The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 2, 1937-1943: From Novelist to Playwright
Page 7
10 Hamlet, Act V, scene ii.
11 Marjorie Barber.
12 Alastair Macintyre, who played the part of Constable Sellon.
13 Alban Brownlow Limpus (1878–1941), producing manager.
14 Lucie Mannheim (1905–1976), German actress. She played as Sonia Duveen in The Last Straw at the Comedy Theatre in September 1937.
15 Maurice Denham (b.1909), who played the minor part of George at the Comedy Theatre and was promoted to play Sellon at the Victoria Palace.
16 D. L. S.’ husband, Atherton Fleming, known as “Mac”. See Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul, chapter 11.
17 The New Statesman and Nation, 11 September 1937, pp. 384, column 1 and 386, column 2. The reviewer, William Buchan, described the play as “interesting and exciting”…“a straightforward, balanced, and tidy piece of work, with no loose ends about it. The good sense and astringent humour which makes Miss Sayers’ novels so engaging are here to advantage.”
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO JOHN DICKSON CARR
17 September 1937
Dear Mr. Carr,
Of course, do please make any reference you like to Gaudy Night; I shall be honoured by the interest and approbation of Dr. Fell.1
I, too, should have enjoyed a more prolonged discussion at the last meeting;2 as you know, I am a confirmed sitter-up, but one cannot expect everybody to share these morbid tastes.
Life is full of activity at the moment, since as you may have seen in the Daily Mail, Busman’s Honeymoon is transferring to the Victoria Palace on Monday week with two new leads, Basil Foster as Peter; I think he is going to be very good, and so is the new girl, but all this means extra agitation and rehearsals.
With best wishes for the new book (mine3 is suffering sadly from theatrical competition!)
Very sincerely yours,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 John Dickson Carr’s detective. No novel by John Dickson Carr is found to contain a reference to Gaudy Night, but there is a reference to The Nine Tailors in The Hollow Man (Hamish Hamilton, 1935, chapter 17), where Gideon Fell says in the course of a lecture on locked room mysteries: “I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life, I much prefer to listen to…the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul.”
2 Of the Detection Club.
3 i.e. “Thrones, Dominations”.
Herbert Hamilton Kelly (1860–1950), founder of the Society of the Sacred Mission at Kelham Hall, Nottinghamshire had considerable influence on the Church of England, partly through his own writing, partly through the community’s missionary work and the training of ordinands. The Zeal of Thy House was first published by Gollancz in June 1937. The final speech of the archangel Michael, which had been omitted from the performance, was there included.1 It caught the eye of Father Kelly who was moved to write D. L. S. a letter destined to have important consequences. He began by saying how wonderful and delightful it was to find a writer “of your influence who actually realizes and can state the vital force of a Christian faith in God and His Christ, not in the abstract fashion which is all we theologians can teach, but in a living, pictorial fashion which common people can follow”. He then asked: “I wonder if you recognize, or are interested in recognizing, how closely your book images the principles of the Athanasian Creed – the two-fold necessity of faith in the Trinity of God, and the Incarnation ”. Thus Father Kelly was the first theologian to recognize the relevance of the play and in particular of the archangel’s speech to Trinitarian theology. The correspondence which developed between them constitutes much of the substance of articles which D. L. S. was soon to write, and especially of her book The Mind of the Maker.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO FATHER HERBERT KELLY
4 October 1937
Dear Father Kelly,
Before I attempt, in the mediaeval manner, to “defend my thesis”, let me thank you most sincerely for your kind and sympathetic understanding of what I was trying to do in The Zeal of Thy House. I have been pleased, touched, and also amused by many friendly reviews, announcing that the play was “about” this, that, or the other; but it is with a deep chuckle of delight that I greet the discovery, by an isolated person here and there, that this is actually a play “about” that dusty and disagreeable thing, Christian Dogma. The neglect of dogma is the curse of nearly all religious plays, from the playwright’s point of view. The dogma of the Incarnation is the most dramatic thing about Christianity, and indeed, the most dramatic thing that ever entered into the mind of man; but if you tell people so, they stare at you in bewilderment. Yet one would think (to adapt Voltaire) that if the Incarnation had never happened, it would have been necessary for some dramatist to invent it.2 However, since it is not the playwright’s business to argue but to present, the only thing one can do is to put it on the stage (in any form the Censor of Plays will permit) and let it speak for itself.
