impeccable artistic taste. This seems a large assumption! What they expect is the automatic emergence of Sinless Man – which, as certain of their own psychologists have said, is, to say the least of it, unlikely.
Hope you will have a good term,2 and harvest like anything when the time comes along –
Much love,
D. L. S.
1 The Mind of the Maker. It is evident that she sent him the typescript or a proof copy since the book was not published until July of that year.
2 John Anthony was still at Malvern College, aged 17.
TO MAURICE B. RECKITT1
8 May 1941
Dear Mr. Reckitt,
Thank you very much for your letter and for the enclosure from Philip Mairet2. What he says is very valuable; in particular I welcome the realism that suggests we may be in for a “war period”. Have you noticed the curious way in which we have come to talk about peace as a “normal” condition – not in the same sense in which we speak of “normal eyesight” (a standard generally desirable but seldom met with, by which we measure our individual defects) or as we might speak of Christ as “the norm of humanity”, but as though it were a usual condition, into which we may expect the world to relax automatically when some exceptional pressure is removed? Historically, such a condition of world-wide peace has, I suppose, never been experienced; but because we are determined to look on war as an exception to the common run of things, we adjust ourselves badly to war conditions. Admittedly, this is a very large, alarming and unpleasant war, and it’s difficult to “be ordinary” when one’s liable to have bombs dropped on one at any moment, – nor, of course, do we want “Business As Usual”; but I can’t help thinking that if we had faced the prospect of war as one of the things that do happen, instead of assuring each other that it was “unthinkable”, we should have been more on the spot to prevent it from coming or to grapple with it when it came. When one looks at the flimsy houses and the glass palaces that we built in the inter-War years, it seems as though our whole way of life had been deliberately out of touch with a reality that included the likelihood of aerial bombardment. But if one says that to people, they reply that to take precautions against war is to accept and acquiesce in the idea of war, and so encourage it – though I notice they don’t think that the putting of locks on the doors and safes in banks is a wicked acquiescence in the idea of burglary. I believe at the back of their minds they are superstitious about it – like the man who refuses to make his will because he doesn’t like thinking about death, and feels he may bring it on by taking notice of it. But there it is; to be as realistic as the people who peppered the country with border keeps is to “admit that war is normal”. It seems to me just as normal as any other sin and wickedness. What’s the good of saying “we ought to have progressed beyond the ideas of the Middle Ages” when, as a matter of brutal fact, we have not done any such thing so far as war is concerned. Progress (if there is such a thing) doesn’t come all of a piece and all along the line – it happens in bursts, and sometimes we go back and have to start again. We wash more than the seventeenth century, but less than ancient Rome; we are kinder to some animals than we used to be, and the manners of village children have improved; but Spaniards are cruel to mules and Germans to Jews, and England is the only country that needs a N.S.P.C.C.3 – so where are you?…
Goodness knows if we shall be able to do anything with the G.C.W.4 The trouble is that we include a number of pious scribblers, but not nearly enough real writers. But we shall see. It’s helpful to know that the N.E.W.5 can offer us a platform – I only hope the paper shortage won’t drive us all out of business!
Talking of writers, in an article the other day in World Review6 I expressed the opinion that the leading Christian thinkers were writing about world-events with a depth and insight which left the secular builders of the New Jerusalem standing. (Not that that’s saying a great deal, for the Utopians’ combination of shallowness with wishful thinking doesn’t take much beating.) Now comes John Gloag,7 with the sneering question: “Leading Christian thinkers? Who are they?” I must give him an answer, and there are a number of names I’d like to mention. But, for confirmation and my better instruction, who should you say were the people who really had the surest grasp of fundamentals in “this present crisis”? The real high-level of Christian thinking? I’d like to hand him a list of about a dozen – including Romans and foreigners, on whom I’m rather weak. Actually, I’m weak on the subject altogether; I only know that when, in my desultory reading, I get hold of a Christian commentator – whether it’s Maritain8 or Demant9 or Niebuhr10 or Berdyaev11 or yourself – he seems to be a damn sight closer to reality than the Human-Perfectibilitarians or the Scientific-Progressives or the people who invoke the Great God Economic-Planning, and the Sinless Proletariat.12
Meanwhile, in my efforts to carry out Philip Mairet’s ideas about war literature, I have produced a curious book called The Mind of the Maker – a sort of exercise in Applied Theology. Demant thinks well of it, so I hope there’s something in it. I’ll see that the N.E.W. gets a review copy and will hope, as they say, for “favourable consideration”. I shall certainly read your autobiography.13
Fr. McLaughlin is away at the moment. I shall tackle him about the G.C.W. as soon as he returns. I’m glad you approve our sub-committee – it seemed the only idea which held out a reasonable hope of getting anything done.
I heard you had been ill. I hope you are better now. I was sorry not to meet you at Malvern – but you had, on the whole, a happy escape.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
P.S. I return Mairet’s letter.
1 See letter to him, dated 21 February 1940, note.
2 Philip Mairet (1886–1975), to whom T. S. Eliot dedicated Notes Towards a Definition of Culture. The editor of The New English Weekly from 1934 to 1949, he was one of the contributors to The Church Looks Ahead. (See letter to Val Gielgud, 24 February 1941, note 1.)
3 National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
4 Guild of Catholic Writers, affiliated to the Church Social Action Group (of which the Rev. Patrick McLaughlin, later associated with the Society of St Anne, Soho, was appointed Secretary). See also letter to Patrick McLaughlin, 28 August 1940.
5 The New English Weekly.
6 “The Church in the New Age”, World Review, March 1941, pp. 11–15. It is preceded by the following introduction by the editor, Edward Hulton: “An uncompromising statement on the Church’s function in the community by a distinguished laywoman who is more widely known as the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey. Her outspoken utterances on the Church’s attitude towards morality at a recent ecclesiastical conference [Malvern] led to bitter newspaper controversy.” In her article D. L. S. makes many of the same points as in her paper for Malvern.
7 In World Review, May 1941, under “Correspondence Cross-Section”, p. 78, John Gloag (1896–1981), novelist and author of works on architecture and design, wrote: “I have read with interest and perplexity the article by Dorothy Sayers. In the one paragraph in which she is specific, she mentions ‘the best Christian thinkers’ and states that they are ‘writing and speaking of world events with an insight and profundity’. Who are they?”
8 Jacques Maritain (1882–1973). French philosopher, who opposed Bergson; author of Humanisme Intégral (1936), tr. M. R. A. Adamson, True Humanism (1938), De la philosophic chrétienne (1933), Science et la sagesse (1935).
9 See letter to V. A. Demant, 4 April 1941, note 1.
10 Ronald (Reinhold) Niebuhr (1892–1971), American theologian. His Beyond Tragedy was published in 1937.
11 Nicholas Berdyaev (1874–1948), Russian philosopher, who championed a return to religious values. Author of The Meaning of History (tr. G. Reavey, 1936); Solitude and Society (tr. idem, 1938).
12 Having received suggestions from M. B. Reckitt. D. L. S. wrote the letter which follows.
13 As It Happened: An Autobiography, Dent, 1941.
[TO THE EDITOR OF WORLD REVIEW]
No date1
Mr John Gloag asks for the names of some leaders of Christian thought who interpret world events with depth and insight. Here are a few: Jacques Maritain, Nicolas Berdyaev, V. A. Demant, Reinhold Niebuhr, William Temple, Christopher Dawson,2 E. L. Watkin,3 Charles Williams, T. S. Eliot, and that dynamic, if less strictly intellectual personality, Karl Barth. Perhaps these will do to begin with. If he desires to pursue his studies further, I shall be happy to present him with a further selection.
Dorothy L. Sayers
1 Published in World Review, July 1941, under “Correspondence Cross-Section”, p. 78. The same issue published her article, “How Free is the Press?”, pp. 19–24, later published in Unpopular Opinions.
3 Ernest Lucas Watkin (1876–1951).
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE RT REV. NEVILLE TALBOT
Bishop of Nottingham
12 May 1941
My Dear Lord Bishop,
Thank you very much indeed for your letter. I am struggling with the six talks on God the Son and am appalled by discovering how much technical knowledge of theological terms is required before the average uninstructed Christian – much more Heathen – can begin to understand what the Creed is supposed to be about. I am particularly embarrassed while dealing with the clauses about the Incarnation, by the fact that “for us men and for our salvation” demands a preliminary instruction on the nature of man and the nature of sin, which I can’t possibly squeeze into a ten minute talk, which has to deal at the same time with “coming down from Heaven” the “Virgin Birth” and the perfect Manhood. The people who made the Creed were not faced with the preconceptions of the modern man, to whom the whole concept of sin is unfamiliar and unconvincing; they could rely on people taking it for granted that whatever man was he wasn’t what he should be. I am relying on your opening talks to hammer the idea of sinfulness into the listener’s head – this is where it properly belongs.1 I shall have to say something about it I suppose, bearing in mind that one cannot count upon one’s hearers having followed the whole series of talks, but I shall only touch on the subject lightly.
As soon as I have got this talk done I will try and let you have a copy. I am taking the line that my business is to explain as well as I can what the clauses of the Creed actually mean, rather than to exhort people to belief. I don’t see how they can believe in a thing which is so much unintelligible abracadabra to them. This seems to me the justification for a strong emphasis upon “doctrine”. After all, if people are to be exhorted to hold the Catholic Faith, it is what G. K. Chesterton calls “an intellectual convenience”2 for them to know what the Catholic Faith is. …
1 The Bishop replied that he had only “rather incidentally” referred to sin.
2 A phrase used by G. K. Chesterton towards the beginning of the final chapter of Orthodoxy.
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO MAURICE B. RECKITT
14 May 1941
Dear Mr Reckitt,
Very many thanks for your prompt and helpful reply. I am delighted that my remarks about the abnormality of peace started a fruitful train of thought. …
I have sent Mr John Gloag a short list of names, telling him that if he wants to read further, I can xxxxxx
(Drat this typewriter! It is of German origin and I think it is suffering from hallucinations, like Rudolf Hess.)1
… that I can oblige him with plenty more. I put in Temple and Dawson, but I have disqualified Middleton Murry and I’ll tell you for why.2 He is exactly the sort of writer whom the scornful critic might expect one to quote as an example of Christian thought, and would take the greatest possible joy in tearing to pieces. Murry is an extremely able man, and the very last person to hide his light under a bushel. He has cashed in on the death of his wife2, and on the death of D. H. Lawrence, and when it comes to the death of God or of Society, he will be there. And, you know, he is worse than erratic. He is inaccurate and question-begging. I don’t mind his not believing in “the physical resurrection” – but why should he say that “St Paul (who, judged by the standards of history, is the chief witness) in no way distinguishes the appearances of the risen Lord to himself on the road to Damascus from the earlier appearances to the disciples”?3 St Paul never pretended to be a witness of the Forty Days, and the evidence for the appearance on the road to Damascus depends on St Luke, whose Gospel is also the evidence for the “physical” appearance at Jerusalem, with the broiled fish and the honeycomb. This is no way to treat ones authorities. The point might be argued, but not in that way. Am I being a cat about Murry? Maybe; but the half-dead scholar rises up in me and protests against the combination of so effective an emotion with so slap-dash a critical judgment. His own world of Letters accepts him only with cautious reservations – and while I admit his originality and “drive”, he offers far too easy a target for attack.
