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

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  It seems to me, too, that a sort of “H.C.F. of Consent” might be produced with regard to “world-reconstruction on Christian lines” – this emerges from your page 19.17 I mean that we might attempt to sort out and put down in a form generally accessible how much in Nationalism, Dawnism,18 Socialism, Fascism, etc, is consistent with Christianity, and try to arrange it so as to make sense. You may say the Pope and people have done this already: no doubt they have but not quite in that form. It has usually been a sort of, “All these other things are wrong and you’ve got to get back to the Church, which says so-and-so” – which is O.K. from the negative side, but makes these people think their most passionate beliefs are unsympathetically received. Surely it would be possible to say somehow: “What’s wrong with all these things is simply that they have been defined separately. But we agree with Fascists that it is right to acknowledge values which are not merely cash-values, and with the Nationalists that patriotism is a true value, and with the Socialists about the importance of the community, and with the ‘Dawnists’ about the importance of the individual man in his body-soul, and with the Fascists about the importance of people’s secular jobs in the body politic, and even with the Capitalists that there is virtue in a reasonable measure of private property, and with the ‘State-ists’ that the secular power is to be respected – so that in a Christian society all those people would in fact discover their ‘H.C.F. of consent’.” If we could possibly make some statement of that kind, and relate it to the H.C.F. of consent in dogma at every point – wouldn’t it bear some appearance of being rational and attractive? And if all the Churches would so to speak, put their names to it, it would be rather impressive – also, we could say the same thing both at home and abroad, without having to scratch our heads each time to remember whether [those] in the Balkans were Orthodox or Uniates19 or Lutherans, or disliked the Vatican or had never heard of the Archbishop of Canterbury, because the name of their own head bloke would be there to assure them that it was O.K. by him.

  But I dare say I’m only twaddling; and the minute one tries to put anything down in black and white it always sounds exactly like what has already been done by somebody and fallen as flat as a pancake. All the same, I rather stick to that phrase, “The Highest Common Factor of Consent” as a sort of guiding principle, to suggest, not that we should jettison as much as possible in order to keep afloat, but earnestly see how much stuff we can possibly squeeze into the lifeboat in order that we may survive – because there’s no point in just floating if we’re all starved to death at the end of the voyage.

  It’s frightful of me to have gone on at such length. I hope you will forgive me, and put it down to my having liked your book very much. And let me take the opportunity of thanking you for your exceedingly kind reception of The Mind of the Maker. I am much relieved to find that the more “Catholic” the critic, the better he likes the book – “Catholic” including a bunch of Greek-Orthodox people, who seemed delighted to find that it had all been said by various Greek Fathers in the year dot. This is certainly a “H.C.F. of Consent”, for I have never read a word of the Greek Fathers! The only people whom it seems to worry are the vague Protestants, (who are always given to mumbling about “danger” and “presumption”, as though God might come to pieces if you pulled Him about to see what He was made of) and a few of the heathen, who think that God ought to know His place and keep Himself to Himself and not go poking His head into the kitchen.

  Yours apologetically,

  [Dorothy L. Sayers]

  1 Count Michael de la Bedoyère (1900–1973), editor of The Catholic Herald. He questioned the morality of area bombing and the propriety of demanding unconditional surrender.

  2 Published in 1941 by Burns, Oates and Washbourne.

  3 Father Martin Cyril D’Arcy, S.J. (1888–1976), Master of Campion Hall, Oxford, 1933–1945; author of The Nature of Belief, 1931.

  4 Latin: no salvation outside the church.

  5 The passage of special interest to her contained such statements as: “I have said that the lack of a unified Christian culture …is one of the chief defects of Catholic education.…We have almost reached the stage in Catholic public opinion when nothing is regarded as Catholic unless a religious or pious or apologetic label can be attached to it. The Catholic scientist, working in his field of research, the Catholic novelist, engaged in the study of contemporary life as it is, the Catholic artist, following his natural inspiration, to none of these is the name of Catholic publicly given…” (See chapter 4, “Where British Catholics Fail”.)