In this case, there was no doubt at all about the dramatic effect of the final scene in which Michael argues the matter out with William. It held the house attentive and excited, though there is absolutely no movement on the stage and the whole drama is contained in the dogmatic argument. But it was interesting to discover, as I did, how many people (whether nominal Christians or not) either were Arians,3 or believed that the Church taught a purely Arian doctrine. However often they had heard or recited the Creeds, it had obviously never sunk into their minds that Christ was supposed to be God in any real sense of the word. The Good and Suffering Man was a familiar idea to them; but the idea of a Suffering God was a staggering novelty. This isn’t exaggeration – some of them quite simply and innocently told me so – especially some of my own actors, who, having seen the play through two months of rehearsal and ten performances, had had plenty of time in which to chew it over. I explained as much as I could (doing my best to steer clear of Sabellianism,4 Patripassianism5 and all the other terrifying heresies which lie in wait for amateurs who try to explain things over the lunch-table), assuring them that the doctrine really was that Christ was always and equally God and Man. But I had to remind them that I was a playwright and not a theological expert and should certainly go wrong if I tried to express the matter otherwise than in terms of my own craft, and beg them, if they really wanted to know, to go to somebody better qualified. I took the line that I wasn’t asking them to believe anything (because earnest middle-aged females imploring young men to believe things do more harm than good) but that the play was meant to be a statement of what the doctrine really was, after which they could take it or leave it. It does seem just as well, if you’re going to disbelieve a thing, to find out exactly what you are disbelieving. And I do honestly think we have heard a great deal too much lately about the “Human Jesus”. That attractive and picturesque figure has almost succeeded in pushing the Divine Logos off the stage altogether, with the result that God the Father appears as the villain of the piece, which isn’t orthodox. For my Angel Cassiel – a young professional actor, who had been brought up a Unitarian – the play was a most peculiar experience! Being condemned, poor dear, to stand and listen for an hour-and-three-quarters, immovably trussed up in a pair of wings, while the characters argued about the nature of Christ, he could at first make neither head nor tail of what was going on. But, having a very sensitive and intelligent mind, he applied himself to working the thing out, and found it most surprising and interesting.
One thing that interested me was to discover a new application of that much-disputed Athanasian statement that “this is the Catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved”. Artistically speaking, it turns out to be a plain statement of fact. I mean that, unless you keep the God-Man idea properly balanced, your play, as a mere piece of dramatic structure, falls to pieces and makes no artistic sense:6 which brings me to the defence of my thesis; because the play is really chiefly “about” the Christian dogma as it p
resents itself to the creative artist.
And therefore 1. The speech about the Trinity. This isn’t meant to be a re-statement of St. Augustine (whose illustration, if I ever knew it, I had forgotten). It is, I’m afraid, only an effort of my own to make an illustration of three-in-oneness familiar to every creative artist and drawn from his own experience. (The play, by the way, was written to fit in with the Festival of Arts and Crafts at Canterbury, and that is why it is all about craftsmen.) St. Augustine says that God, in making Man, made an image of the Triune. I am trying to say that Man (made a craftsman in the image of the Master-Craftsman) in making a work of art presents also an image of the Triune, because “every work of creation” is three-fold.7 Now, it is a fact that when you set out to make a book (or anything else, of course, but I naturally tend to think in terms of books), you are simultaneously making three books, which are all the same book:
(a) The Book as You Think It, which I have called the Idea (in the ordinary, not the philosophic sense). This presents itself all at once, in a dispassionate kind of way, with the end and the beginning all there together, a timeless sort of thing with no distinguishable parts, just existing (here, I suppose one links up with St. Augustine) as if it had always been there and always would be.
