The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, Volume 2

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  I am quite of your mind about the teaching put forward in many churches; but I should not have said that this erred very much nowadays on the side of being too theological. My own complaint would be that it is apt to take the theology far too much for granted, and, instead of explaining and interpreting that, to offer either a set of ethical exhortations which are pointless apart from the theology on which they are based, or else a good deal of talk about religious experience which means nothing to the hearer who has not shared that experience, and is seldom directly communicable.

  You may be interested in a letter I have had from a master in a public school,5 who is, as he says, in a position to “know what the young men want”. He writes, “Christian principles without Christian dogma leaves most of them stone cold. But they’ll take dogma with both hands and ask for more.” The impression I get, for what it is worth, is that the modernist position belongs, like so many things calling themselves modern, to the last century, and that the younger people are looking for something that can be called dateless; and in their search they seem to be making the double swing back to Aquinas and Augustine – since tomorrow always seems to have to build itself on the day before yesterday; it never builds on yesterday – perhaps the greatest mistake of the “evolutionist” in applying their biological analogy in the spiritual field was to suppose that it did.

  Thank you very much for your letter, and for the things you so kindly say about my books. I hope you will forgive me for appearing contentious – but the matter seems to me of too much urgent importance not to be discussed as frankly as possible.

  Yours faithfully,

  [Dorothy L. Sayers]

  1 Identity unknown.

  2 D. Huizinga (1872–1945), Dutch historian and essayist, author of The Waning of the Middle Ages (tr. F. Hopman, 1924) and Homo Ludens (1938). In the Shadow of Tomorrow: a Diagnosis of the Spiritual Distemper of our Time was published in 1936. D. L. S. quotes from this work three times in The Mind of the Maker (Methuen, p. 18, note 1; pp. 32–33; p. 35).

  3 Published in 1937. Michael Roberts was a schoolmaster and a poet.

  4 Latin: ratio scientiae, the order of knowledge; ratio sapientiae, the order of understanding.

  5 Eton College; see following letter.

  [24 Newland Street

  Witham

  Essex]

  TO J. D. UPCOTT1

  Keate House

  Eton College

  Windsor

  1 September 1941

  Dear Mr. Upcott,

  Thank you so much for your extremely interesting letter. I’m extremely glad to know what you tell me about “what the young men want”. As you say, you are there, and you know. I can only guess – and though it’s a novelist’s business to guess, and guess right (since one’s livelihood depends on guessing right) one is always liable to be shouted down by the people who clamour incessantly that young people don’t want any of this nasty dogma. I have a shrewd suspicion that most of the anti-dogmatics are elderly people, who were brought up in the old-fashioned “Liberal” tradition and are quite out of touch with the young; but they don’t always produce their birth-certificates to back up their views, so it’s hard to be sure.

  But, looking round at the world as it is, it seems to me (I speak as a fool) that youth is all out for dogma, and that if boys and girls grow up imagining that Christianity has no dogma to give them, they’ll give themselves over to political dogma or economic dogma in its crudest and most intransigent form. And whether they end by accepting the Christian philosophy or not, it seems only right and reasonable that they should at least be told that there is one, of a quite coherent and really relevant kind, and what it is. Otherwise, as Michael Roberts says in The Recovery of the West,2 they find themselves comparing their adult knowledge and science and politics with the simple notions of Christianity they acquired at their mothers’ knees, and naturally conclude that the Christian religion is only fit to be put away with the other childish things.

  I’m very glad your 16-year-olds enjoyed The Devil to Pay.3 The imminence of the war, and other things, spoilt its reception in Town; also, I think it was, in a way, about a year too early for most people’s mood. None of the critics and few of the public grasped the meaning of the Helen episode and the devastating relapse into irresponsibility. It was a little terrifying to find out how many of the audience thought it was so much nicer for Faustus to be a “dear little doggie” than to pay the price of his human dignity. De te fabula4 was the only possible comment. Today, they might make more of it – especially the younger ones, who do seem to be grasping the idea of responsibility. At least, I hope so. But I’m rather afraid of all these “leaders” who seem to be heading towards the planned state and the planned citizen. Perhaps I have been reading too much Hermann Rauschning;5 but I do seem to detect in nearly all the plans for a New-Order the doctrinaire passion for over-simplification which refuses to take account of the complexity of human nature or of the paradox that causes all human absolutes to issue in their own opposites. People proclaim peace, justice, liberty, democracy – as though by saying the word they could impose the thing – never mind what we mean by peace, liberty, justice and democracy. Never mind theology – all we have to do is to practise the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount; that’s all we have to do; nothing, obviously, could be more simple and easy.

