The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers Vol II: 1937-1943: From Novelist to Playwright
Page 45
2 Dr E. V. Rieu, Literary and Academic Adviser to Methuen, later Editor of Penguin Classics.
3 Dr Rieu had raised the question of the ordination of women. He had said: “I now ask whether the one chance which the Church has to regain its leadership of mankind is not to use both sexes equally. Why, to take a little thing first, should not girls sing in choirs as well as boys? Would not a parish be run best by a man and his wife both in orders and both paid servants of the community? Why, to put it in a nutshell, should you not be Archbishop of Canterbury?” He said that he had talked the matter over with his wife, “an extremely intelligent lady who played a part in the suffragette movement years ago”.
4 i.e. of “Bridgeheads”.
5 But see her letter to G. C. Piper, dated 24 January 1939!
6 Elisabeth Bergner (1900–1986) played the title role in J. M. Barrie’s The Boy David in 1936 at His Majesty’s Theatre.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DR JAMES WELCH
16 February 1942
Dear Dr. Welch…
The last batch of letters you sent on was a nice one. People seem to have more or less settled down to the thing. The C.E.N.1 seems to be of the opinion that we removed vast excesses of slang in express deference to its wishes. I am going to be obstinate about St. Matthew. If we may only leave that “test-case” unaltered, people will have to believe that everything else has been played practically as written. The Daily Express had the nerve to ring up on Monday to ask me what cuts had been made in “A Certain Nobleman”. Unhappily, I was in bed at the time with a slight cold, and my husband answered them. I hope he didn’t say anything indiscreet. He says he was careful, and informed them (a) that he knew nothing about it, (b) that so far as he could gather such cuts as there were were made for time and (c) they weren’t to quote him because it had nothing to do with him; but of course he may have said more than he should, because he was rather angry with them for ringing up at all. So far, I haven’t seen anything in the Express about it, so I hope no harm was done.
I do think that when the plays are published you or somebody ought to write an introduction with an authoritative account of the stand made by the Churches’ Committee.2 I say, “or somebody”, because I don’t know how far your official position allows you to “reveal” (as the papers say) the inner history of the battle; but you are the obvious person, “having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first”. It does seem to me extremely important that something should be said about it, because the popular idea is that the blessed laity are all for boldness of policy and a march forward in a spirit of Christian brotherly love, and are only impeded by the timidity and bickering of their ecclesiastical leaders; whereas in this business the Churchmen were united, bold and intelligent and the laity obscurantist and divided. (Not all the churchmen, of course, but the official spokesmen, of whom one might have expected the worst.) And the extraordinary discovery that the united voice of an undivided Church can silence ministries and parliaments ought to be an encouragement to somebody or other to do something or other when the time comes. So do think it over, won’t you, so as to be prepared when the time comes.
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Church of England Newspaper.
2 Dr James Welch did write such an account in his “Foreword” to the published version of The Man Born to be King, Gollancz, 1943, pp. 9–16.
It was Dr Welch’s responsibility to submit every play to the Central Religious Advisory Committee and to pass on their comments to D. L. S. For the most part the alterations they requested were minor ones, to which D. L. S. agreed. With regard to the fourth play, “The Heirs to the Kingdom”, a difficulty arose. The Bishop of Winchester, Dr Cyril Garbett (soon to become Archbishop of York), who for twenty years had been Chairman of the Committee, objected to the informality of the dialogue. D. L. S. decided that the time had come to make a stand.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
TO DR JAMES WELCH
19 February 1942
Dear Dr. Welch…
Look here; I rather think the time has come when I must dig my toes in a little. Otherwise I see trouble ahead. I have accordingly written you a formal sort of letter about the alterations, which can be passed on, if you think well, to the Bishop.
