The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, Volume 2

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  Two hours after we had spoken, we had a hideous five hours of horror in Bristol, and what happened during those hours has rather upset one’s scale of values.… All that seems supremely important at the moment is that we should broadcast to the children of the nation as perfect a picture of Our Lord as possible through the medium of your plays, in the belief that at least one or two children, and possibly hundreds, will get a picture of Our Lord from our broadcast of your plays which may be decisive for them in determining their attitude to Christ and the Church.

  D. L. S. replied:

  [24 Newland Street

  Witham

  Essex]

  TO DR JAMES WELCH

  7 December 1940

  Dear Dr. Welch,

  Many thanks for your letter. I was rather afraid you would find it difficult to get hold of Val Gielgud.

  Of course I shall be delighted to meet Mr. McCulloch, if he can possibly get to London. (That would mean only one day’s travelling for me instead of three or four, which at the moment I simply can’t afford time for.) I greatly appreciate the generous attitude he has taken; and, as I said to you at the time, I never felt there ought to have been any real difficulty so far as he was concerned. My feeling was that he was backing up a colleague in an ill-judged action, according to the departmental code. And I didn’t say I wouldn’t have him as a producer – only that he must decide to be either a producer or a department, but not both.

  I am quite prepared to believe that Miss Jenkin has a great experience in the Children’s Hour; but when you entrusted the job to me, you were taking the adventurous step of cutting out the juvenile experts, and trying a new experiment – that of giving the children “professional theatre”. I think we must stick to the terms of that experiment, and deal with the thing on “professional theatre” lines. “If we fail, we fail”, but we must try it out properly and not mess about with it.

  I do sometimes wish that the experts would have a little more respect for their infant material. You remember Niebuhr: “Every child is a born theologian, which may be one reason why moderns regard theologians as obscurantists”. Young children continually ask questions to which there is no answer possible except a mystical answer. I believe one should respect them enough to give them the true answer and not withhold it until they can understand it with the reason; because, by that time, the reason is already so corrupted as to refuse anything outside its own scope.

  I really did take some pains to estimate in my own mind what weight of the mystical the uncorrupt mind might be expected to carry. I think it is greater than is generally supposed, and I am sure one must not depend too much on the criticisms of parents and teachers, or even on the expressed opinion of the children. I know I should have never dared to confess to any of my grown-ups the over-mastering fascination exercised on me by the Athanasian Creed. They were kind, but not so exceptionally sympathetic as the mother of the seven-year-old I mentioned to Miss Jenkin, and I felt instinctively that they would be surprised and amused, and say, “Surely you can’t understand that”, and tell each other about it as a quaint thing I had said. So I hugged it as a secret delight.

  Children hate being told they can’t understand. There was quite a little row at Canterbury when some well-meaning person said the school-children oughtn’t to have been taken to see Charles Williams’ play, Cranmer of Canterbury. The children were bitterly offended, and wrote a letter, insisting that they had understood it perfectly! It is an excessively difficult play, but I am prepared to believe that, though they can’t have understood it with their heads, they got more out of its rhythms than the average adult. Charles Williams seems to be a sort of test case. Educated audiences find his Seed of Adam almost incomprehensible; but Fr. MacLaughlin saw it played to a totally uneducated rural audience, who not only heard it with rapture, but were able to explain quite clearly and sensibly what it was all about. The same sort of thing happened when some people took their little R.C. servant to see T. S. Eliot’s Family Reunion. They asked her if she understood the end of it – which was what all the reviewers and liberal rationalists found so baffling and repulsive. “Oh, yes,” she said; “he was going out into the wilderness to make his soul, and then he would come back and do good.” That, no doubt, was the effect of always having been given the mystical interpretation of life; it was taken as perfectly natural.

  I am certain that it is desperately important to get the mystical and poetic approach to life accepted naturally at an early age or when the mind is uncorrupted by rationalisation – children and charwomen are the only audience to whom these things appeal directly; the adult and the educated can only make the difficult and perilous approach of the “twice-born”, and may never get there. Even if they do, it is easier for them if they have had it once at first hand.