Williams and Eliot are much sounder; Williams is really an original interpreter of theology, I think; it is true that people who don’t find him illuminating find him wholly unintelligible, but it is good for men like Gloag to tackle the unintelligible.
Of the others, I have put in Watkin and also Barth,4 whom I have read. I find his style unendurable, but his influence is undoubted. He is a Calvinist, and accuses me of being a Pelagian5 – but what is a little total depravity between friends? …
“Christendom” shall certainly have the “curious book”.6 It isn’t a Gollancz publication, but the first of a series which is being edited for Methuen by M.St Clare Byrne and myself; I enclose a preliminary blurb.
With many thanks,
Yours sincerely,
Dorothy L. Sayers
1 Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Deputy from 1933. He had flown to Scotland on May 10/11.
2 Cf. her letter to Father Kelly, 24 May 1938.
2a Katherine Mansfield.
3 Cf. his book, Life of Jesus, 1926.
4 Karl Barth (1886–1968), Swiss theologian. He corresponded with D. L. S. and translated her two articles, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged” and “The Triumph of Easter”. He wrote: “I have read her detective stories with quite special interest and amazement” (quoted by Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth, SCM Press, 1975).
5 Relating to the heresty of Pelagius, a British monk of the 4th and 5th centuries, who held that good works were sufficient as a means of salvation.
6 i.e. The Mind of the Maker. It was reviewed by V. A. Demant in the March number, 1942.
TO THE REV. J. G. WILLIAMS
19 May 1941
Dear Mr. Williams,
I am reduced to complete pulp by Bishop Talbot, who says that in FOUR talks devoted to Why we want a God to believe in, it has not occurred to him to explain what is meant by the word “Sin”!!!! You wouldn’t think anybody could overlook that theological trifle, would you? Consequently, I have had to squash Sin into two minutes filched from the Incarnation – since I have now ceased to put my trust in Jesuits or in any child of man – and am left to contemplate your letter with a gleam of wildness in my eye. …
My talks, I find, fall naturally into three sections; Lord, Jesus, and Christ. But since you must have a separate title for each, here they are:
1. Lord and God.
2. Lord of all Worlds.
3. The Man of Men.
4. The Death of God.
5. The World’s Desire.
6. The Touchstone of History.
I will send the text of the first four (I hope) this week.
I have firmly assumed that I shall be able to deliver about six pages in ten minutes – as Mr. Fenn knows, my natural pace is pretty quick, and efforts to alter it produce confusion! Tell Mr. Fenn I have decided to do the preliminary summaries myself in the text of the talk. This, I am afraid, rules out his desire of a “smash-hit” first sentence, but will save time, as I shall get over the ground quicker than the Announcer. Don’t let the Announcer have a lot of verbiage on his own account! Let him just say, “Our [fourth] talk on the Creed is called ‘The Death of God’. Here is Miss Dorothy L. Sayers” – and it’s done. (But let him not say: “The World’s Desire – Miss Sayers”, which would be indelicate, as well as untrue.)
N.B. The people who thought of this way of spending a pleasant Sunday should be boiled – rather slowly – in oil.
Yours savagely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
TO BROTHER GEORGE EVERY1
21 May 1941
Dear Brother Every,
Public Enemy No. 1 – if you must use these expressions – is a flabby and sentimental theology which necessarily produces flabby and sentimental religious art. The first business of Church officials and churchmen is, I think, to look to their own mote and preach and teach better theology. But the point which they do not recognise is this; that for any work of art to be acceptable to God it must first be right with itself. That is to say, the artist must serve God in the technique of his craft; for example, a good religious play must first and foremost be a good play before it can begin to be good religion. Similarly, actors for religious films and plays should be chosen for their good acting and not chosen for their Christian sentiment or moral worth regardless of whether they are good actors or not.2 (A notorious case to the contrary is the religious film society which chose its photographers for their piety, with the result that a great number of the films were quite blasphemously incompetent.) The practice, very common among pious officials of asking writers to produce stories and plays to illustrate certain doctrine or church activities, shows how curiously little these good people as a class understand the way in which the mind of the writer works. The result in practice is that instead of the doctrines springing naturally out of the action of the narrative, the action and characters are distorted for the sake of the doctrine with disastrous results.
This is what I mean when I ask that the Church should use a decent humility before the artist, whose calling is as direct as that of the priest, and whose business it is to serve God in his own technique and not in somebody else’s. Matters are only made worse when Sunday Observance Societies and other groups talk wildly about modern tendencies in art and so bring the Church into contempt, not only for bigotry but also for ignorance.
I quite agree that a great deal of ecclesiastical bric-à-brac needs purging. It is, as you say, so difficult to choose the really sound authorities to pronounce on the artistic merit of hymns and so forth. I believe that here again the soundest method is to purge at once the works which express a sickly brand of religious sentiment. They are pretty certain to be bad on all counts; it is very noticeable how well the great mediaeval hymns stand up to the test of time and the test of translation, on account of the soundness of the theology which inspired them. But I think they should be purged definitely on theological grounds, if the work is being done by Ecclesiastics as such, since here they are on their own ground and are not going outside their terms of reference. The whole question is extraordinarily complicated because of the gulf that has grown up between art on the one hand and on the other hand both the Church and secular society, so that the artists tend to be out of touch with the common man, while the latter, whether Christian or not, has only a very fumbling critical judgment to rely on.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Of the House of the Sacred Mission, Kelham, Nottinghamshire.
2 Cf. D. L. S.’ article “Why Work?”, first given under the title “Work and Vocation” at Brighton in March 1941. Published in Creed or Chaos? (Methuen, 1947), pp. 47–64; see especially pp. 60–61. (For further details see letter to the Editor, The Sower, 21 April 1941, note 2.)
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO BASIL BLACKWELL1
30 May 1941
Dear Basil,
Here are the two Wimsey items I talked to you about. Of the Wimsey Papers2 there ought to be about 150 copies already printed which are available. We had intended to keep these for private sale to people who might be interested, but we never tried to “stimulate a public demand” for them, and when Miss Simpson died her Executors handed the whole lot over to me. She was part author of the jest and responsible for some of the best passages. I am sure that there would be no objection at all on her husband’s part, as there is certainly none on mine, to the books being printed in America, always with the stipulation that copyright must be safeguarded; this, of course, applies also to the sale in America of the copies printed in England. The copyright had better be vested in my name.
Of the little pamphlet on Lord Mortimer Wimsey3 I have also a certain stock by me – about fifty I should think, but I should not want to part with them all. As you will see, the whole point of this one was that it should appear to be an early nineteenth century print. Graham Pollard, who wrote that book on The Forged Victorian Pamphlets,4 supervised the format for me, and I think has made a fairly good job of it, down to the wholly fictitious and misleading imprint.5
If you think that there is anything to be done with these two little works, go ahead. I don’t know how far the Americans are likely to understand or appreciate the solemn jest of the pastiche. Some simple-minded friends of mine became quite disturbed in their minds about these delusive booklets, which they received, without comment, as Christmas presents, and before thanking me for them, hastily rang up a mutual friend to enquire “whether there really was a Wimsey family”. It would be great fun to take in the American continent! – but I will leave the matter of presentation to you if you should decide to do anything about it.
Yours ever,
[D. L. S.]
P.S. The binding of the Wimsey Papers which were printed for sale is slightly different from this, and not quite so good.6
1 The Oxford bookseller and publisher, later Sir Basil Blackwell, for whom D. L. S. worked from 1917 to 1919. See The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1899–1936, letter to Muriel Jaeger, 8 March 1917, pp. 128–129.
2 Papers Relating to the Family of Wimsey edited by Matthew Wimsey, privately printed for the Family (Humphrey Milford, 1936).
3 An Account of Lord Mortimer Wimsey, The Hermit of the Wash, privately printed by Humphrey Milford, November and December 1937.
4 An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth-century Pamphlets, by J. Carter and G. Pollard, 1934.
5 The imprint reads: BRISTOL:\ Primed by M. BRYAN, Corn-street.\ 1816.
6 The colour blue is lighter.
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO MAURICE B. RECKITT
“Date as Postmark”
[? June 1941]
Dear Mr Reckitt,
You should be receiving from Methuen, at the same time as this, a review copy of my “curious book” about the Trinity: The Mind of the Maker. As you will see, it is the first volume of a series called Bridge-heads, edited by M. St Clare Byrne and myself, of which the general idea is to deal with this business of “Creativeness” – both in theory and in practice. The object of this particular book is to start us off on the right lines by trying to examine, in the light of theology as interpreted by the writer’s experience, what “Creativeness” is, and how it works, because the word is rapidly becoming one of those catch-phrases which people use without always understanding them very well.
I hope you will like it. Fr Demant says, “Whatever priests may say, I think that is the way theology should be written. It is the way it was written in the formative periods of the Church” – so I feel a little encouraged, because I think he’d have cracked down upon it if it was fundamentally unsound or insincere, don’t you?
A copy is also being sent to the New English Weekly,1 as you requested.
Yours sincerely,
Dorothy L. Sayers
1 This journal, edited by Philip Mairet, ceased to exist in 1949, when it became incorporated in New Age.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
THE SISTER SUPERIOR1
The Hostel of God2
Lindfield
Haywards Heath
25 June 1941
Dear Madam,
It is a delicate and difficult matter to argue with pacifists, as with any people who have erected a single point of morals into an absolute.