You will see that I have not actually refused to do anything, or threatened to stop work, or to give interviews to the papers. Nor have I invoked the thing called “artistic integrity”. But I have said rather plainly what I feel about these matters on doctrinal and other high-minded grounds, and indicated the position into which I have been pushed. I do not want to make a row; but to count upon my – and your – being ready to put up with anything for peace’ sake is a genteel form of blackmail. The objections are of varying importance: the one about the Americanisms raises the most immediate danger; the one about “ducks and drakes” is the silliest; the one about the expressions used by the Caiaphas gang is going to land us in the most serious differences of opinion as time goes on. I cannot deal with the Bishop as I should deal with Miss Jenkin; and, after the uproar that has been made, you know quite well that I shall not make a to-do and call in the scripts. But I am frankly appalled at the idea of getting through the Trial and Crucifixion scenes with all the “bad people” having to be bottled down to expressions which could not possibly offend anybody. I will not allow the Roman soldiers to use barrack-room oaths, but they must behave like common soldiers hanging a common criminal, or where is the point of the story? The impenitent thief cannot curse and yell as you and I would if we were skewered up with nails to a post in the broiling sun, but he must not talk like a Sunday-school child. Nobody cares a dump nowadays that Christ was “scourged, railed upon, buffeted, mocked and crucified”, because all those words have grown hypnotic with ecclesiastical use. But it does give people a slight shock to be shown that God was flogged, spat upon, called dirty names, slugged in the jaw, insulted with vulgar jokes, and spiked up on the gallows like an owl on a barn-door. That’s the thing the priests and people did – has the Bishop forgotten it? It is an ugly, tear-stained, sweat-stained, blood-stained story, and the thing was done by callous, conceited and cruel people. Shocked? we damn well ought to be shocked. If nobody is going to be shocked we might as well not tell them about it.
It’s very bad luck on you, and I don’t want to make trouble. But I do want the Bishop to know what I feel about it – not from the “artistic” point of view, but from the point of view of what we are trying to tell people. The scandal of the Cross was a scandal – not a solemn bit of ritual symbolic of scandal. “The drunkards make songs upon me” – I daresay they did, and I don’t suppose they were very pretty songs either, or in very good taste. I’ve made all the alterations required so far, but I’m now entering a formal protest, which I have tried to make a mild one, without threatenings and slaughters. But if the contemporary world is not much moved by the execution of God it is partly because pious phrases and reverent language have made it appear a more dignified crime than it was. It was a dirty piece of work, tell the Bishop.
Sympathetically yours,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO FATHER TAYLOR1
after 8 March 1942
Dear Fr. Taylor,
Thank you for your delightful and encouraging letter. I’m absurdly pleased that you liked the Centurion’s batman.2 My Roman army man seemed to come much more alive when I had removed from him the faithful slave, or the hypothetical “son” beloved of biblical commentators and fixed him up with a batman. Also, I wanted the play to bring out as much as possible the blessing upon the “uncovenanted” people and relationships – on the one hand the born “heirs to the Kingdom”, and the religious leaders, so disappointing, and the traitor joining himself
even to the disciples; and on the other “those who come in from the east and from the west” – the heathen Roman, with his trade of warfare, and the relation of friendship between superior and inferior in a State machine.
Did you approve – or at any rate not dislike – the (so far as I know) quite unorthodox interpretation I put on the Centurion’s “Lord, I am not worthy”? It has always seemed to me curiously unconvincing that a Roman soldier, of all people, should be overcome all of a sudden with a terrific sense of personal sinfulness and abasement, such as one associates with quite advanced Christian penitents, at the mere sight of a Jewish prophet, however impressive in appearance. But I could very well understand his feeling that here was a “holy man” of a different race, and his personal saintliness – much as a British soldier of the nicest type, who had lived a long time in India, might show delicacy of feeling when approaching some venerable and holy Mahatma, and understand that he ought not to ask him to pollute himself by contact with dogs or cooked beef or other things offensive to his religion. The speech about being a man under authority doesn’t seem to have any grovelling sense of inferiority about it – only a recognition of Christ’s personal authority, and a nice appreciation of the general fitness of things.