  6 Reference to the Calvinist doctrine of “total depravity”.

  7 Society of the Sacred Mission (Kelham Hall, Nottinghamshire).

  8 Christian News-Letter.

  9 Thomas Edward Hulme (1883–1917), poet, essayist and writer on philosophical subjects. His works were edited by Herbert Read in two volumes: Speculations (1924) and Notes on Language and Style (1929). His theories of Imagism influenced poetry and the visual arts.

  10 Church of England.

  11 Cf. her letter dated 28 November 1941.

  12 Nicaca (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451). These were all oecumenical councils, accepted by both Eastern and Western Churches.

  13 J. S. Whale, D.D., Christian Doctrine: Eight Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge to Undergraduates of all Faculties (Cambridge University Press, 1941, 2nd edition 1956). It was reviewed by D. L. S. in The International Review of Missions, in which she said: “Dr Whale’s book is extremely welcome, both as an assistance to those who need, for themselves or others, a comprehensive and coherent exposition of Christian doctrine that is at once brief, profound and adapted to the adult mind; and also as affording ocular proof of essential doctrinal agreement among the churches. Moreover, it is written in a vigorous and pithy style… Of its trenchant and memorable phrases there is room to quote only two: ‘Belief in God is an absolute presupposition of all rational enquiry.’ ‘The obligation to be intelligent is always a moral obligation’.”

  14 Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell.

  15 William Cosmo Gordon Lang (1864–1945), Archbishop of Canterbury from 1928 to 1942.

  16 Mark, chapter 11, verse 13. The wording in the Authorized Version is: “for it was not the time for figs”

  17 In chapter 2, “Christianity and the Last War”, referring to the failure of the settlement after World War I.

  18 The belief that the use of reason would usher in the dawn of a new age. Widespread in the eighteenth century, it became associated ultimately with nationalism and dictatorship. See Bedoyère, Christian Crisis, chapters 4, 5 and 6.

  19 Uniat(e), a Russian, Polish or other member of the part of the Greek Orthodox Church which, retaining its own liturgy, acknowledges the Pope’s supremacy.

  [24 Newland Street

  Witham

  Essex]

  TO THE REV. GEOFFREY L. TREGLOWN

  22 Milton Avenue,

  Romford

  9 October 1941

  Dear Mr. Treglown,

  As you will see by my address I live not very far from you, though there is the disadvantage that very few Witham trains ever seem to stop at Romford, and I have no car.

  Just at present I am very full up with work and engagements, but possibly by April the pressure will have slackened. I don’t think I could face preaching on Sunday evening, but I might manage the meeting on Monday afternoon, April 20th, if that would suit you as well. I will try not to be “tiresome and irrelevant”; I think that is perhaps a weakness of politicians rather than of women as such!

  I am interested, as well as pleased, to learn that you find my theology sound, because as you probably know I am an Anglo-Catholic, and it is being borne in upon me that the theological differences between the various communions are much less acute than one might imagine, at any rate, as far as fundamentals are concerned. At present I am spending my time urging Christians of the leading denominations to pull their socks up and get out
a statement on doctrine on which everybody, from the Pope to the Moderator of the Free Church Council, can agree to agree. It seems to me that this would have a good effect, besides saving lay people like me a good deal of unnecessary time and labour in telling the heathen what Christian doctrine is.

  Yours sincerely,

  [Dorothy L. Sayers]

  24 Newland Street

  Witham

  Essex

  TO T. S. ELIOT

  16 October 1941

  Dear Mr Eliot,

  I was delighted to get your letter yesterday, making an offer for Common or Garden Child.1 Miss Byrne is at Cambridge, but I rang her up last night, and she rejoiced greatly, expressing herself as very well content with the terms, very glad that you proposed to publish at a moderate price2, and particularly pleased that Faber should be the publishers. However, she is writing to you herself today, so I will now get out from under your feet and leave her to treat with you directly.