  The other day, a well-known Socialist said to Maurice Reckitt that she now realised how much their youthful efforts had been nullified by “failure to face two problems: the problem of Evil and the problem of Power”. And the other day I tried on a bright youngish Socialist Reinhold Niebuhr’s statement: “Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.”6 He found it terrifying (so it is), and indicated that he didn’t want to believe it was true. Perhaps the young wouldn’t mind so much leaving “security” behind them, and setting out, “A fire on the one hand and a deep water on the other”, if people would only tell them that that is what is called for. I don’t know. But it seems to be a fact that you can’t get anybody to do anything worth a damn by telling them that everything’s all right and the Golden Age just on the other side of the mirror; they just turn into dear little doggies and innocently let hell loose everywhere.

  By the way, all the conjurations in Devil to Pay are quite authentic – guaranteed to produce results. I can’t definitely say we conjured up anything worse than ourselves, either in Canterbury or London; but the production was attended by a series of extraordinary difficulties and catastrophes in both places. I hope no peculiar effects were observable at Eton!

  With again many thanks,

  Yours sincerely,

  [Dorothy L. Sayers]

  1 John Dalgairns Upcott taught classics and history at Eton from 1919 to 1945. He died in 1962.

  2 See letter to the Rev. T. Wigley, 1 September 1941, note 3. The Recovery of the West was published in 1941.

  3 There is no record of a performance of the play at Eton. Mr Upcott may have arranged a dramatized reading of it as part of “private business”.

  4 Latin: it speaks of thee.

  5 Hermann Rauschning, an East Prussian military aristocrat who joined the Nazi movement in its early days. Later disillusioned, he wrote two books in which he exposed its essential nihilism: Germany’s Revolution of Destruction, tr. 1939 (which D. L. S. recommended under “Books to Read” in Begin Here) and Hitler Speaks, tr. 1939.

  6 See letter to the Sister Superior, 25 June 1941.

  [24 Newland Street

  Witham

  Essex]

  TO DR JAMES WELCH

  17 September 1941

  Dear Dr. Welch,

  I didn’t acknowledge your former letter, because I gathered that a second was to follow it. I will now make haste to acknowledge them both, before dashing off to Hayward’s Heath to address some people there about Christian New Orders and things.1

  I’m so glad you all found “The King’s Herald” interesting as a play – because whe
n writing for production that is the first and greatest commandment on which hang all the Law and the Prophets. I’m quite prepared to find that a few people may be startled or shocked – I don’t mind if you don’t. The proportion of shocked people in my fan-mail for He That Should Come was exactly one in eleven, which isn’t too bad, I think, since the angry people are usually much more ready to write letters than the contented people.

  What you say about the theophany2 touches really the central point of all this – the central point, I mean, of what I’ve been trying to do in these Bible plays. My feeling is that one of the principal reasons why the Gospel story is apt to appear unreal and stained-glass-window-like is, oddly enough, the enormous importance we attach to all the incidents. For the Evangelists, and for us, looking at the whole story in the light of what we know, Jesus is the centre, not only of His own story, but of all history, and it is with great difficulty that we remember how differently He must have appeared to His own contemporaries. In so many religious plays and books He is shown surrounded by people who are, so to speak, self-consciously assisting at, or assisting in, the fulfilment of prophecies. But they weren’t really like that – they said, “Is not this the carpenter?” – adding, indignantly, “But we know these people” – and as for new prophets, though no doubt they always caused an excitement, most of them would be nine-day-wonders, and not really so urgently absorbing as the price of oil and the iniquities of tax-gatherers. The thing that is so dramatic, and so convincingly “real” is that the course of the world’s history was being violently changed, and that practically nobody took any notice. To us the baptism of Christ is the earth-shaking moment when the Son of Man realized fully that He was the Son of God; but [to] the bystanders (who apparently didn’t see the vision) that baptism would be just one of many – and to my “Hannah” the exciting thing would be that this was, unexpectedly, “Mary’s boy” – an old friend with news from home. (It seems pretty clear from Luke IV.16–30 that Jesus had never said or done anything remarkable in the 30 silent years – he doesn’t seem even to have been looked upon as the local infant phenomenon, still less as the local miracle monger. The Nazarenes complained that they weren’t getting any of the exciting “things” that had been done at Capernaum.) So Jesus undergoes a really terrific experience – and we feel as though the world ought to have stood respectfully still – but instead it comes chattering and clattering in on Him, occupied with its own affairs. I’ve tried to indicate that it is, after all, the perfectly balanced temperament that can control itself and deal graciously with the intrusive world – that it is John who is thrown off his balance and can’t attend to anything, and Jesus who can find time and patience to attend to a gossipy middle-aged woman and a couple of children. Incidentally, I put in this bit, and the children generally, because it seemed to offer the possibility of something fairly simple for the younger listeners. All the rest of the John Baptist story is difficult stuff for children – repentance, and all that. …