The consensus of opinion in the Early Church is perhaps not quite as unanimous as your correspondent suggests; (it is handily summarised in A. C. F. Beales’ “Penguin” The Catholic Church and International Order – Chapters five and six).3 I think the sneer at the expense of the Church for changing the emphasis of her teaching after Constantine is scarcely justified. It was not until then that the Christians became responsible for the actual maintenance of world-order, and were forced to realise what a policy of complete “pacifism” involved in practice. This was a necessary consequence of the transference of power into Christian hands; and however much one may regret the anomalies produced by the interlocking of spiritual and temporal power, it is useless to talk as though temporal power were not an important fact.2 At all points we are brought up against the paradox so bitingly stated by Reinhold Niebuhr: “Goodness armed with power is corrupted; pure love, without power, is destroyed.” (Beyond Tragedy: p. 185).3
But apart from the historical question, the difficulty which (as it seems to me) the pacifists fail to face is the inherent corruption of all human virtues by original sin, which produces impurities when any one of them is erected into an absolute. (The “absolutism” attached to the command about turning the other cheek is very marked – it is seldom, for instance, that anybody insists that when a decision at law is given against a litigant, he should pay double the penalty imposed; though that might be equally well deduced from Matt.V, 40.4) If everybody lived in a state of perfect grace, moral codes would no longer be necessary, and the virtues, being perfect, would not contradict one another. But when men fall from grace they are brought under the operation of the law. And the moral virtues, being “of the nature of sin”, do contradict one another, so that any “absolutism” in them falls under the condemnation of the law. (See the very interesting passage in C. S. Lewis’s Problem of Pain, p. 70 and note; Christian Challenge Series.)
The human virtues are not single-minded (see Lewis again, p. 63). In their best expressions they are corrupt; and in the pacifist position there is usually mingled, along with a great deal of genuine love of God and mankind, a number of other factors: personal fear, inertia, unwillingness to sacrifice private interest, and, more subtle and important, a certain refusal of responsibility, and a severing of the self from the universal guilt and its consequences. And there is also that secret accidie5 which produces a pacifism “founded, not on the doctrine that other people’s lives are sacred, but on the belief that nothing is worth fighting for” (Michael Roberts, The Recovery of the West, p. 48; Faber).
I feel that there is a kind of clue to all this in the much-disputed passage about the purse and scrip and sword in Luke XXII, 36.6 When the Perfect Innocence is bodily present, no money, no worldly provision, no sword; but now “the things concerning Me draw to an end”, and the world’s weapons will have to be used, with all they imply. It is as though only the Perfect Innocence can afford to ignore those implications, because He alone is completely single-hearted, and can practise a virtue which is altogether free from inward corruption.
I have always thought it curious that the last few generations should have so placidly recited, and approved, and taught to their children, that staggering passage in Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur”:
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world7
without seeing how trenchantly it went to the very root of the moral paradox.
The history of the past twenty years shows nothing more clearly than the havoc that can be wrought by more or less well-disposed people concentrating on Peace (negatively conceived as the mere avoidance of War), and the appalling corruptions that grow up through an absolutist concentration on this isolated virtue within the sphere of legality. The refusal to admit that a technical “peace” was to the advantage of vested interests, the total neglect of the natural virtues of justice, and fortitude, and the quite extraordinary falsehood which refused to recognise the fact of temporal power (e.g. in the naive assertion, in the face of all experience, that “public opinion” must be a sufficient restraint upon the unruly wills and affections of sinful men) are evidence of the corruption produced by “one good custom”.
War is, I think, not so much a sin in itself as a natural judgement upon sin – the bodily incarnation of a spiritual dialectic that has not found its synthesis; and the attempt to repudiate the judgement in this lower court is apt to be less a refusal of sin than an endeavour to side-step the consequences. But the whole question is very difficult, and any attempt to deal with it gives one the appearance of seeking to “justify the unjustifiable by specious argument and the slinging of isolated texts”.
Yours very truly,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Sister Magdalen (Ada Elizabeth Robson), 1896–1977.
2 Founded at Clapham in the 19th century for the chronic and dying sick, evacuated to Lindfield, West Sussex in August 1939.
3 Published April 1941.
2 Cf. her Introduction to The Emperor Constantine.
3 See letter to Maurice B. Reckitt, 8 May 1941, note 10.
4 And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.
5 Sloth, torpor, one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
6 Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.
7 Words of the dying Arthur from the barge: “The old order changeth, yielding place to new…”
TO BROTHER GEORGE EVERY
25 June 1941
Dear Brother Every,
Art is long and life is fleeting, and I can’t answer your letter properly. But there are one or two points I must pick up, because the whole subject is too important and fascinating to be left alone –
1. About Mr. Micawber. I’m never happy about E. M. Forster’s treatment of the novel.1 It is an outstanding example of the thing I was getting at under “Gnosticism” (“Docetism”2 might have been more exact, but the word means nothing to the average layman). Both his novel writing and his criticism suffer from the fact that he is antagonistic to the medium he is working in. “A third man says in a sort of drooping regretful voice, ‘Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story’… the third man is myself. Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist. That is the highest factor common to all novels, and I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different – melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form”. (My italics). This contempt of and hatred for the “fundamental aspect” of what he is dealing with is a thing that paralyzes both creation and creative criticism, and is the source of all that is weak in his novels and untrustworthy in his criticism; because he persistently judges the thing by a standard which doesn’t truly belong to it. And, approaching his judgments with the profound caution which this central anomaly engenders, I’m inclined to think that his distinction between “round” and “flat” characters may be a bit too sharply drawn. Even he has to allow for characters like Lady Bertram,3 who bulge up out of flatness into roundness when the story (the story) requires it. And the mere fact that Mr. Micawber’s end is felt to be incongruous suggests that he isn’t as consistently flat as (according to the theory) he should be. The spasmodic rotundities of Dickens’s characters are frequently ill-managed. Hence, e.g. the peculiar effect of indecency produced by the marriage of Mercy Pecksniff to Jonas Chuzzlewit. The assemblage of grotesques is suddenly brought into contact with bodily fact by the “serious” treatment of the married Mercy, and it all becomes curiously unpleasant. The end of Micawber would be in place in a book which nowhere touched actuality; but David Copperfield is not pure fairy-tale; therefore the “miraculous” ending is out of key.
(By the way, I have used fictitious characters as the chief illustration for “the free will of the creature”;4 but I shouldn’t necessarily confine myself to the characters. It’s only that, with them, it is easier to make the analogy plain to people. It’s hard to make them understand the free will of a phrase or a literary form, for instance: e.g. the work that insists on being a play and not a short story; but the principle is the same.)
2. Realism. Going on from this, I want to ask you to consider whether it is quite sound to talk about “realism” and “representationalism” as though these were synonymous with the “unforgivable sin”. I haven’t worked this out: but I rather fancy there is, again, both a time-element and a theological element in it. Do we perhaps stagger from a sort of Arian Humanism to a kind of Docetism about the universe, and is “representational” and “non-representational” Art a reflection of this dialectic? There seem to be periods when the human spirit feels itself to be “right with” the bodily form of the universe, and expresses it in a satisfying manner. Then we get the artist “pour qui le monde visible existe”, delighting in, and expressing himself through the visible form. These are, I think, periods, not of decadence but of eager youth – G. K. C. says somewhere that it is the quite young child who can be excited by the “realistic” story. Then there comes a period when the spirit is no longer genuinely at ease in the outward form, and the Art becomes false, because it is still expressing an easiness and harmony which are no longer there: it is used sentimentally, as a “consolation” and pretence; and the “new” art comes along, which expresses, not the harmony but the dislocation between spirit and form. But this, too, has its time of decay, when the pattern of disunion in its theme becomes false, and one gets a stereotyped and consciously “archaic” art, contradicting the “new” sense of expression and harmony that by that time will be coming along. And then one has the divorce between life and art – a sort of schizophrenia – and perhaps a disjunction into hieratic and popular art. … I haven’t started to examine this; but I notice a sentence in Michael Roberts’ Recovery of the West (of which Faber has just sent an advance copy) which looks as though he felt rather the same about it. “The world of imagination and the world of material reality had fallen apart, and the one could no longer be imaged through the other.” (My italics again) “Reality” – that which corresponds to the thought? … My feeling is that there is nothing in itself wicked or inartistic about realism as such – only when it persists as a dead thing after the correspondence to the inner reality has ceased to be true.
3.Devil to Pay. I don’t want to bother with an apologia for my own work. But one thing seems important. The “conjuring-tricks” are there, of course, in the first place, because they are in the story (the story again!) and I was trying to interpret that story within its own convention. But the whole point is that the Devil is, precisely, the vendor of cheap (or, if you like, expensive) conjuring-tricks and magical utopias – his chief business today is the offering of short cuts to perfection, without responsibility and in defiance of the universal nature of things. Irresponsible power, producing effects without cause or consequence, is the very definition of magic. The thing is set out in the Pope’s speech, where he says that it does indeed seem so much better and easier to:
Lean through the cloud, lift the right arm of power
And with a sudden lightning smite the world perfect.
Yet this was not God’s way, etc.5
And the whole conclusion of [Scene] Four is that there is no short cut, and no way out, except by destroying your humanity. So that Faustus cannot regain his soul except by willingly accepting all the pains of evil which he had tried to short-circuit. Every trick that seems to eliminate evil, merely produces the inevitable evil in a new form, so that, do as man may, and twist as he will, he must “go though the hoop” one way or the other at last. Helen (for Faustus) is the perpetual hankering to go behind evil to simple innocence – what Charles Williams calls the attempt to “recover the single and simple knowledge of good by tearing up the aprons”. Christ is the passage to the good through the evil, so that in His presence Satan the enemy appears paradoxically as, willy-nilly, God’s ally:
The love of God urges my feet towards hell,
The devil that seeks to have me thrusts me back
Into God’s arms.6
The terrifying thing about the play was the number of people who thought it so much nicer “to be a dear little doggie than a responsible human being”. “De te fabula”7 is all one can say to them. But I admit that Alistair Bannerman never succeeded in “getting across” the ghastly animal disintegration of the Young Faustus – the irresponsible enjoyment of bloodshed, the loss of all human standards and ideals (“Value? what does that mean? Helen was a troublesome baggage”8), and the whimpering, unreasoning, animal terror. It’s all in the script; but it wasn’t, unfortunately, in the actor.
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 E. M. Forster (1879–1970), novelist. His critical work, Aspects of the Novel, was published in 1936.
2 A heretical view that Christ’s body was a phantom.
3 A character in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.
4 D. L. S. is referring to The Mind of the Maker, chapter 5.
5 The Devil to Pay (Gollancz, 1939, scene 2, p. 54).
6 op. cit., pp. 105–106.
