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…”
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
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 t
o 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.
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
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.
The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 2, 1937-1943: From Novelist to Playwright Page 34