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.
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
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.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
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 expressi
ons 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
The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 2, 1937-1943: From Novelist to Playwright Page 36