You know, I think some of the “unreality” that clings about the Gospel story as we hear it in the ordinary way is due to the impression one gets that anybody who is said to have “believed” in Jesus was immediately inspired, as by a prophetic revelation, with a full comprehension of the Nicene Creed in detail. There must have been all sorts of different grades of “belief” – belief that this was the Messiah, implicit confidence in this remarkable person, acceptance of the teaching, a dim sense that here was a man with something unearthly about him – according to the religious and social background of the believer; the central and important thing common to them all being, I suppose, a generous and unshakable trust. We are so apt to read the story backwards, with our minds steeped in the Resurrection and the Hypostatic Union.3 But to the people at the time, the whole thing must have seemed very queer and vague and puzzling. Obviously the disciples were all at sea to the very end – what, then, must have been the condition of mind of Roman soldiers, Syro-Phoenician women, wandering lepers, blind beggars, and “the multitudes”?
No – I don’t suppose the objectors listen to the plays; or if they do, they are committing a grievous sin by their own standards. They object on principle. “Thou shalt not make graven images” – still less, therefore, allow a wicked actor to “masquerade” (their word) as Our Lord. And you must not allow Christ to speak any words, however harmless and suitable, that are not recorded and prescribed in King James’s Bible, because there is a curse in Revelation against adding anything to “the Book”. And “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”; and any sort of acting is worse than vain, it is the Scarlet Woman in her worst abandoned guise. Also, acting the Gospel is a thing only done by idolatrous Roman Catholics in the ages of superstition, or by nasty foreigners at Oberammergau; and the whole thing is Popery, and closely connected with the mummery of the Mass. Further, even if you do not take this extreme view of the damnable nature of the whole enterprise, the thing is irreverent. The characters in the Bible are all sacred, and one must not suppose that sacred personages ever used slang or made jokes. Not only Christ, but even His enemies are “Sacred”, because they are in the Bible. One correspondent objected to Herod’s saying to his court, “Keep your mouths shut,” because he did not like to hear such vulgar expressions from anybody “closely connected with Our Lord”. (Just like the old lady who rebuked the young man for saying “What the devil?” on the grounds that she could not bear to hear a Sacred Personage so lightly spoken of.) Here is another gem from a gentleman in the Stoke Newington Observer.
The two following objectionable parts were noticed; one character says to another: ‘do the dirty on you’; and the Centurion who was commended by the Jews, and had built them a synagogue, is made to refer to the building in a conversation, with a levitous (sic) and jocular air.
You see, you mustn’t try to think what a Roman Centurion would be really like. He is a sacred Centurion, and the little sacred building is sacred to him, and his daily conversation is sacred – and so the whole notion that the Son of God came in the flesh to the roaring, jostling, chaffering, joking, quarrelling, fighting, guzzling, intriguing, lobbying, worldly, polemical, political, sophisticated, brutal, Latinised, Hellenised, confused, complicated, careless civilization of first-century Jewry is utterly dissipated and lost. Christ wasn’t born into history – He was born into the Bible (Authorized Version) – a place where nobody makes love, or gets drunk, or cracks vulgar jokes, or talks slang, or cheats, or despises his neighbours, but only a few selected puppets make ritual gestures symbolical of the sins of humanity. No wonder the story makes so little impression on the common man. It seems to have taken place in a world quite different from our own, – a world full of reverent people waiting about in polite attitudes for the fulfilment of prophesies.
Forgive this outburst. Story-telling is my profession, and even if I believed nothing, it would offend me to the soul to see that tremendous story so marred and emasculated in the handling. It’s not the fault of the Evangelists; they sketched in the characters with a firm hand; shake off the dusty phrases and there are the real people, recognizable and alive: Caiaphas (the smug beast), and Pilate “all tied up with red tape”, and the Samaritan woman setting down her pitcher, and the Blind Man at Siloam with his salty peasant wit, or the wedding guests getting harmlessly “merry” with good wine, and the disciples over-working themselves to the edge of nervous break-down and being told to lay off and find a quiet spot and take it easy for a bit (a humane suggestion oddly disguised by the stately and involved “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place”, which sounds so ascetic and uncomfortable) – it’s all there, but it’s got silted up with rumbling phrases and heavy-handed veneration. “He was in the world and the world knew Him not” – that’s the great ironic tragedy; it was this actual world, and they simply did not know what was happening.
