The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1
Page 39
1 The Most Rev. and Rt Hon. Dr William Temple (1881–1944) was Archbishop of York from 1929 to 1942 and Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 until his death. In his Readings in St John’s Gospel, 1939, Dr Temple had said: “[Mary] was apparently in some position of responsibility [at the wedding], as her concern about the wine and her instructions to the servants show”.
2 D. L. S. said: “[Mary’s] attitude to Jesus and His to her are always the great stumbling-block of this scene. I have linked this up with the episode of the Finding of Christ in the Temple, so as to show the human mother faced with the reality of what her son’s personality and vocation mean in practice”. (The Man Born to be King, “A Certain Nobleman”, Notes, The Characters, Gollancz, p. 92.)
3 Readings in St John’s Gospel, vol. 1, p. 42: “St John is right about it.”
4 Sir Edward Clement Hoskyns, Bart., author of The Fourth Gospel (1940).
5 Anglo-Catholic clergy.
6 A Family Portrait, by Lenore Coffee and William Joyce Cowen, a 3-act drama, published in 1939 in The Best Plays of 1938–39, edited by B. Mantle.
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO HER SON
1 October 1941
Dear John,
Thank you for several letters – also an elegant birthday sonnet, which I find with distress I omitted to acknowledge before.
I think it is an excellent idea that you should try for a job or something non-academic in January, if Mr. Cosgrove and Co. think you have come to the end of your furrow at Malvern. (Some Freudian complex prompted me to write “Marlborough” – effect of reading Winston Churchill, no doubt!)
The whole question of the University becomes extremely complicated in war-time. When things are normal, there is always a difference of opinion whether it is best to know a little of the world before going up, or to ease one’s self into the world though the ‘Varsity gates. In war-time this becomes acute.
In peace-time I believe it is best on the whole to take the academic part first and get it over; because the University is wider than the school, but much narrower than the world – so that a schoolboy going up there finds himself liberated, whereas, if he comes back into it from outside he is apt to feel it all very cramped and unreal.
But during a war, the unreality of college life can’t help striking anybody. Last war, of course, it was specially unsatisfactory, because all the young men were called up, and there was nobody there but the halt, the lame and the blind, and the conchies1 and people with something funny about them. This isn’t so this time. On the other hand, one goes there, and in spite of the incessant noise of ‘planes and the awful crowding of evacuees and Govt. depts. and so on, one really wonders whether the Senior Common Rooms have grasped the facts of life at all. (Especially at Oxford; Cambridge is better, having had a bomb or two.) The place is full of ardent young theorists among the undergraduates – but whether they wouldn’t theorize more usefully with a little experience to help them I rather doubt.
There is, however, one thing you will have to bear in mind: namely, that having once escaped from academics you may not want to go back there at all! One year in a job may make you feel you couldn’t stand Oxford at any price, and that the other undergraduates would by that time be too young for you. If you do feel like that, it may not matter much. During the next few years, academic degrees will be less than ever a passport to jobs – unless they are degrees in maths. and science, which seem not to be your line. The other important thing is going to be languages, and some sort of knowledge of how the minds of foreigners work – a thing which nobody ever learns in the universities. There’s going to be a devil of a lot of cleaning-up to be done in Europe, when all this is over.
It would be easier if one knew how long the War is likely to last. I think it will probably go on for some time, though of course I may be quite wrong. But Churchill seems to think so, and to be making his plans to that end, and he’s usually right. If Russia can stick it out this winter, she will probably stick it out till we are ready for a big offensive – and that may not be very soon. Or, of course, Hitler may collect himself for a big offensive on us in the Spring – and if so, it will really have to be all hands to the pumps; in which case you would probably find the University quite intolerable.
If I were in your place, I think I should be looking for something in the way of the technical side of air warfare or radio – where the maths might be of use and one’s colleagues fairly intelligent. They seem to want any number of young men for that part of the game, and I know they are an intelligent lot, because I’ve met them. Also, you would be in contact with the really intelligent British mechanic, who is a person worth knowing. And it would be something real.
Nobody loves the Universities more than I do – but a war-time Oxford isn’t the real Oxford, and that’s what’s wrong with it. It’s neither flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. I know, because I had a war year of it last time. It had neither its own virtues nor the virtues of the world.
So my own feeling on the whole is: leave school if you’ve done all you can do there, and for preference, take whatever chance the war offers, leaving Academia to look after itself. If the war is over in a year – but I don’t think it will be. And indeed, I believe we may have to arrange our lives for the next fifty years or so on the basis that wars are normal and peace the abnormality, instead of the other way round. This shocks the 19th-century Liberal Humanist, who forgets that, until the end of the Victorian era, this was the ordinary way of looking at things. It’s only the “gospel of human perfectibility” that has got us into the way of being perpetually “taken by surprise”, like Mr. Chamberlain’s government, at the appearance of human perversities which all Christendom had previously taken for granted.