7 Latin: it speaks of thee.
8 The words of Faustus, scene 3, p. 78.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
7 July 1941
Dear Sir,
WODEHOUSE BROADCASTS1
In the discussion about Mr. P. G. Wodehouse’s unhappy broadcasts, there is one point of which we ought, I think, to remind ourselves.
At the time of the Battle of France, when he fell into enemy hands, English people had scarcely begun to realise the military and political importance of the German propaganda weapon. Since then, we have learnt much: we know something of why and how France fell; we have seen disintegration at work in the Balkans; we have watched the slow recovery of American opinion from the influence of the Nazi hypnotic.
But how much of all this can possibly be known or appreciated from inside a German Concentration Camp – or even from the Adlon Hotel? Theoretically, no doubt, every patriotic person should be prepared to resist enemy pressure to the point of martyrdom; but it must be far more difficult to bear such heroic witness when its urgent necessity is not, and cannot be, understood.
Yours faithfully,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 When the Germans occupied France in the summer of 1940, P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975), the creator of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, who was living in his villa in Le Touquet, was taken into captivity. He was at first placed under house arrest and later interned. On 25 June 1941 news came that he had been released from internment and was living in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. On the next day it was made known that he had agreed to do a series of broadcasts over the German radio. The first, on 26 June, took the form of an interview with Harry Flannery of the Columbia Broadcasting System. It was assumed in Britain that Wodehouse was “giving comfort to the enemy”, a treasonable offence. Feelings ran high although nobody in Britain then knew what he had said.
TO MAURICE B. RECKITT
12 July 1941
Dear Mr. Reckitt,
I ought to have written before to thank you for sending me your autobiography1, which I have read with so much interest and pleasure. There are a lot of things in it that make me want to start discussions – if only one had time for everything! Your kindly reference to me2 makes me wonder how it was that I got through so much of my life without ever bothering about public affairs and “the structure of society”, and all that. It wasn’t that my contemporaries didn’t take an interest – they did. I suppose I was just lazy and deeply prejudiced by a Tory Church of England upbringing. And completely self-centred.
But I fancy there may have been something else. I can only express it by saying that there was something about the socialist doctrine of the period that affected me vaguely like a bad smell. A faint indication of something not quite right somewhere. Unless I am merely rationalizing my dislike to the threat to my own privilege, I believe I can now put a name to the thing – namely, that what was sought was often rather a shift of power than a new understanding of power, and that both parties were really working inside the same area of infection – the area where the concept of employment is substituted for the concept of work.
I gather from your book that you too have had your uneasy moments. I wonder whether the years one wastes in not taking part in movements are entirely locust-eaten, or whether, provided one has been doing an honest job of work in the meantime, one gains any compensatory perspective through not having had one’s young passions enlisted on one side or the other.
Which brings me to the other thing I wanted to write to you about. Women. I don’t feel that any of your contributors has quite got on to the mark in the June Christendom.3 I was never a “feminist” – I didn’t have to be – so I’m rather in the same semi-detached position as I am about everything else. What I feel that few people ever grasp properly – certainly not the Church – is that the question of equality turns on the fact that Man is always dealt with as both Homo and Vir, but Woman only as Femina and never Homo.4 Take two points – one trifling, the other important.
Trousers are always made a point at issue. The fact is that, for Homo, the garment is warm, convenient and decent. But in Western countries (though not in China or Mohammedan countries) Vir has staked out a claim to it, and has invested it and the skirt with a sexual significance, for physiological reasons which are a little too plain for Puritans to admit. (Note: that the objection is always to closed knickers and trousers; never to open drawers, which are the foundation of a very different kind of music-hall joke.) It is this obscure resentment that complicates the simple “Homo” issue of whether warmth, safety, and freedom of movement are desirable qualities in a garment for any creature with two legs. Naturally, the trouser is also taken up into the whole “Femina” business of attraction, since Vir demands that Femina should be Femina all the time, whether she is engaged in what I may call Homo activities or not. But all discussion is vitiated, because the “Homo” part of the question is always left outside the argument.
Again, industrialization is blamed for “herding women into factories”, and people argue naively that women “don’t really like it”. But the real question is whether Homo likes it, or ought to like it. What is the good of saying solemnly that we ought to decide which jobs women definitely ought not to do, and keep them to those they are fitted for, unless we start by admitting that most of the distinctively women’s jobs have already been taken from them by men, when they were taken out of the home and transferred to the factory? Of course the women of the Middle Ages had effective power in the home, because the home was the centre of many industries – spinning, weaving, baking, brewing, distilling, perfumery, preserving, pickling – in which the mistress of the house worked with her own staff. But the control and direction – all the intelligent part of those industries – have gone to the male heads of industry, and the women have been left, not with their “proper” work, but with employment in those occupations, which is quite a different thing.
There has never been any question but that the women of the poor should take their share in the work of the world. The objection to woman’s labour did not begin with a feeling that women should not do harvest work, or strip withies or plant potatoes. It began when the plutocratic and aristocratic notion that the keeping of an idle female was a symbol of social superiority spread to the commercial middle-classes. “My wife doesn’t need to soil her hands with work.” Therefore she must be confined more and more to a home from which all intelligent work was being steadily removed. It is simply idle to argue about the thing if half the relevant facts are ignored.
Homo – I have seen it solemnly stated in a paper that the seats on the near side of a bus are always filled before those on the off side, because, “men find them more comfortable, on account of the camber of the road, and women like them because they can see more easily into the shop-windows”. As though the camber of the road did not affect male and female bodies equally. Men, you see, are given a Homo reason, and women a Femina reason, because they are not really human.
I do not think I have ever heard a sermon about Martha and Mary which did not somewhere hasten to remind us that, although, of course, Mary’s was the better part, the work of the Marthas is necessary too – just by way of softening down the story. Because, after all, Martha’s was a feminine job, whereas Mary was just behaving like any other disciple, male or female – and that is a hard pill to swallow.
Another point, which few people examine for its bearing on the subject, is the enormous hypertrophy of the idea of romantic love, which, from the late Middle Ages on, has distorted the earlier conception of the relations of the sexes, and has produced – or at least exaggerated – the tendency to deny to the woman the common human needs and feelings. And, by the way, all that stuff about the husband’s rights in marriage! What is poor dear Casserley5 thinking of? As though the insatiable appetite of wives were not one of the oldest vulgar jokes in the world – quite as old as mothers-in-law, and much older than kippers!
From all of which you will gather that I find your contributors too, too genteel and ostrich-like for words. As for the “work” problem, you will notice that where the new equality in jobs has been working long enough, the difficulties have practically vanished. There is no movement in the theatre for the men to get back the playing of the female parts, taken from them in the seventeenth century; nor, in the literary world, does the woman writer encounter any real prejudice, other than a vague jealousy among some middle-aged males. That’s why I said I had no need to be a feminist. But fifty years ago, there was still a real discrimination. And if you ask, Are women any happier for the opportunity to work freely at a job, I say, Yes – so long as they do not have to do it under conditions which would harass any human being. It is quite true that the majority of the ordinary vocationless woman would be glad if she didn’t have to work for her living; but would you swear that the average vocationless man wouldn’t jolly well like to “get away from work” if he thought he could? At any rate he would say so – Homo, male or female, always says so. But if a man says so it’s human nature; if a woman says so, it’s female nature, don’t you see.
If the Church wants people to accept the idea that there is neither male nor female, bond nor free, she must really begin by allowing that women have, as the foundation of their special female nature, a share in common human nature – that they can plainly need warmth and convenience in their clothing, comfort in the bus, and an opportunity for intelligence in their work, quite apart from any peculiar “feminine angle” on the matter. One of the best things the war has done is to cause women to be killed as well as men – that at any rate is a human occupation which cannot be denied. And there will not be the same proportion of “surplus women” after this show to embitter relations and confuse statistics.
You may notice that I have not used the words “their rights”. I don’t believe much in “rights”. I can see only common human needs; and I think that if the whole question has become bitter it is largely because of the indecent position produced by the commercial cult of the idle woman, and the removal of the creative occupations from the home. Any attempt to cope with the post-war economic situation must take these things into account.
In theory, I believe the Russians have got hold of the right end of the stick about this, though I don’t know how it works there in practice, and I don’t like their totalitarian organization anyhow. In this country, it looks as though the balance of intelligent work for all was being stabilised in – of all unexpected quarters – the Services, especially the Air Force. These girls who do the radio work have to be pretty well as intelligent as the pilots, and are often in nearly as much danger. But they are not doing that work in order to “ape the men”, or to qualify themselves to be more bedworthy, or in order to have a nice hobby, but because the work has to be done and done properly, otherwise we are all in the soup. To have work to do, and know that his work is wanted, is the basic human need – I don’t care whether it’s of man or woman. But we treat the woman as we treat the fighting man –
It’s ape and slut and job-snatcher and “Polly, you’re a liar”,
But it’s “Thank-you, Mary Atkins,” when the guns begin to fire.6
Join up – your country needs you – but don’t suppose that any of the jobs we train you for are going to be permanent. And, in the meantime, after eight hours a day being a bus-conductor, you can surely find time to clean the flat, cook the dinner, and make yourself attractive to your young man – because that’s a woman’s job. You can only be counted as a human being in an emergency, and in addition to being a full-time female.
I know the whole thing bristles with difficulties, like every other economic “problem”; but it can’t be solved by leaving out all the common human factors.7
I wanted my friend Miss Byrne8, who feels strongly about the business, to do you an article; but I don’t know whether she will be able to manage it. If not, and you feel that some of these points are worth putting, shall I try to tidy them up into some kind of an article or letter?9 Indeed and indeed, the Church must pull her socks up and introduce a spot of reality into this controversy, for if she will not allow the equal possession of a common human nature, who will?
Forgive all this splurge and emphasis, but the democratic new order is heading for another nasty cropper over the woman question if it doesn’t look out.
With again thanks and appreciation of the book,
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 See letter to Maurice B. Reckitt, 8 May 1941, note 13.
2 The reference is: “Such writers as T. S. Eliot, Middleton Murry, Charles Williams, and Dorothy Sayers are listened to because to prophecy they add, in their different manners, the compulsive power of art, and an insight which only the artist can have” (p. 279). To be listed with Middleton Murry cannot have pleased her very much (cf. her letter to Father Herbert Kelly, 24 May 1938), but she was no doubt gratified to be in the rest of the company.