(b) The Book as You Write It. You can’t have the Idea without, at the same time seeing it as a sequence in time and a struggle with the material. This I have called the Energy, and it is, quite literally, “begotten of that Idea” from the beginning, because the one without the other is unthinkable. The Energy produces, of course, a visible “incarnation” of the book in material form, but it exists before that and goes on after, so that it and the Idea co-exist inevitably and are still the same book.
(c) The Book as You and They Read It. This is the most difficult to explain. I have called it the Power. It isn’t the same thing as the Energy, though it proceeds (in the most orthodox manner) from the Idea and the Energy together. It is the thing that you give out to your readers and your readers give back to you; and it, too, exists from the beginning, because every book is written for somebody, so that there is a perpetual exchange of Power going on. I mean, you can’t write a book in vacuo; even if every other person in the world were annihilated, the writer would always be his own reader, so to speak. So that your book comes back to you, as it were, from the minds to which it is addressed – still the same book, but with a different personality, “neither compounding the persons nor dividing the substance”.
[Added at foot of page]
Of course, to make the analogy go on all-fours, the artist should have created his own public, but that is only true metaphorically. Still, all analogies break down somewhere, because if anything were exactly like another thing at all points it would be the thing. Even St. Athanasius’ illustration about “the reasonable soul and flesh” lands you in awful difficulties about human reason if you take it literally.
But Idea, Energy, Power – it is always the same book; at least, it would be in an ideally perfect book, though, as William truly observes, “no man’s work is perfect,”8 and often the Idea is feeble, the Energy ill-directed and the Power conspicuously lacking.9 But the writer would, I think, recognize the illustration as being sufficiently expressive of his own experience to serve as an illustration – no more, of course than that. And if you were to ask him which of the three was “the real Book” – as Thought, Written or as Read – he could only say, “each and all of them,” because you can’t really separate them, even in thought.
Perhaps this explanation sounds even feebler than the original statement, but I did want to make it clear that I wasn’t just jumbling up St. Augustine but trying to work out a little picture of my own – very limited, naturally – of an earthly three-in-oneness which I know by experience to exist and which may therefore serve as an inadequate analogy of the Divine Three-in-Oneness. There may be several illustrations for the same thing, mayn’t there? – though I absolutely refuse to accept St. Patrick’s shamrock! Each leaflet of the shamrock isn’t equally by itself the whole leaf, and you can’t reasonably say that any one of them is begotten of, or proceeds from, another, because they all proceed alike from something quite different!
2. Mr. Laurence Irving, bless his heart! Oh, dear – well, there you are! I’ve told him a hundred times that the play was about DOGMA, but, you see, he won’t believe it.10 He thinks it’s terrifically dramatic, but he cannot understand that Dogma IS the Drama. He probably thinks it’s dramatic in spite of the dogma – and when people write prefaces to your book for you, you can’t very well say, “Hi! that’s not what it means to me”. He may reply, “Well, that’s what it means to me”. (Apparently “the Power” hasn’t provoked quite the right response in the living soul in his case!) His kindly intention was, I’m sure, to keep readers from being put off by the notion that the play might be about DOGMA. No doubt he feels that the world will accept God more easily if you call him something else (like the editor in G. K. C.’s story, who crossed out the word “God” wherever it occurred and substituted “Circumstances”).11 I didn’t expostulate with him (though I should enjoy it immensely if somebody else did). For one thing, my sense of humour got the better of me. For another, that book will go to theatrical managers, who will be much more inclined to give the play a London production if they don’t think it’s about that dreadful DOGMA. This consideration is highly immoral, but this is the point where, like William, one “damns one’s soul for the good of the work”.12