My own opinion about the Universities is that people now go to them either too late (the Elizabethans got them over and done with by the time they were sixteen, and were then ready for their responsibilities) or too early. If they were made places for serious scholarship, and nobody went up till they were well over twenty, then the play-boys would be weeded out, and the genuine seekers after knowledge would be able to make the whole thing a much more mature and responsible business. But that’s only my opinion; and if I had my way I’d sweep all the people who merely want to qualify for a job into the provincial universities (which work on a much more general, “school” sort of curriculum), abolish the pass men at Oxf. and Camb:, and use them for the people who really wanted learning – for whom they would then have ample room – and who could come up when they already knew something about life. However, nobody is likely to take my suggestion in good part!
Bridgeheads are struggling against (a) the difficulty of finding people who will undertake to write books and get them finished (b) the difficulty of getting any book printed and bound in view of the paper shortage. But we toddle along and hope for the best.
Love,
D. L. F.
1 Conscientious objectors.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO V. A. DEMANT
2 October 1941
Dear Father Demant…
As you were so kind about The Mind of the Maker, you will be pleased to know that it is selling well and steadily, and that the publisher has not only put the third edition1 in hand, but with a quiet Victorian pertinacity is actually setting the fourth in hand! The Romans seem to have taken a great fancy to it – the Universe emitting the usual dark mumble about hoping to see me follow G. K. C. into the arms of Mother Church. I have no doubt it is their job to say these things, but I do dislike being made to feel like a rabbit exposed to the slow fascination of a waiting serpent.
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Actually the third impression.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO COUNT MICHAEL DE LA BEDOYERE1
The Catholic Herald
7 Oc
tober 1941
My dear Count,
I ought to have written to you long ago about Christian Crisis,2 which you were kind enough to send me. The fact is that, owing to a series of accidents, my reading of it was interrupted, and it got laid aside until, a short time ago, I was able to take it up again and re-read it properly.
I don’t know how your critique of the Roman position has been received by those to whom it is more particularly addressed, but from my (that is, the Anglo-Catholic) point of view it is most valuable, both as a means of clearing one’s mind and also as a means of dealing with outside criticism. Only the other day, when writing to Fr. D’Arcy,3 I mentioned the very odd sort of difficulties which confront an Anglican free-lance, who is often found in the peculiar position of having to defend Rome with one hand and Canterbury with the other against attacks upon [what] I may perhaps without offence call the combined Catholic front. The enemy has a nasty way of trying to turn the doctrinal flank – not only with what Fr. D’Arcy calls “Pope Joan” arguments (including such hoary monsters as Maria Monk, the Spanish Inquisition, Pope Alexander Borgia, and the Winking Virgin of What d’ye call it, together with the most surprising versions – or perversions – of the cult of Our Lady, the operation of the sacraments, and the pronouncement nulla salus extra ecclesiam)4 – all of which one knows more or less how to deal with – but also with more awkward criticisms about recent Vatican policy and the behaviour of the Catholic countries in the present crisis. The difficulty in coping with all these lies is knowing how much to say and how far to go. To say that all criticism is unfounded would be absurd; to “knock” Rome would be neither charitable nor politic; while to offer apologia, apology, or explanation for another communion along lines which its own members would dislike or repudiate would be a most unfortunate blunder. For this reason, if for no other, I personally welcome your book, which I shall take every opportunity of recommending to those who want to know the Church’s own mind in the matter.
Quite apart from this, there are two points which I find particularly interesting and an encouragement towards getting something practical done.
The less important, I suppose, though the most personally urgent to me, is the passage on p. 1635 which deals with the Catholic attitude to the arts and sciences – and in fact the whole of that chapter. As you may have gathered from The Mind of the Maker and also from The Zeal of Thy House, I feel strongly and indeed violently about this. Neither in my own Church nor in yours can I find any general understanding of the facts that the Christian artist (or other “maker”) must serve God in his vocation, which is just as truly his vocation as though he were called to be a priest; that if his work is not true to itself it cannot be true to God or anything else; and that bad art is bad Christianity, however much it may be directed to edification, or adorned with emasculated Christs, spineless virgins and cotton-wool angels uttering pious sentimentalities; and further, that to take novelists and playwrights away from doing good work in their own line (whether secular or devotional in content) and collar them for the purpose of preaching sermons or opening Church bazaars is a spoiling of God’s instrument and defeats its own aims in the end. It’s no good asking the artist how he knows that he is “called” to write novels rather than address meetings, and flattering him by saying that he addresses meetings so well and does such a lot of good. How does a chisel know that it isn’t “called” to be a screwdriver? – though you can, no doubt use it quite effectively for that purpose – if you don’t mind it’s presently going bust! What is so maddening is the bland refusal to allow that God can take any interest in a secular job as such – as though He only sat up and took notice if He heard His own name mentioned in it. That point of view would be natural from a Genevan “utter-depravitist”6, but from Catholics it’s preposterous. One result of all this is a total lack of any sort of Christian critical standard in the arts: whereby the Church is made to look an ignoramus, and a philistine, and a fool. No writer seems to have tackled this subject seriously – except perhaps our Brother George Every of the S.S.M.7 in that C.N.L.8 booklet – and he’s got T. E. Hulme9 on the brain, I think, with his hatred of “realistic”, or what Hulme calls “vital” art. (This is the Puritan, Barthian, not to say Manichee, fear of the secular again – a natural revolt from humanism, but surely quite unsacramental.) Besides, Brother Every doesn’t really know enough about the arts and generalises quite wildly. I tell him that the business of the ecclesiastics is to teach the artist an intellectual Catholic dogma, soak it well into him, and then, when he’s properly saturated, leave him to get on with his job in his own way. (Unfortunately, George Every doesn’t much like the general theological tone of my work, and this rather cramps my style – especially as I cannot by any means discover what his objection is.) However, he has tried to do something about this business of the Church and the Arts, which is greatly to his credit. I harangued the Malvern Conference insistently on this point – of the artist’s “autonomy of technique” – the only result being that the Bishop of Chichester toddled amiably onto the platform and said: “And I do agree with Miss Sayers that the Church must manage to get hold of the Arts again”. – Oh, dear! The C. of E.10 does suffer a great deal from her bishops.11 Mercifully we don’t have to take them quite so seriously as you do; still, some of them are a great and sore trial, however well-meaning.