3 Christendom: A Journal of Christian Sociology, a quarterly edited by Maurice B. Reckitt, Ruth Kenyon, V. A. Demant and P. E. T. Widdrington. The June issue of 1941 (volume 11, No. 42, pp. 104–109) contained a symposium entitled “The Emancipated Woman Comes of Age”. The authors were W. G. Peck, Rosalinde Wilton and J. V. L. Casserley.
4 The Latin word homo means man in the sense of a human being; vir means man in the sense of a male human being; femina means woman. (The prefix homo-, as in “homosexual”, is derived from Greek and means “same”, “identical”.)
5 J. V. Langmead Casserley (1909–1978), author of The Christian in Philosophy (Faber and Faber). D. L. S. quotes from his book, The Fate of Modern Culture in The Mind of the Maker, Methuen, p. 7, note 1. He also contributed a volume to the “Signposts” series, Providence and History, 1941, No. 11. In the Symposium, Casserley had said: “The earlier convention conceded to the husband marital rights over his wife.…The new convention has in effect transferred the sexual initiative to the wife, a transfer plainly at war with the physical facts.”
6 Adaptation of lines by Rudyard Kipling: “Oh, it’s ‘Tommy this an’ Tommy that, an’ Tommy, go away;’\ But it’s ‘Thank you, Mister Atkins’ when the band begins to play.” Tommy.
7 In a draft for a curriculum vitae, undated but drawn up in 1928, D. L. S. set down her views on Women and Marriage: “Consider that chief difficulties in most cases are economic. Extremely keen that all women, married or not, should be able to make money for themselves and take their share in the upkeep of the house. Consider that it will soon be thought as degrading to be ‘kept’ by a husband as ‘kept’ in any other way. Would welcome legislation to abolish husband’s liability for wife’s income-tax, personal debts and other unfair distinctions.” (The MS is in the possession of the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Illinois.)
8 Muriel St Clare Byrne did contribute to the following issue (Volume 11, No. 44, December 1941, pp. 234–247), entitled “‘Emancipated’ Woman and Vocation. Female or Human?”, an incisive, cogent and factual article, to which J. V. L. Casserley replied briefly (Vol. 12, No. 45, March 1942, pp. 39–40). The same number contained an article by Mary Ryan, “Woman and Catholic Teaching”, pp. 41–43.
9 The letter was “tidied up” into the article “The-Human-Not-Quite-Human”, first published in Christendom: A Journal of Christian Sociology, vol. xi, no. 43, September 1941, pp. 156–162. It was later included in Unpopular Opinions (Gollancz, 1946), pp. 116–122. See also her article “Are Women Human?”, included in the same volume, pp. 106–115, first given as a paper to a Women’s Society in 1938.
Public indignation about the broadcasts by P. G. Wodehouse continued. In response the Minister of Information, Duff Cooper, directed that a statement should be made by the B.B.C. This responsibility was entrusted to William Connor on the staff of the Daily Mirror, whose pen name was “Cassandra”. Under this alias, on 15 July, he broadcast a talk which gave great offence to D. L. S. and to others.1 See also her letter to The Daily Telegraph, 7 July 1941.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO SIR STEPHEN TALLENTS
Director of Talks
Broadcasting House
London W.I
15 July 1941
My dear Sir Stephen,
In writing to you, I am probably addressing my protest to the wrong person – indeed, I hope I am. When I was at Broadcasting House last month, you received me kindly, and I should like to think you were in no way responsible for tonight’s deplorable broadcast, and that you perhaps deprecate it as much as I do, and as many others must.
In view of the controversy that has arisen, I can understand that it may have been necessary to make some kind of public allusion to the unhappy affair of P. G. Wodehouse if only to dispel the notion that a popular and wealthy man would receive preferential treatment from authority. But was it necessary that this painful task should be entrusted to a speaker of whom I will say only that he faithfully serves and represents the journal whose name was advertised in the broadcast?
W7as it necessary that the attack should be made with such vulgarity, that it should be directed against professional reputation as well as against personal character, that it should be such as to inflict the greatest possible pain upon any friends or relatives who might have had the misfortune to hear it, and that it should be embellished with a nauseating Scriptural parallel which, in the context, in that manner, and from that speaker, was as shocking as a blasphemy?
That the lightmindedness which we admired, and the money with which we rewarded it, could lead a man to commit treason, whose penalty is death, is a fact grim enough to need little embroidery. And even the most sober statement should have been made only by someone whose standing and reputation set him above even the suspicion of envy, malice, or self-advertisement. If no man of unquestionable integrity could be found to undertake this hangman’s office, that might have raised a doubt whether the thing should be done at all. However weighty the reasons of State which prompted it, it would have been better left undone than done like this. It was done without dignity, done without decency, and probably so done as to defeat its own object; since nothing so moves men to the condonation of crime as the spectacle of a vindictive judge, whose relish in pronouncing sentence seems sharpened by personal spite.
I have never heard anything like this from the B.B.C. before; I hope I never shall again. It was as ugly a thing as ever was made in Germany.
Yours faithfully,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
Sir Stephen Tallents replied on 17 July stating officially that the broadcast was given under the direction of the Ministry of Information, but in his own handwriting he added the following note:
Since we have taken tea together I do not hesitate to add privately that this script was strongly objected to by all concerned at the B.B.C. The Minister ordered it, notwithstanding, to be broadcast. Your letter puts admirably, if all too temperately, what I felt about it. I should add only the point that it seemed to me contrary to the English tradition to abuse or condemn a man who could in no real sense answer. A disgusting business.
In the meantime D. L. S. had written also to the Public Relations Officer of the B.B.C.
1 Four years later George Orwell wrote an article “In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse”. First published in The Windmill in 1945, it was reprinted in Critical Essays, Seeker and Warburg, 1946, pp. 156–169.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
16 July 1941
Sir,
Mr. P. G. Wodehouse
I do not know Mr. Wodehouse. I deplore that he should have become the tool of enemy propaganda, and I believe that his conduct should be the subject of enquiry by a legal tribunal when he is in a position to explain and, if possible, defend it.
Nevertheless, I feel that “Cassandra’s” broadcast offends both justice and decency.
It appears to me to be a violation of the principles of justice that a man who cannot at present reply, and who may in the future have to appear before a judicial body, should in the meantime be attacked by an anonymous speaker, and that the B.B.C. should cooperate to give such an attack the widest possible publicity.
Furthermore, the terms of the broadcast must have struck many listeners as being in the worst possible taste. A compound of sneers and sanctimony, it descended almost to the Nazis’ own level, and left a sense of shame that public opinion should be so vulgarly misrepresented.
If in the national interest it is thought advisable to express condemnation of the actions of one of our countrymen in enemy hands, let it be done as forcefully as necessary but with dignity by some responsible (and not anonymous) speaker.
I do not flatter myself that this letter from an obscure citizen will carry any special weight, but you will doubtless receive many others in similar strain, and I write in the hope that their cumulative effect may assist you to assess national opinion.
Yours faithfully,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE REV. J. G. WILLIAMS
17 July 1941
Dear Mr. Williams,
Thank you so much for your letter. I enjoyed doing the talks and am very glad you were pleased with them. I expect they were rather stiff going for the majority, but my own feeling is that it may be quite as well to let people exercise their brains a bit; so many of them have the idea that the “simple gospel” is something that anybody can understand and put into practice without having to think twice about it.
I had a number of letters informing me that it was not possible for God to die and a number, of course, of the usual objectors furnished with texts to prove that Christ was not God. Also the usual collection of tracts and lunatics. I don’t think any letters came from the Forces, but then I don’t think the Forces have very much time to write letters. The Resurrection produced two protests – one accusing me of gross materialism and the other of being a Christian Scientist; so I think I must have about hit the happy medium.
What I have received is a number of thoughtful and appreciative letters asking whether my talks were going to be printed as they would like to study them. I have replied to this that it depends on what happens to the Series as a whole.1 Do you think it likely that anything could be done about this? And would they make a really coherent exposition of the creed if they were all published together? I have a feeling that my line of exposition was probably a good deal more rigid and dogmatic than any of the others and that the Series might be too much of a patchwork to make a study-book.
I spent Tuesday night up to one in the morning writing a solemn protest against that atrocious broadcast about P. G. Wodehouse. Did you ever hear anything more indecent? No doubt something had to be said about him, but why they should have chosen the most notorious contributor of the most notorious trash paper to deliver a talk, so vulgar and so envenomed by spite, passes my comprehension. We were all flabbergasted. One usually accuses the B.B.C. of too much public-school gentility, but this came straight out of the gutter. As for the nauseating scriptural parallel, it turned my stomach. I hope that some of you people in the Religious Department have had something to say about it.
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 The talks on the Nicene Creed were not published.
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO MAURICE B. RECKITT
22 July 1941
Dear Mr Reckitt,
I find that Miss Byrne is doing her article after all. I must not, therefore, take her place – particularly as the remarks which I quoted to Fr McLaughlin, and which caused him to suggest the writing of an article for Christendom, were her remarks in the first place.
However, since you seem to think you would like to have something from me on the subject, I am elaborating some of the more frivolous and plain-spoken portions of my letter to you and finishing up the “Martha-and-Mary” passage, so as to produce a more or less coherent piece of rhetoric, which, if you have the space and inclination, could appear in addition to Miss Byrne’s article, or in a subsequent number. I have left it to her to deal with the more practical aspects of the subject, on which she is far better qualified, both by training and experience, to speak than I am.
I do feel very strongly that this whole question is one with which the Church ought to deal, and deal honestly. Her past record is bad, and is responsible for a very great amount of anti-clerical feeling among educated and intelligent people, both men and women. The signs of the times suggest that after the War the issue will become an acute one, violently disputed; and unless the Church will face the fundamental issue, she will only make a surface contribution to the question, and bring herself into still further disrepute. I use that word quite advisedly.
If you think my article unsuited for the chaste pages of Christendom, I will take it away and place it elsewhere. But I would rather it appeared in a specifically Christian organ than that it should arrive, as it were, from outside, and be hailed as “another attack upon the Church”. Attacks upon the church are, I think, better delivered from inside, for obvious reasons.
Oh, no! don’t imagine that in my careless youth I really saw that Socialism was Capitalism turned inside out! I only, as I said, was faintly aware of a bad smell. Or rather, I was like a cousin1 of mine, who took an odd, instinctive dislike to her bedroom in a particular house. She said she never felt comfortable in it, and suffered from peculiarly vivid and disagreeable nightmares. Eventually (upon some occasion or other) a technical expert arrived upon the premises, whereupon: “DRAINS!” said he in a voice of authority; and revealed an escape of odourless sewer-gas directly below her bedroom window. She accepted this explanation as intellectually satisfactory; and it proved, in fact, to be correct. In much the same way, I accept the “economic heresy” as the fons et origo2 of my early instinctive dislike. But I could not have discovered it for myself.