  I am personally very glad you like the work, because I like it myself very much, and I also know that it will be a great encouragement to her to have it taken. Also, I must again thank you for having been so kind when I accosted you, so to speak, on the tooth-snatcher’s very doorstep.3 I do hope that his odious ministrations have done all that was expected of him and that you are now really feeling a lot better. The world is quite tiresome enough, even if one is in the best of health and spirits. I really see no reason why the war should not go on for ever – at least, no cheerful reason. I suppose a complete Hitler victory might stop it, but I’m not even sure about that! Perhaps we should make up our minds to accept war as a natural state of things and adapt ourselves to it. Poets and story-tellers, facing a perpetual paper-shortage, will have to re-learn the art of recitation; and we must firmly refuse to be surprised at the phenomenon of sudden death, or the absence of bananas.4 I am rather glad to be relieved of bananas – they taste of nail-polish, and I can’t imagine why we ever spent money on them.

  With all good wishes and most sincere thanks,

  yours very sincerely,

  Dorothy L. Sayers.

  1 Muriel St Clare Byrne’s memoir of her childhood was published in 1942.

  2 Seven shillings and sixpence.

  3 They appear to have met at the dentist’s.

  4 Cf. her poem, “Lord I thank thee…”, first published in 1942: “I detest bananas, A smug fruit, designed to be eaten in railway carriages On Bank Holidays, With a complexion like yellow wax And a texture like new putty Flavoured with nail polish.” (See Poetry of Dorothy L. Sayers, ed. Ralph E. Hone, ed.cit. 1996, pp. 123–128.)

  [24 Newland Street

  Witham

  Essex]

  TO THE REV. DOM. R. RUSSELL

  Downside Abbey

  28 October 1941

  Dear Father Russell,

  Mrs. Mitchell has kindly forwarded to me your most generous review of The Mind of the Maker. I am very glad indeed that it has pleased you, as well as other Catholic theologians, who have treated it in a very friendly way. Anybody who rushes in on theological ground without any sort of technical training naturally lays himself open to the severest criticism, and ought to be only too grateful if the experts refrain from tearing him into fragments and dancing derisively on the remains. But everybody has been most indulgent. (Even the Protestants seem more apprehensive than angry – but then they will treat God as an elderly invalid who might collapse from shock if suddenly intruded on by a common person bouncing in suddenly.)

  Perhaps I ought to say something about your censures. I entirely agree that “Bigamy is a crime” – that is precisely what it is, for us – though not for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Luxuria is on the other hand, always a sin – though either may occur without the other. (Thus, bigamy committed in ignorance is still a crime, and lust, though it leads to nothing illegal, is still a sin.) But the point I was making was that the criminality of anything depends upon the consent of opinion; its sinfulness is an entirely different matter.

  It should be fairly clear, I think, from the book as a whole that all three persons of the Trinity are essentially concerned in creation. My emphasis on the particular function of the Son is due to the fact that surprisingly few people realise that the Son is supposed to have anything to do with the Creation at all. The prevalent idea is that God the Father made the world (with perhaps a little assistance from the Spirit of God, since He is mentioned in Genesis as “brooding” over the business), but that the Son, the Logos, the Energy, took no part in the job at all, and apparently took no interest in it except to redeem it when it had gone wrong.… The majority of Protestants are, in their hearts, Adoptionists1, or Arians2 at the best, and the common-or-garden heathen has no more idea than the man in the moon that the Son is supposed to have had any existence prior to the appearance of Jesus on earth. Consequently, the very idea that the same God who made the world also suffered in the world is to the ordinary man an entirely alien notion, and if you try to tell him that this is what is meant, he thinks you are making it up. No language, however strong, violent, or emphatic will expunge from the mind of the average anti-Christian the picture he has formed of Christian Soteriology,3 viz: that Jehovah (the old man with the beard) made the world and made it so badly that it all went wrong and he wanted to burn it up in a rage; where-at the Son (who was younger and nicer, and not implicated in his Father’s irresponsible experiment) said: “Oh, don’t do that! if you must torment somebody, take it out [on] me.” So Jehovah vented his sadistic appetite on a victim who had nothing to do with it all, and thereafter grudgingly allowed people to go to heaven if they provided themselves with a ticket of admission signed by the Son … This grotesque mythology is not in the least exaggerated: it is what they think we mean – consequently the whole Incarnation doctrine is for them completely meaningless. I say, “the average anti-Christian”; I don’t say “the average un-Christian”. One man, for instance, wrote to me that the idea that the God who suffered and the God who created were the same God was to him a complete novelty, which if it were really what Christians believed, would clear up a whole area of what had been Stygian4 obscurity. Might he say that God the Father suffered? I said that, strictly speaking, he might not – that was Patripassianism,5 and would land him in difficulties later on; but that even Patripassianism was a distinct improvement on the barbaric superstitions which he had had presented to him as the Christian religion, and that he might certainly say that the Creator suffered . … I don’t know what happened to him after this; he was a naval officer, and I am afraid he may have been a casualty, as he promised to keep in touch, but has not done so.…