  I struggled a good deal with “thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness” but could find nothing for it that children could make anything of. It implies so much that needs knowledge – theological and historical, and it is all mixed up with the difficult business of sinlessness, and the vicarious assumption of the sins of the world; so I thought it best on the whole to substitute a simple phrase that might convey something rather than keep a difficult phrase that couldn’t convey anything much.3

  John’s stammer – This sort of thing always looks maddening in print, but I think it will be all right in production. I’ll explain to Val that we don’t want a real stammer, but only a little trick of stumbling, due to his tripping over his own eager tongue. They did a little play the other night, in which the actor who played Charles Lamb4 had got just the right effect, and it was very attractive. For broadcasting, any trifling trick of speech is of enormous help to the listener, because it helps him in the immensely difficult job of distinguishing one male voice from the other. And there are so many male voices in the Gospel story; it’s going to be hard work for the listeners however much help we give them. I’m sure you can trust Val to do that part of it all right.

  Humour – dreadfully difficult – especially as the reported humour of Christ tends to be of the ironical kind which appeals to the adult mind. I owe to R.A. Edwards,5 by the way, the suggestion that the conjunction of Simon’s name with Simon’s face must have been entertainingly incongruous. We’ve got to depend a lot on the actors about all this.

  By the way (à propos of the comforting assurance to Andrew that the bread came from the baker) – I wish one of the Evangelists had thought to tell us what the disciples felt about living with a person who could turn water into wine and multiply loaves and fishes. Miracles of healing are not really so disconcerting – but the first staggering realization that solid material things might slide away and turn into something else – what did they think about it? Supposing somebody said to you, “I was seriously tempted to turn stones into bread” – even if you didn’t think he was mad or lying, and indeed especially if you didn’t think he was mad or lying – would you feel comfortable? The Evangelists are so exasperatingly matter-of-fact about themselves. The only thing that really seems to have upset anybody was the miraculous draught of fishes. I suppose that really was the first miracle (though I haven’t room for it) – but even so, fish in the proper place for fish – though in large numbers – isn’t quite so disquieting as the other things. …

  Whip or goad6 – I’m sure you are perfectly right about the goad. But how can one ask the “effects” people to make a noise like a goad? One’s only got people’s ears to appeal to, and a whip helps a lot to make the starting-up of the cart audible. If you think strict accuracy essential, we’ll do without it. But actually I’m not trying very hard to be pedantically Oriental. I feel that the best way is to give a slight Oriental flavour here and there, but to combine this with as much familiar daily-life detail as possible. Like those Renaissance painters, who dress Christ and the disciples in “Bible” costume, and Herod’s soldiers in vaguely classical armour, and surround them with men and women in more or less sixteenth-century costume with a dash of oriental trimmings here and there. That’s why I made John Baptist talk of the “bride-groom’s friend” as the “best man” – a person the children know all about, instead of trying to preserve all the detail of the Eastern ceremony. I’m doing the same with the Marriage at Cana – keeping all the necessary water-pots, wine-skins and what not, but letting a friend of the family propose the health of the young couple much as it might be done by Mr. Smith of Surbiton, and avoiding pedantic exactitude of detail. It won’t please the historical-costume experts, but it’s so much easier to get life into the thing that way.

  The next play7 is done, and you shall have it as soon as it is typed. But I’m depressed and discouraged by hearing from Val that after the first two plays the programme people are cutting the time down from forty-five minutes to forty. It is simply maddening to have all these upsets and alterations. Five minutes means a difference of about 3 and a half pages, and that’s a serious matter – because it’s always the lively, atmospheric bits that have to be sacrificed. Can you possibly do anything about it? Surely, that one day in the week, some fragment of light music or something can be dispensed with? What bothers one is the uncertainty. One tries to plan the plays so that they will each bear a reasonable proportion to the thing as a whole – but what will have happened by the time we get to the Last Supper? Will that find itself suddenly curtailed to half-an-hour? They treat this play-writing game as though it were like reeling off a set of gramophone records. But honestly it’s the most difficult and delicate job I’ve ever struck and at each fresh obstruction one’s heart goes down with a bump, and one’s enthusiasm and interest get sort of sucked out of one. I seem to be always complaining about something, don’t I? I know there’s a war on8 – but why pick on Christ, if you take my meaning? Can’t somebody else suffer, for a change?<
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  I don’t think my “creative genius” is likely to conflict – consciously, at any rate – with the narrative; though of course one’s obliged to take a few liberties of compression, addition, and adjustment, to avoid having a mere succession of disconnected episodes. And sometimes one has to interpret explicitly what seem to be the implications, and one may easily go wrong. I find, as I had expected, that where St. John (or whoever it was) is giving an “eye-witness report” he is incomparable. All his characters are real people and all his conversations are lively and precise. He leaves out a lot of what had been written down already, and he often summarizes briefly the things he didn’t see for himself; but whenever he goes into detail he knows where people were sitting, and what they said and the connection between one thing and the other – the perfect “source” for the playwright.