G. K. Chesterton was a grand person – quite extraordinarily sound and shrewd about most things. Again and again I discover how right he was about literature and theology. But he seems never to have grasped that there was more than one kind of woman in the world: at any rate, there is only one kind of woman in his novels. But that is a common weakness among male writers – the correlative of the weakness of the female writer for whom every man is Edward Fairfax Rochester.3 These arc the dream-men and the dream-women, begotten by Fantasy upon Desire, and tell us more about the limitations of their creators than they do about the sexes they are supposed to typify.
I gather, by the way, that Mrs Cecil Chesterton4 has not dealt too kindly with Gilbert K. and Frances.5 This seems a pity, especially as both are dead, and so recently. “The sweet war-man is dead and rotten; sweet chucks, beat not the bones of the buried”.6 I don’t mind what hard blows are dealt to those who can hit back, but this working-off of old scores when there is no possibility of self-defence is indecent. I was glad that so many reviewers objected to it. I ought not to comment, not having yet read the book; but one passage that I did read quoted seemed to be quite indefensible. …
1 Margaret Leigh, who was her contemporary at Somerville.
2 Latin: fount and origin.
3 The character in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
4 Ada, the widow of G. K. Chesterton’s brother, author of The Chestertons, London, Chapman and Hall, 1941.
5 The wife of G. K. Chesterton.
6 Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act V, scene 2.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO F. H. JAEGAR1
23 July 1941
Dear Mr. Jaegar,
I quite recognise the importance of religious feeling, but I am quite sure that to concentrate on this, to the exclusion of the rational side of Christian philosophy, is a very great mistake. That is exactly what we have been doing of recent years, with the result that, so far as European society is concerned, the strong intellectual skeleton of Christian dogma has collapsed, bringing Christian ethics down with it. People of intelligence have drifted into the agnostic camp, and the world has become persuaded that it is impossible for any person with brains to be a Christian.
If the arousing of strong mystical emotion is a guarantee of true religion, then the Nazi religion of blood and soil is as good as any; nor is there any criterion by which we can condemn it. It represents, in fact, the direct appeal to the “unconscious” – a region which is packed with “original sin” and offers no very reliable guide to conduct.
As regards my broadcast talks, you will perhaps remember that I was not asked to talk in a general way about “religion”, but specifically to explain what the Church meant by certain clauses in a particular document: the Creed. This document does not purport to deal with feelings but with fact and doctrine. Perhaps you did not follow the whole series, and were therefore not aware of its general purpose?
Yours faithfully,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Identity unknown.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DR JAMES WELCH
1 August 1941
Dear Dr. Welch,
I expect you will think I have been a long time about sending the next play1 for you to see. I have, as you know, been very busy, partly through wrestling with Mr. Fenn’s programme on the Creed, and partly with getting out a new book.2 However, I have at last contrived to finish the play about John the Baptist, and I hope that I shall now be able to get along faster.
I am sending you the play, together with a copy of my letter to Mr. Gielgud which I have sent him along with the script. There are a couple of paragraphs in the letter in which I have explained my handling of the material. I have taken the line that nobody, not even Jesus, must be allowed to “talk Bible”. I expect we shall get a good many complaints that I have not preserved the beauty and eloquence of the authorized version, and that Jesus has been made to say things which don’t appear in the sacred original. It seems to me frightfully important that the thing should be made to appear as real as possible, and above all, that Jesus should be presented as a human being and not like a sort of symbolic figure doing nothing but preach in eloquent periods, with all the people round him talking in everyday style. We must avoid, I think, a Docetist3 Christ, whatever happens – even at the risk of a little loss of formal dignity. I hope very much you will agree about this. I cannot forget the remark of one of my secretaries (which I believe I have quoted to you before) when she typed my other play, He That Should Come. She said, “I never realized before that Mary and Joseph, and all those, were real people.”
As I said to Mr. Gielgud, the material for this play was extremely difficult to bring into dramatic form, and I have had to take slight liberties with the text, such as telescoping the two occasions on which John Baptist pointed out Jesus to the multitudes and the disciples, and also making his arrest follow immediately upon the “bridegroom” speech. This is just for dramatic concentration, and, as you will see, I have followed the suggestion that James and John, as well as Andrew, were John Baptist’s disciples, and Judas also. This enables me to get the characters firmly planted at the start and makes it unnecessary to invent anonymous disciples of John Baptist, who would be of no importance for the succeeding plays.
I hope you won’t mind these tamperings with the text – if that is the right word for them.
I am thankful to hear from Mr. Gielgud that production is postponed until December;4 that will enable me to make a better job of the thing. I have talked over general questions of production with him, and I feel pretty sure that he will be able to find us the right sort of actors, so far as war conditions allow. I know he will do a sensitive and reverent production, and I will promise you not to start any more rows!!
I hope all is well with you at Bristol. Thank Heaven and the Russians5 for a period of rest from bombing and late nights.
With kind remembrances to Mr. Fenn and Mr. Williams,
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
P.S. I don’t know that the small children will make very much of this play, the subject is not very suitable for them, but I have tried to do what I can to engage their attention by putting in the scene with the children at the beginning.
1 “The King’s Herald”, the second play.
2 The Mind of the Maker, which had just been published.
3 See letter to S. Dark, 6 April 1938, note 4.
4 The first play, “Kings in Judaea”, was broadcast on 21 December 1941.
5 Hitler had invaded Russia.
TO MAURICE B. RECKITT
11 August 1941
Dear Mr Reckitt,
Proof herewith.1 You will see that I have obstinately refused to be browbeaten by the printer!…
Yes, indeed; the predatory American female is precisely the logical and inevitable outcome of the “functional” attiutude to female nature – the exploited has become an exploiter of a very ruthless and disgusting type. Claire Boothe’s play, The Women,2 is its most bitter commentary, and the savage joy with which it was received on both sides of the Atlantic was revealing. I imagine that Miss Byrne will have something to say about it. But nothing else can possibly come of a society where the keeping of idle women is prized as a badge of wealth and success. It is revenge – a kind of wild justice.
Yours very sincerely,
Dorothy L. Sayers
1 Of her article, “The Human-not-quite-Human”.
2 Claire Boothe (1903–1987), the wife of Henry Luce, and United States Ambassador to Italy, was the author of the play The Women (1936).
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO IVY SHRIMPTON
19 August 1941
Dearest Ivy,
I seem to have got rather mixed up about what’s paid for and what isn’t, however, some money has just come in, so I enclose cheque £20 – will you let me know how far this goes. I seem to have spent most of my time lately trying to find servants and to catch up with jobs that ought to have been done weeks ago. Otherwise, things go much as usual, except that there is a perpetual noise of our bombers going to Germany instead of Hitler’s bombers going to London! This way is pleasanter. Not that we ever got many bombs, but one dislikes the feeling that other people are getting them. However, one good thing about living in East Anglia is that people imagine we live in perpetual showers of bombs, and therefore evacuate themselves into other places, to the confusion of the rationing arrangements and the congestion of the traffic. Now the jugginses arc all rushing back to London, and I suppose when the winter uproar begins again they will all rush out again. I was sorry to hear about your Aunt Marie. One or two of my friends have been bombed out too, but so far, touch wood, none of them have been killed. Well, that’s war – and better on the whole than the last war, when the young men went and left the old people and the women feeling ashamed to be safe. Anyway, let’s hope the Russians give Hitler plenty to think about for a bit.
Best love,
D. L. S.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
MR. J. WILSHIN1
21 August 1941
Dear Mr. Wilshin,
Many thanks for your interesting letter. I entirely agree with you about the need for a change of outlook and I do understand how you, and people like yourself feel about it. The trouble is, as you will realise, that changes of outlook come slowly, and have to seep down, as it were, “from the top.” I mean that the really big and profound thinkers have to do their thinking first, and then the new ideas spread slowly, through people like me, who try to understand them and explain them to the fairly well-educated, and so on, down to the simple and popular sort of books, till at last they get “into the papers.” By the time they get there, the big thinkers have got a bit further on, and so it continues, with the mass of the nation always trailing a bit behind.
It has been the fashion lately to pretend that the big thinkers – the real trained minds – don’t count, and that the ordinary man can get all the guidance he needs from cheap journalism and “practical men”. But that isn’t really true. The outlook that we have been suffering from lately – the idea that nothing matters except to “get on” and that whatever pays is right – can be traced back to the materialist philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It did its harm very slowly, though it was tremendously helped on by the “industrial revolution”, and (as I tried to show in Begin Here) by the new kinds of sociology and psychology, based on the scientific discoveries of the machine age and the age of evolution. Now, the tip-top scientists are not nearly so sure of themselves as they were. But the new ideas are very difficult, and we can’t expect them to be put into popular language all at once. And meanwhile, the people who have absorbed the nineteenth-century ideas are finding out that they don’t work, and are discouraged, because they don’t know of anything to put in their place. But they are still steeped in those ideas, which have become so much a part of their outlook that they hardly realize how much they are taking them for granted. The idea, for instance, that the value of all work is to be measured in money – profits and wages and expenditure. People denounce capitalism – but they do really still admire wealth and idleness, and go to see films about idle rich people in America, and wish they could live like that. And they do still in their hearts despise people who think or teach, and call them “stuffy highbrows”, and look down on imagination as “not practical”, at the very same time that they are complaining of “unimaginative” statesmen and lack of “vision” in public affairs.
I don’t think the working people present nearly such a difficult problem as the middle classes. They live much closer to hard facts, and I always find an audience of working men very keen and interested in problems which need a bit of thinking-out. The really difficult people are those who have enjoyed a little bit of social security, without ever really needing to think and without ever really needing to struggle with life. My real job is, I think, to try and get hold of them – the people in the villas, the young people in the universities, the people who can get hold of books if they really want to and have enough education to try their teeth on something that isn’t quite written in words of one syllable. Because those people are very much bewildered, and very unhappy, and there are a great many of them. One can’t talk to everybody in the same book, but by tackling the people nearest to one’s self one may get a little bit done.