  I didn’t set out to “defend my thesis”, but only to show that I had, at any rate, paid attention to those parts of your review which were less favourable. My original and chief intention was to thank you for having given my odd theological adventure so kind and serious an attention. In particular, too, for your resolute support in refusing to regard the book as a “personal angle on God”. I am weary of this evil and adulterous generation, with its monstrous deification of insignificant personalities. If a thing is not true in itself, the fact that I say it will not make it any truer; nor is it any addition to God that a popular novelist should be so obliging as to approve of Him. Since the book deals with creative art, it is a relevant fact that I am a professional writer; it might also be relevant that I am a Master of Arts and former scholar of Oxford University – since this would tell the reader what standard of judgment to expect. But the publisher thought it would be unwise to mention this fact – the public might, I suppose, be alienated by any suggestion that the writer is educated or qualified for his job. “The name is enough” – and of that fact I am still scholar enough to be ashamed.

  I am sorry to conclude on this gloomy note! But what fun it would be if all books were compelled by law to appear anonymously for the next twenty years or so! There would be such a bonfire of reputations.

  Yours with much gratitude,

  [
Dorothy L. Sayers]

  1 See letter to the Rev. Neville Gorton, 24 September 1941, note 5.

  2 See letter to Father Herbert Kelly, 4 October 1937, note 2.

  3 The doctrine of salvation.

  4 From the river Styx, one of the rivers of Hades in classical mythology, meaning dark, obscure.

  5 See letter to Father Herbert Kelly, 4 October 1937, note 5

  [24 Newland Street

  Witham

  Essex]

  TO MURIEL ST CLARE BYRNE

  16 November 1941

  Dearest M…

  The other day I went to speak to some soldiers about Detective Fiction, at a camp near Harwich. Driven there by a very nice girl who has to do with the Entertainments Committee. All very good going; but on the way back, the car conked out completely in a desert-looking place in the pitch dark. Garage turned out to be fortunately near. Garage man happily a pet – but, less fortunately, an enthusiast. He put the thing partially right (the girl so ignorant that she didn’t even know a sparking-plug when she saw it: “are those the long things on wires?”). We started again, but were unhappily inspired to stop and ask the way, whereupon the engine conked out again in a place still more dark and deserted. Meanwhile, the enthusiast had had his doubts about us and pursued us in a car; which was nice of him. But such was his enthusiasm that he could not be persuaded to leave the ruddy car alone and run us home in his. He proceeded to take the engine to pieces by torchlight. This game went on till about 11.30 (nobody having had dinner). The car, having had its plugs changed and been given dope to clean its valves, grew more and more sulky and nervous. Then he proceeded to take down the carburettor, clean the jets, and hint darkly that the petrol was full of sand and paraffin. The car began to show signs of collapse; and was stimulated by having the mag[neto] taken to pieces and the points reset. Happily, this was too much for the poor creature, who, having suffered many things of this particular physician, gave a hollow groan and rendered up the ghost. So the enthusiast had to drive us back after all; and it turned out he was the local comic man and dance-band enthusiast, so all the way back he enlivened us with items from his repertoire. I reached home at 12.40, very cold and empty. Mac said I had been on the binge with the soldiers, and that I was drunk and a liar. So I threw my boots at him and so to bed!1