3. The Cherub and 4. Michael. These two points are part of the same thing. For dramatic purposes I’ve adopted the very idea you mention, viz: that, to the Angels, the whole business of Man’s creation and Redemption is a puzzle. But they know it isn’t their business to solve puzzles. I have tried to depict them as perfect but limited beings, each doing his own specialised job obediently without speculation or question. Raphael occupies himself with prayer; he can distinguish between true and false (William’s devoted craftsmanship is recognised by him as having more of the true spirit of prayer than Theodatus’s self-righteous litanies) – but his function does not extend further. Gabriel, the Heavenly Messenger, intervenes in human affairs from time to time (as when he speaks in the ear of Ernulphus, or as in the “rope-scene”), and he has a touch of that heavenly humour which makes the non-conformist mind so indignant. Cassiel records with austere impartiality, and can distinguish between the sin itself and the good use to which God may turn it. Michael’s job is to deal out rewards and punishments and “justify the ways of God to Man”.13 Therefore, when he is deputed to deal faithfully with William, he knows how to give him the appropriate theological instruction. But if William had gone further and asked, as the Young Cherub asks, “Why did God create man at all, and with this particular nature?” Michael could only say: “I don’t know. I am a soldier; I take my orders, and my orders are to deal with man as I find him. If you want to know anything outside revealed religion, you must not ask me. Possibly the College of Seraphim may know, but I do not, and I am not supposed to ask”. Hence the rebuke to the Young Cherub: Angels must not ask that kind of question: that leads to the fall of Lucifer; man, indeed, asked questions, and that (for some inscrutable reason) led to the Incarnation, but Angels are angels and Men are men and it would never do for an angel to behave like a man. As a matter of fact, William never asks the Cherub’s question; it would never occur to him, the artist, to ask why another Artist chose to create anything, however fantastic or unusual. The love of making things for their own sakes is to him a perfectly sufficient and self-evident reason.
5. Your last point is about the Prior. It has to be Michael, not the Prior, who finally copes with William’s trouble, because Michael knows, as the Prior does not, what the trouble is. The Prior, you see, never heard William’s outburst of hubris. He does not, like the rest of them, commit himself to the easy assertion that the fall is a judgement for the Ursula affair. He knows God is usually a bit more subtle than that, so he puts the blame where,
humanly speaking, it belongs and leaves it at that. But he feels a spiritual snag in William, only, as he says, he “cannot read the heart” and isn’t very sure where it is. And William is by this time incapable of telling him. (Ursula knew it at the time, of course; but her own sense of guilt over the accident has made her lose sight of it.) William quite honestly doesn’t see what the Prior is getting at. It is true there was an accident, due to somebody’s perfectly plain carelessness, and in spite of it, here he is – crippled, certainly, but still able to work, obviously preserved because he is indispensable and carrying on very creditably under great difficulties – he really cannot see how anybody can find anything to blame him for (except, of course, those cheerful faults on which the Church is always so severe and which he is sorry for). And since William really does seem to feel no conviction of sin, the Prior feels he can’t refuse him Absolution merely because he (the Prior) only thinks there is something else behind. He can only exhort him to self-examination, and when this fails, absolve him and hope for the best, adding at the same time a warning that the Sacraments are not magic, acting independently of the will of the penitent. The Prior isn’t really absolving him “in bits”, though I admit that the thought is rather condensed; he is only reminding him of the conditions under which any Sacrament is valid. (I don’t think the Prior thinks William is making a bad confession; I think he recognises that he is only in a state of complete ignorance himself.) The confession scene is already rather long in performance, and there isn’t room for a detailed discussion about Sacraments, and since there is a deeply-rooted conviction in most people’s minds that Sacraments are magic, working ex opere operato,14 possibly a slight over-emphasis in the other direction may do no harm. But I might try to get this clearer. If it can be done in a line and a half! – Of course, the minute Michael puts his finger on the seat of the trouble, William is up in arms. God has no right to take that attitude. And, after all, if it wasn’t for the Incarnation, I don’t know that He would have the right. But if God has really been through the whole grim business Himself, then He’s fairly won the right and one must give in – and that’s why it’s so exciting and dramatic, and why anybody should think that sort of doctrine DULL passes my comprehension. You may call it a fairy-tale, but it’s ridiculous to call it dull.15