The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 2, 1937-1943: From Novelist to Playwright

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  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 Y
ear 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 un
intelligible 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.