The second point really is important. You say only too truly that it is hopeless to base any action on the lowest common denominator of agreement. But I am coming to think that a great deal might be done if we could among us contrive to formulate a “Highest Common Factor of Consent” about doctrine; and I believe that that factor would be higher than is generally supposed.11 One can’t, of course, hope to include in the “Church universal” the very numerous people who call themselves Christians without believing that Christ was fully God. They are not really “Christians” at all – a friend suggests that “Jesuists” would be a better name for them. But, disregarding their protests, what I’ve usually tried to put before the general public is the body of what I feel able to call “Oecumenical Doctrine” – that is, the content of the Creeds, interpreted in a way that would be acceptable to Roman, Anglican, and (so far as I know anything about them) Greek-Orthodox Christians – leaving out those points on which those bodies differ. This amounts, roughly speaking, to the doctrines accepted and defined at the Four Great Councils.12 In practice, I find that this substantial body of doctrine also commands the assent of a great number of Free Church theologians; and I have been surprised to find, in reading Dr. J. S. Whale’s book Christian Doctrine,13 how far a Congregational theologian is ready to go along “oecumenical” lines. In places, of course, (especially as regards the Catholic-Apostolic Church, Sacraments, and the Four Last Things)14 his exposition seems rather incomplete, but there is very little in it that anybody could actively object to.
It does seem to me that it ought to be possible for the Churches to say plainly: “These things, at any rate, we all believe”; and if the British public, and their children, could be made to understand at least that much of Christian dogma as a coherent theology, they would be very much better placed than they are now (a) to understand what it is all about and (b) to unite themselves intelligently to some communion or other. At present, a shocking number of them are completely ignorant that there is any rational Christian theology or philosophy, or that there is any substantial agreement whatever among Christian bodies – other than a vaguely humanist assent to the Sermon on the Mount, adorned with various horrifying scraps of mythology, ranging inconsistently from Baby-worship to savage blood-sacrifices.
I haven’t got a pastoral mind or a passion to convert people; but I hate having my intellect outraged by imbecile ignorance and by the monstrous distortions of fact which the average heathen accepts as being “Christianity” (and from which he most naturally revolts). And it does seem to me that, in the present state of confusion, the mere assimilation of the basic dogma would offer sufficient exercise f
or the mental teeth and stomachs of people; and further, that it would be helpful if writers and speakers and broadcasters would concentrate on those facts, and if they were able to say: “It doesn’t matter where you go – ask the Pope, ask the Patriarch, ask the Archbishop of Canterbury, ask the Moderator of the Free Church Council – they will all say the same thing about this bunch of dogma.” (I admit the obvious diplomatic difficulty of extracting anything definite from Cosmo Cantuar,15 or of coaxing the Pope and Patriarch onto one platform – but there! the Barren Leafy Tree’s very reasonable excuse that “this was not the time for figs”16 was held to be unacceptable, and there do seem to be moments when one must perform the impossible or perish!)
I don’t know why I am badgering you about all this, or what I expect you to do about it; but reading your book and Dr. Whale’s together, I am struck by the idea that in violently assaulting one another’s positions we are half the time battering at open doors, to the extreme scandal of a cynical and astonished world. I entirely agree that it is all wrong to try and compromise on dogma; but if we in fact agree about seven-tenths of the dogma, why the blazes shouldn’t we say so? If you say that the infallibility of the Pope follows logically on the Incarnation and I say it doesn’t, all right, that’s an argument; but until you and I have together hammered the Incarnation into the head of the heathen, he’s not in a position to appreciate what the argument is, still less to take sides about it; and he’s much more likely to get properly hammered if we all concentrate on that job like navvies driving a pile and get him from all sides in rhythm, so to speak. At any rate, we’re much more likely to get him that way than by a “lowest common denominator” of saying, in the liberal-humanist way, that at any rate all Christians agree that we should “believe in God and follow Christ in the spirit of love” – which means almost exactly nothing, but is what most of the people who write to The Times about religious education seem to think a suitable basis for instruction.