  Now, if anybody had said that the political part of “Kings in Judaea” was rather hard going for children, I think he would have had a case. But I want to try it on them, because that side of it may catch and interest the older ones, who have already got beyond the direct appeal of rhythm and mystery, and are ready to use their reason about a human and historical situation. They must all hear a lot about international questions these days; and one mustn’t forget that weekly attendance at the cinema had made them far more sophisticated than we ever were at their age. Incidentally, it is interesting that a friend of mine, teaching in an evacuated school, finds that, now that the children can no longer indulge in the accustomed cinema-crawl, they are far more interested and delighted by poetry than they were before. Which means, I suppose, that the age of sophistication has been set back.

  Of course, one has got to remember that, with plays, it’s impossible for the whole audience to get the full value out of every word. If, out of 800 people who find the show good entertainment, 8 are so thoroughly stirred that the thing becomes an experience in their lives, the playwright has done more than he has any right to expect. But he may hope that perhaps another 80 or so may carry away something – a word, a line, a situation, a picture – that may remain in the memory and later on come to mean something, when experience is ready to interpret it. I sometimes think that the B.B.C. is too much inclined to attempt the impossible task of pleasing everybody and offending nobody, and so producing that harmless mediocrity that vaguely insults everybody and stimulates nobody. You can’t really follow the line: “It would be a pity if some children didn’t understand”; you can only say, “If one child fully understands, then praise God for a miracle”. The highest common factor of human intelligence is not so very high, and if a thing is fully understood by everybody, it is seldom worth understanding. But everybody may grasp bits here and there, and that’s worth it. My guess is that the young children will like the mysterious bits, while the grown-ups will like the Little Zillah and the baby-talk – which I only hope to God will not alienate the children!

  Anyway, let’s try. I’m frightfully sorry all this has set us back, but by all means let us pretend that Miss Jenkin never happened, and return to the starting-point. When the next plays come along, I will send a copy direct to you (I should have done so before, but I gathered you had handed the whole thing over). Then, if you have any blasphemy, heresy or schism to complain of, we will get it mended, and the script can go to Mr. McCulloch as producer, without any committees, for his technical criticism about production. To that I’m always ready to listen. Honestly, I’m not out to be obstructive. What happened was that Mr. McCulloch and I got put into a false position, and it seemed necessary to do something to force the issue. This, in the theatre, is the process known as “Throwing a fit” – after which everybody bursts into tears and kisses everybody, and they all behave like lambs. Such behaviour is not usual, of course, in Government departments. A pity, I sometimes think. I should love to see a good theatrical fit thrown in the M.O.I.,1 for example.

  It’s distressing that all this should have boiled up just when Hitler was making all other considerations seem so petty. But things do happen like that.
He dropped a beautiful stick of incendiaries across Witham on Wednesday night, and I prepared to make a dash to safety, clutching a ms. on the Creative Mind under one arm, and John the Baptist (half-finished) under the other. Fortunately, the A.F.S.2 got the things put out before the heavy stuff could follow them up.

  Yours very sincerely,

  [Dorothy L. Sayers]

  1 Ministry of Information.

  2 Auxiliary Fire Service.

  Thus all seemed well and D. L. S. continued work on her second play. Unfortunately, Miss Jenkin, who had read the correspondence which had passed between D. L. S., Dr Welch and Derek McCulloch, felt moved to defend herself against charges of “impertinence, tactlessness and literary ignorance” which D. L. S. had made against her. She also made it clear that in the absence of Derek McCulloch it would be her responsibility to take over the production of the plays. And she concluded: “We cannot delegate to any author, however distinguished, the right to say what shall or shall not be broadcast in a Children’s Hour play”.

  Two days before Christmas D. L. S. replied:

  [24 Newland Street

  Witham

  Essex]

  TO MAY E. JENKIN

  23 December 1940

  Dear Miss Jenkin,

  THE MAN BORN TO BE KING

  Under the circumstances you outline, I have no option but to cancel the contract. Kindly return all scripts of “Kings in Judaea” immediately. My agents will communicate with you.