It is, of course, quite true that ideas can’t be violently imposed on people. In my novels – especially the last two or three2 – I have tried to “infiltrate” a few general ideas, especially about the value of work and the absolute necessity for “intellectual integrity”. But, as you understand so clearly, this kind of thing has to be done very carefully and must arise naturally out of the story. A story that has great gobbets of philosophy dumped into it very readily becomes unreadable. So, since the war started, I’ve been going at the thing rather more directly – an article here, a speech there, a pamphlet or two, and a good bit of correspondence with readers who seemed interested. But there are so many wrong ideas that need up-rooting that it is very slow work.
However, you may be assured that the thinkers “at the top” are really getting hold of the right end of the stick and – if things go reasonably well – you will presently see the new out-look beginning to make its appearance. The great thing is that there are so many people who are really anxious to think matters out afresh. The war – especially the things that led up to the war – have given everybody a nasty jolt, and made them much readier than they would have been otherwise to admit that something has gone wrong with our sense of values, both in Europe and America.
I don’t know that I can help you, personally, very much – indeed, you seem to have arrived at the right place already – but if there is any particular problem you want to examine I might be able to suggest books and so on. I’m sure that the best way to tackle the whole thing is for anybody who does come across a book, or article, or statement which seems helpful, to draw his friends’ attention to it and discuss it with them. Like that, the ideas get spread about, and people come to realise that these matters are being thought about and that the ideas are really in the air. Then comes the next step – acting upon them, even if it’s only in a small way, such as taking a paper a little less squalid than the Daily Mirror, or interesting one’s self in what the Borough Council is doing, or listening-in to something a trifle more “highbrow” than hot jazz, or admiring a film for good dialogue and good photography, rather than for the dresses worn by the star and the amount spent on production. It’s just in those small ways that one does gradually learn to acquire a new attitude to the really important matters; and they are ways that everybody can learn and that cost nobody anything. But so often people get disheartened because the difficulties look so big, and they feel that nothing can be done, except by huge national efforts and the expenditure of a lot of public money – with, as you say, the countenance and approval of Lord So-and-so and the influential Mrs. Thingummy-jig.
I’m afraid these suggestions sound very dull and trivial; but, as I said, if there is any line of inquiry you want to follow up, let me know, and I will be of help if I can.
Yours very truly,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Identity unknown.
2 The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, and Busman’s Honeymoon.
TO THE REV. T. WIGLEY1
1 September 1941
Dear Sir,
With much of what you say I agree: in particular that a great many religious difficulties arise out of entirely misconceived and mistaken notions of what Christian doctrine actually is. But it seems to me that it is impracticable to confine ourselves to “modern words and expressions” in dealing with theology, and that for two reasons:
1. The mere fact that we have to deal with the Bible obliges us to make use of the theological ideas and expressions in which it abounds, and which naturally reflect the current philosophies of the times at which its various books were written. Many, indeed, of the most crude and erroneous ideas about doctrine (especially as regards redemption) are directly derived from the reading of the Bible without sufficient knowledge of its theological and historical background.
2. The older theological words and expressions formed a real technical vocabulary, and it is at least possible to discover and say what they meant to the theologians who used them. But modern words and expressions change their connotation so rapidly, and are used so loosely by scientists and other amateur philosophers that they are at the very least as misleading as the old technical vocabulary and much more vague. From the purely practical point of view, there is an advantage in keeping the old words as the basis of a theological vocabulary, while explaining and interpreting them as far as possible so as to convey their meaning to the modern mind.
If we do not do this, we tend, I think, to get precisely the situation that has arisen: the general assumption that the language of the Bible is completely irrelevant to the present “world-view”, and a breach of continuity with the past which is fatal to any historical religion. And there is always the danger of allowing people to suppose that our modern times are so wholly unlike any other times that the fundamental facts about man’s nature have wholly changed with changing circumstances. I doubt whether, for example, we gain anything by abolishing the words “original sin” and substituting evolutionary terms about the “ape and tiger”, or psycho-analytical terms about schizophrenia and the sub-conscious – though we may use these latter terms to illustrate some of the implications of “original sin”. The newer words are much more limited in scope than the old and are even more readily superseded by fresh theories; and further, they have the disadvantage of appearing to explain – or explain away – phenomena in terms of some particular branch of science, whereas “original sin”, being a purely theological term, belongs properly to its own science and commits one to no passing scientific fashion. There are a number of new theological expressions – but these are, for the most part, quite as difficult for the common man as the older ones. D. Huizinga in In the Shadow of Tomorrow2 issues a significant warning against the extremely ephemeral nature of modern scientific concepts; Eddington, failing to come to grips with the necessarily analogical nature of all language, seems to suggest in desperation that we should abandon language and think only in mathematical formulae and ejaculations; Michael Roberts in The Modern Mind3 traces the changes in the use and meaning of certain words in a way that shows how necessary it is to keep in mind the actual meaning of any word at the time when it was used when the document in question was written. He points out, for example, that the word “reason”, which at one time was held to include the whole intelligence together with the creative imagination, and was thus a fairly adequate translation of 
, became restricted in the mouths of the eighteenth-century scientists to mean only the logical faculty. Consequently, all arguments about “the Divine Reason” are apt to end in misunderstanding. The original word , however, does not provoke these confusions, provided its technical meaning is explained to the student. There is, in fact, no modern word that precisely corresponds to – because recent methods of thought have tended to split up that general concept into a number of more limited concepts – word, reason, energy, intellect, imagination, and so forth. It is quite likely that this tendency to over-analysis will correct itself. In the meantime, it is of some assistance to know that St. Thomas Aquinas had already detected the tendency and made it plain that, theologically, the ratio scientiae could not be considered synonymous with the ratio sapientiae.4
I am quite of your mind about the teaching put forward in many churches; but I should not have said that this erred very much nowadays on the side of being too theological. My own complaint would be that it is apt to take the theology far too much for granted, and, instead of explaining and interpreting that, to offer either a set of ethical exhortations which are pointless apart from the theology on which they are based, or else a good deal of talk about religious experience which means nothing to the hearer who has not shared that experience, and is seldom directly communicable.
You may be interested in a letter I have had from a master in a public school,5 who is, as he says, in a position to “know what the young men want”. He writes, “Christian principles without Christian dogma leaves most of them stone cold. But they’ll take dogma with both hands and ask for more.” The impression I get, for what it is worth, is that the modernist position belongs, like so many things calling themselves modern, to the last century, and that the younger people are looking for something that can be called dateless; and in their search they seem to be making the double swing back to Aquinas and Augustine – since tomorrow always seems to have to build itself on the day before yesterday; it never builds on yesterday – perhaps the greatest mistake of the “evolutionist” in applying their biological analogy in the spiritual field was to suppose that it did.
Thank you very much for your letter, and for the things you so kindly say about my books. I hope you will forgive me for appearing contentious – but the matter seems to me of too much urgent importance not to be discussed as frankly as possible.
Yours faithfully,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Identity unknown.
2 D. Huizinga (1872–1945), Dutch historian and essayist, author of The Waning of the Middle Ages (tr. F. Hopman, 1924) and Homo Ludens (1938). In the Shadow of Tomorrow: a Diagnosis of the Spiritual Distemper of our Time was published in 1936. D. L. S. quotes from this work three times in The Mind of the Maker (Methuen, p. 18, note 1; pp. 32–33; p. 35).
3 Published in 1937. Michael Roberts was a schoolmaster and a poet.
4 Latin: ratio scientiae, the order of knowledge; ratio sapientiae, the order of understanding.
5 Eton College; see following letter.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO J. D. UPCOTT1
Keate House
Eton College
Windsor
1 September 1941
Dear Mr. Upcott,
Thank you so much for your extremely interesting letter. I’m extremely glad to know what you tell me about “what the young men want”. As you say, you are there, and you know. I can only guess – and though it’s a novelist’s business to guess, and guess right (since one’s livelihood depends on guessing right) one is always liable to be shouted down by the people who clamour incessantly that young people don’t want any of this nasty dogma. I have a shrewd suspicion that most of the anti-dogmatics are elderly people, who were brought up in the old-fashioned “Liberal” tradition and are quite out of touch with the young; but they don’t always produce their birth-certificates to back up their views, so it’s hard to be sure.
But, looking round at the world as it is, it seems to me (I speak as a fool) that youth is all out for dogma, and that if boys and girls grow up imagining that Christianity has no dogma to give them, they’ll give themselves over to political dogma or economic dogma in its crudest and most intransigent form. And whether they end by accepting the Christian philosophy or not, it seems only right and reasonable that they should at least be told that there is one, of a quite coherent and really relevant kind, and what it is. Otherwise, as Michael Roberts says in The Recovery of the West,2 they find themselves comparing their adult knowledge and science and politics with the simple notions of Christianity they acquired at their mothers’ knees, and naturally conclude that the Christian religion is only fit to be put away with the other childish things.
I’m very glad your 16-year-olds enjoyed The Devil to Pay.3 The imminence of the war, and other things, spoilt its reception in Town; also, I think it was, in a way, about a year too early for most people’s mood. None of the critics and few of the public grasped the meaning of the Helen episode and the devastating relapse into irresponsibility. It was a little terrifying to find out how many of the audience thought it was so much nicer for Faustus to be a “dear little doggie” than to pay the price of his human dignity. De te fabula4 was the only possible comment. Today, they might make more of it – especially the younger ones, who do seem to be grasping the idea of responsibility. At least, I hope so. But I’m rather afraid of all these “leaders” who seem to be heading towards the planned state and the planned citizen. Perhaps I have been reading too much Hermann Rauschning;5 but I do seem to detect in nearly all the plans for a New-Order the doctrinaire passion for over-simplification which refuses to take account of the complexity of human nature or of the paradox that causes all human absolutes to issue in their own opposites. People proclaim peace, justice, liberty, democracy – as though by saying the word they could impose the thing – never mind what we mean by peace, liberty, justice and democracy. Never mind theology – all we have to do is to practise the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount; that’s all we have to do; nothing, obviously, could be more simple and easy.
The other day, a well-known Socialist said to Maurice Reckitt that she now realised how much their youthful efforts had been nullified by “failure to face two problems: the problem of Evil and the problem of Power”. And the other day I tried on a bright youngish Socialist Reinhold Niebuhr’s statement: “Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.”6 He found it terrifying (so it is), and indicated that he didn’t want to believe it was true. Perhaps the young wouldn’t mind so much leaving “security” behind them, and setting out, “A fire on the one hand and a deep water on the other”, if people would only tell them that that is what is called for. I don’t know. But it seems to be a fact that you can’t get anybody to do anything worth a damn by telling them that everything’s all right and the Golden Age just on the other side of the mirror; they just turn into dear little doggies and innocently let hell loose everywhere.