I know a priest who had the extraordinary experience of having to tell the story of Jesus to an adult educated Englishwoman who had never heard it before. (She was a society sort of person, I gather, and it just hadn’t come her way – though you would hardly believe that possible.) Apparently it staggered her completely, and she asked in astonishment, “But does everybody know about this?” (Nor, I am sorry to say, when she afterwards attended church, was she at all persuaded by the behaviour of the congregation that they knew about it, either.)
The answer seems to be that they don’t know; what they know to the point of boredom is something quite different – something that never happened, something that never looks to them remotely like anything that actually happened. My job, as I see it, is to present the thing, as best I can, as something that really did happen, as actually and unmistakably as the Battle of Britain, and all mixed up, like other events, with eating and drinking, and party politics, and rates and taxes, and working and sleeping and gossiping and laughing and buying and selling and coping with life in general. I am most grateful to you for telling me so kindly that, with all their faults (which obviously must be legion) the plays do really come over with something of that effect.
It is a shame to inflict all this upon you. I must stop, and get on with the Raising of Lazarus. (What on earth did Lazarus’s friends say to him at that incredible supper-party? Did he make them all feel desperately uncomfortable, or did they just ask inquisitively: “Do tell us! What does it feel like to be dead?” Or did they think it would be better taste, on the whole, not to refer to the incident? Or succeed in pushing the whole peculiar affair into the background of their minds and forgetting that it had ever really occurred?)
He told it not – or something sealed
The lips of that evangelist.4
(But if you are writing a play, you have to make the characters s
ay something or other!)
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Identity unknown.
2 In the fourth play, “The Heirs to the Kingdom”, broadcast on 8 March, D. L. S. interpreted the centurion’s servant as his batman. (word denoting an officer’s servant) See Luke, chapter 7, verses 1–10.
3 A theological term, meaning the union of the divine and human natures in the person of Christ.
4 Tennyson, In Memoriam, 31.
At the request of Dr Welch D. L. S. agreed to visit the Bishop of Winchester and discuss the vital point of not “watering down the crudity, indeed the truth, of the Prosecution, Trial and Crucifixion”.
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO THE BISHOP OF WINCHESTER1
17 March 1942
My Lord,
Thank you for your letter and invitation. I will certainly come and see you if I possibly can, though at the moment it is difficult to make any arrangements, since I am practically without servants and am thus tied to the house. I hope, however, that this situation may have cleared up by the end of the month, and that I shall be able to get to Winchester on Monday, March 30th.
I will do my best to discuss the forthcoming plays – though I ought to make it clear that works of art do not thrive on discussion beforehand – they are apt to “go stale” on the writer. But the general consideration which I feel I ought to lay before your Lordship is the necessity of making the characters and behaviour of the persons who brought about the trial and crucifixion of Christ real to the listener, even at the cost of some slight shock to the pious. For the story is a shocking one, even by human standards; but because its brutality is disguised for the common man by stereotyped expressions which have lost their power to shock, he accepts with mild complacency facts which ought to startle and horrify him like a blow in the face. If we cannot give him that blow in the face, what are we there for? “Christ was mocked and railed upon, buffeted, scourged and crucified” – everybody knows it, and few people are really startled by it – it is part of a Good-Friday service. But the playwright can show them the facts: “Here was God delivered over to the mercy of men, and what did we do to Him? Listen and you shall hear. We insulted and made a joke of Him. We smacked Him in the face. We gave Him the cat. We dragged Him through the streets and had Him nailed up on the common gallows by soldiers who took it all as part of the day’s work – and the crowds at the gallows’ foot made fun of Him. We had God here, and we said He was a lunatic, we said He was a blasphemous fellow, we said He was a political traitor and a criminal – we hated Him on sight and we killed Him with every circumstance of injustice and brutality. Listen to the facts, not camouflaged by Elizabethan ecclesiastical language. If you are not shocked, you ought to be – for if that cannot shock you, nothing can.”