  Yours faithfully,

  [Dorothy L. Sayers]

  [24 Newland Street

  Witham

  Essex]

  TO DR JAMES WELCH

  23 December 1940

  Dear Dr. Welch,

  I am very sorry indeed to disturb your holiday with unpleasant news, but I think I had better let you know before you hear it from other quarters that I have been obliged to cancel the contract for the plays. Just after I had written to you I received a most unfortunate letter from Miss Jenkin which really left me no option. I am distressed about this. I hoped we were getting everything nicely smoothed out but her letter makes it clear we were back exactly where we were before your diplomatic intervention. I also gathered from her that in case anything happened to Mr. McCulloch she would expect to produce the plays herself and this, of course, I could not permit, nor if anything happened to me would my literary Executor1 permit it.

  The position is an awkward one since it was primarily yourself who commissioned the plays. If the Children’s Hour Department insists on full control of what is broadcast during their periods, no doubt they are within their rights, but I am also within my rights in refusing to work under those conditions.

  I need not say how very much I regret all this. Possibly at some future time you may be able to make another arrangement more satisfactory to all parties.

  Yours very sincerely,

  [Dorothy L. Sayers]

  1 Muriel St Clare Byrne.

  1941

  The mind of a maker

  D. L. S.’ letter of 23 December 1940 had left the door open. Dr Welch replied: “The position is now very difficult and will take a little time to straighten out.” The difficulty was that responsibility for the Children’s Hour period on Sundays was shared between Dr Welch and Derek McCulloch. “But much more”, Dr Welch stressed, “it belongs to the listening children of the country. I cannot accept the cancellation of these plays, which means the denial to the children of an entirely fresh portrayal of the life and teaching of Our Lord.”

  D. L. S.’ reply shows that she was determined to strengthen her position:

  [24 Newland Street

  Witham

  Essex]

  TO DR JAMES WELCH

  2 January 1941

  Dear Dr. Welch,

  I do not greatly care about arguing business contracts on a religious basis; it is difficult to avoid the appearance of making unwarranted claims for one’s self. But you have appealed over the head of Caesar, and I will take you to the higher court if you insist.

  When you say that a play by D. L. S. on this subject would be “a landmark in the history of religious education”, I am not clear whether you mean that my work would have a certain value, or that my name would have a publicity appeal. If the latter, I can only express the opinion that the Kingdom of God can probably scrape along without that particular form of advertising, and echo your words, that it does not matter by whom the plays are written or produced. So far as I am concerned, it can remain anonymous.

  But if you are referring to the worth of the work itself, then I am bound to tell you this: that the writer’s duty to God is his duty to the work, and that he may not submit to any dictate of authority which he does not sincerely believe to be to the good of the work. He may not do it for money, or for reputation, or for edification, or for peace’s sake, or because bombs may fall on him or other people, or for any consideration whatever. Above all, he may not listen to the specious temptation which suggests that God finds his work so indispensable that He would rather have it falsified than not have it at all. The writer is about his Father’s business, and it does not matter who is inconvenienced or how much he has to hate his father and mother. To be false to his work is to be false to the truth: “All the truth of the craftsman is in his craft.”1

  That other dramatists have re-written their work on request is irrelevant. I do not know their motives. They may have sincerely agreed that the change was for the better; they may have felt no particular sense of duty to their work; they may have been so anxious to get on the air that they were prepared to betray their truth; the work may have been of a kind that expected no high standard; they may have been so poor that even the B.B.C. pittance was a necessity for them. I am not their judge. But there is no law of God or man that can be invoked to make a writer tamper with his conscience.

  To do Caesar justice, the general law of contract is devised to safeguard the writer’s integrity as far as possible. The B.B.C. (for some reason) refuses to give proper contracts. I think, however, my agents made it clear that I was prepared to work on the usual terms, viz:

  1. The author to approve the producer and cast.

  2. Nothing in the text of the play to be cut or altered without the author’s consent, such consent not to be unreasonably withheld.