By the way, all the conjurations in Devil to Pay are quite authentic – guaranteed to produce results. I can’t definitely say we conjured up anything worse than ourselves, either in Canterbury or London; but the production was attended by a series of extraordinary difficulties and catastrophes in both places. I hope no peculiar effects were observable at Eton!
With again many thanks,
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 John Dalgairns Upcott taught classics and history at Eton from 1919 to 1945. He died in 1962.
2 See letter to the Rev. T. Wigley, 1 September 1941, note 3. The Recovery of the West was published in 1941.
3 There is no record of a performance of the play at Eton. Mr Upcott may have arranged a dramatized reading of it as part of “private business”.
4 Latin: it speaks of thee.
5 Hermann Rauschning, an East Prussian military aristocrat who joined the Nazi movement in its early days. Later disillusioned, he wrote two books in which he exposed its essential nihilism: Germany’s Revolution of Destruction, tr. 1939 (which D. L. S. recommended under “Books to Read” in Begin Here) and Hitler Speaks, tr. 1939.
6 See letter to the Sister Superior, 25 June 1941.
TO DR JAMES WELCH
17 September 1941
Dear Dr. Welch,
I didn’t acknowledge your former letter, because I gathered that a second was to follow it. I will now make haste to acknowledge them both, before dashing off to Hayward’s Heath to address some people there about Christian New Orders and things.1
I’m so glad you all found “The King’s Herald” interesting as a play – because when writing for production that is the first and greatest commandment on which hang all the Law and the Prophets. I’m quite prepared to find that a few people may be startled or shocked – I don’t mind if you don’t. The proportion of shocked people in my fan-mail for He That Should Come was exactly one in eleven, which isn’t too bad, I think, since the angry people are usually much more ready to write letters than the contented people.
What you say about the theophany2 touches really the central point of all this – the central point, I mean, of what I’ve been trying to do in these Bible plays. My feeling is that one of the principal reasons why the Gospel story is apt to appear unreal and stained-glass-window-like is, oddly enough, the enormous importance we attach to all the incidents. For the Evangelists, and for us, looking at the whole story in the light of what we know, Jesus is the centre, not only of His own story, but of all history, and it is with great difficulty that we remember how differently He must have appeared to His own contemporaries. In so many religious plays and books He is shown surrounded by people who are, so to speak, self-consciously assisting at, or assisting in, the fulfilment of prophecies. But they weren’t really like that – they said, “Is not this the carpenter?” – adding, indignantly, “But we know these people” – and as for new prophets, though no doubt they always caused an excitement, most of them would be nine-day-wonders, and not really so urgently absorbing as the price of oil and the iniquities of tax-gatherers. The thing that is so dramatic, and so convincingly “real” is that the course of the world’s history was being violently changed, and that practically nobody took any notice. To us the baptism of Christ is the earth-shaking moment when the Son of Man realized fully that He was the Son of God; but [to] the bystanders (who apparently didn’t see the vision) that baptism would be just one of many – and to my “Hannah” the exciting thing would be that this was, unexpectedly, “Mary’s boy” – an old friend with news from home. (It seems pretty clear from Luke IV.16–30 that Jesus had never said or done anything remarkable in the 30 silent years – he doesn’t seem even to have been looked upon as the local infant phenomenon, still less as the local miracle monger. The Nazarenes complained that they weren’t getting any of the exciting “things” that had been done at Capernaum.) So Jesus undergoes a really terrific experience – and we feel as though the world ought to have stood respectfully still – but instead it comes chattering and clattering in on Him, occupied with its own affairs. I’ve tried to indicate that it is, after all, the perfectly balanced temperament that can control itself and deal graciously with the intrusive world – that it is John who is thrown off his balance and can’t attend to anything, and Jesus who can find time and patience to attend to a gossipy middle-aged woman and a couple of children. Incidentally, I put in this bit, and the children generally, because it seemed to offer the possibility of something fairly simple for the younger listeners. All the rest of the John Baptist story is difficult stuff for children – repentance, and all that. …
I struggled a good deal with “thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness” but could find nothing for it that children could make anything of. It implies so much that needs knowledge – theological and historical, and it is all mixed up with the difficult business of sinlessness, and the vicarious assumption of the sins of the world; so I thought it best on the whole to substitute a simple phrase that might convey something rather than keep a difficult phrase that couldn’t convey anything much.3
John’s stammer – This sort of thing always looks maddening in print, but I think it will be all right in production. I’ll explain to Val that we don’t want a real stammer, but only a little trick of stumbling, due to his tripping over his own eager tongue. They did a little play the other night, in which the actor who played Charles Lamb4 had got just the right effect, and it was very attractive. For broadcasting, any trifling trick of speech is of enormous help to the listener, because it helps him in the immensely difficult job of distinguishing one male voice from the other. And there are so many male voices in the Gospel story; it’s going to be hard work for the listeners however much help we give them. I’m sure you can trust Val to do that part of it all right.
Humour – dreadfully difficult – especially as the reported humour of Christ tends to be of the ironical kind which appeals to the adult mind. I owe to R.A. Edwards,5 by the way, the suggestion that the conjunction of Simon’s name with Simon’s face must have been entertainingly incongruous. We’ve got to depend a lot on the actors about all this.
By the way (à propos of the comforting assurance to Andrew that the bread came from the baker) – I wish one of the Evangelists had thought to tell us what the disciples felt about living with a person who could turn water into wine and multiply loaves and fishes. Miracles of healing are not really so disconcerting – but the first staggering realization that solid material things might slide away and turn into something else – what did they think about it? Supposing somebody said to you, “I was seriously tempted to turn stones into bread” – even if you didn’t think he was mad or lying, and indeed especially if you didn’t think he was mad or lying – would you feel comfortable? The Evangelists are so exasperatingly matter-of-fact about themselves. The only thing that really seems to have upset anybody was the miraculous draught of fishes. I suppose that really was the first miracle (though I haven’t room for it) – but even so, fish in the proper place for fish – though in large numbers – isn’t quite so disquieting as the other things. …
Whip or goad6 – I’m sure you are perfectly right about the goad. But how can one ask the “effects” people to make a noise like a goad? One’s only got people’s ears to appeal to, and a whip helps a lot to make the starting-up of the cart audible. If you think strict accuracy essential, we’ll do without it. But actually I’m not trying very hard to be pedantically Oriental. I feel that the best way is to give a slight Oriental flavour here and there, but to combine this with as much familiar daily-life detail as possible. Like those Renaissance painters, who dress Christ and the disciples in “Bible” costume, and Herod’s soldiers in vaguely classical armour, and surround them with men and women in more or less sixteenth-century costume with a dash of oriental trimmings here and there. That’s why I made John Baptist talk of the “bride-groom’s friend” as the “best man” – a person the children know all about, instead of trying to preserve all the detail of the Eastern ceremony. I’m doing the same with the Marriage at Cana – keeping all the necessary water-pots, wine-skins and what not, but letting a friend of the family propose the health of the young couple much as it might be done by Mr. Smith of Surbiton, and avoiding pedantic exactitude of detail. It won’t please the historical-costume experts, but it’s so much easier to get life into the thing that way.
The next play7 is done, and you shall have it as soon as it is typed. But I’m depressed and discouraged by hearing from Val that after the first two plays the programme people are cutting the time down from forty-five minutes to forty. It is simply maddening to have all these upsets and alterations. Five minutes means a difference of about 3 and a half pages, and that’s a serious matter – because it’s always the lively, atmospheric bits that have to be sacrificed. Can you possibly do anything about it? Surely, that one day in the week, some fragment of light music or something can be dispensed with? What bothers one is the uncertainty. One tries to plan the plays so that they will each bear a reasonable proportion to the thing as a whole – but what will have happened by the time we get to the Last Supper? Will that find itself suddenly curtailed to half-an-hour? They treat this play-writing game as though it were like reeling off a set of gramophone records. But honestly it’s the most difficult and delicate job I’ve ever struck and at each fresh obstruction one’s heart goes down with a bump, and one’s enthusiasm and interest get sort of sucked out of one. I seem to be always complaining about something, don’t I? I know there’s a war on8 – but why pick on Christ, if you take my meaning? Can’t somebody else suffer, for a change?
I don’t think my “creative genius” is likely to conflict – consciously, at any rate – with the narrative; though of course one’s obliged to take a few liberties of compression, addition, and adjustment, to avoid having a mere succession of disconnected episodes. And sometimes one has to interpret explicitly what seem to be the implications, and one may easily go wrong. I find, as I had expected, that where St. John (or whoever it was) is giving an “eye-witness report” he is incomparable. All his characters are real people and all his conversations are lively and precise. He leaves out a lot of what had been written down already, and he often summarizes briefly the things he didn’t see for himself; but whenever he goes into detail he knows where people were sitting, and what they said and the connection between one thing and the other – the perfect “source” for the playwright.
I’m not sure when next I shall be in Town. I’m dashing about the country rather a lot these next few months, but I’d very much like to see you, and I’ll let you know next time I can manage to be up on a Tuesday or Wednesday.
Please remember me very kindly to Mr. Fenn and Mr. Williams.
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Talk given on 17 September at 8 p.m. at the Senior School in Hayward’s Heath. It was the 4th and last in a series entitled “A Christian New Order”. It was acclaimed as a “profound and brilliantly reasoned discourse” (The Mid-Sussex Times, 23 September 1941).
2 A revelation or manifestation of God, such as occurred at the baptism of Jesus.
3 Matthew, chapter 4, verse 15, relating the baptism of Jesus: And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered him. In The Man Born to be King, “The King’s Herald”, scene 1, Jesus says: “Do as I ask you now, John. It’s right to begin this way, like everybody else.”
4 Charles Lamb (1775–1834), essayist and poet.
5 R. A. Edwards, The Upper Room (London, Methuen, 1941).
6 Dr Welch had pointed out that oxen were urged on by a goad, not a whip. Cf. D. L. S.’ reference to this, The Man Born to be King, Introduction (Gollancz, p. 26): “It is doubtless true, as somebody pointed out, that a yoke of oxen would be driven, not with a whip but with a goad; but the lash of a whip can be heard on the air, whereas it is useless to ask the studio-effects-man to stand by making a noise like an ox-goad.”
7 “A Certain Nobleman”.
8 Eching the current reply to any request: “I suppose you know there’s a war on!”