  As regards (2), I was (not so much asked as) instructed to make a number of alterations. Certain of these I refused to make – not, I think, unreasonably, since I advanced reasons which you admitted to be plausible.

  In such a case, the management have only two alternatives: (a) to accept my decision; (b) to reject the play. They cannot compel me to alter. Owing, however, to the fact that in the Children’s Hour Department the management is combined with the production, they tried to enforce alterations in matter and style on the pretence that these concerned the production. This was an unprofessional proceeding, and I said so plainly.

  I was, however, prepared to go on with the job. Miss Jenkin’s letter made this impossible. It is not correct to call this document “a purely personal affair”, since it stated unequivocally that the management proposed to override both clauses (1) and (2) of the contract terms, by claiming the sole right to decide what portions of my text should or should not be broadcast, and by forcing upon me, under certain circumstances, a producer not approved by me. This left me no course open but to break off relations.

  Contractual obligations hold good for ail plays. There is also a recognized difference between work that is submitted by a writer on his own initiative and work that is commissioned. In the first case, the writer works at his own risk, and may expect to have it accepted upon conditions. But commissioned work is ordered at the risk of the management, which expects either to take what it gets or to refuse the work as it stands. This principle is accepted by all responsible professional bodies, and also by all responsible amateur bodies, such, for example, as the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral.

  You say that my reaction was fierce and rude – but h
ow is one to deal with a body that does not understand the terms of a professional engagement? You ask, why should I or anybody object to comment? – but the “comment” took the form of an instruction to alter, and in that form was an impertinence. I beg you not to use such expressions as “Dorothy Sayers is Dorothy Sayers” – I am not asking that rules should be broken in my favour; I am requiring that the common decencies of contract should be respected.

  The notorious difficulty that professional people find in dealing with the B.B.C. is that it is usually quite impossible to discover who the contracting parties are. A piece of work is ordered by one department (e.g. yours), paid for by another department, and put on the air by a third; while the producer is not simply a producer, but also the head of an education committee and an unspecified fraction of the management. Under ordinary professional conditions, in a theatre, you would order the work, approve it or not, and, having approved, engage a producer to produce it, and you would be the party responsible, and to whom the other parties were responsible. As it is, I am not the only person to whom B.B.C. work is a sheer nightmare, because of the amateurishness, the confusion, and the preposterous overlapping of control. “Long experience in B.B.C. production” is not a professional qualification, because the B.B.C. (except on the engineering side) is not a professionally-run body, and has no professional standing.

  Last night’s deplorable exhibition2 was typical. To summon “experts” in science and philosophy and subject them to a sort of penny-paper quiz on sailors’ trousers and the miscellaneous information one can get from a Handy Guide to Knowledge is bad. To call on them to deal with profound and intricate conundrums in physics under a three-minute time-limit is worse. To snigger archly about “the feminine line on the fourth dimension”, and follow this with a put-up piece of futility designed to provoke laughter is worse still. To pretend that this is done, “not as a ‘stunt’ programme but a serious attempt to provide useful information” is the worst insult of all. It’s not even amusing – unrehearsed, stifled in private giggles, it stutters and drags on lo no result, cheap, slip-shod, amateur, degrading, and contemptible. This is the official B.B.C. attitude to art, science, philosophy and learning. Do you wonder that Mgr. Knox,3 attacking the specious and the shoddy in the name of the only wise God, called his book “Broadcast Minds”?4 Do you wonder that those who have a respect for their calling are sometimes reluctant to associate themselves with the B.B.C.? Joad5 and Huxley6 lend themselves to these things. True. But would Eddington7 or Whitehead?8 The stigma that rests upon the place is that it is the spiritual home of the not-quite-first-rate — the artist, the scientist, the philosopher with one ear turned from the work to catch the crackling of thorns under the pot.9 This is not an outburst of personal spite: what I am saying is said by everybody; by everybody who has reverence for the mind.