With kind regards,
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 See letter to her, 4 May 1942, note 1.
2 London Calling, edited by Storm Jameson (New York and London, Harper and Brothers, 1942), to which D. L. S. contributed a poem, “Lord, I thank thee”. (See Poetry of Dorothy L. Sayers, ed. cit., pp. 123–129.)
3 The centre, known as the Society of St Anne, occupied a great deal of D. L. S.’ time and energy during the last 14 years of her life.
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO HER SON
26 June 1943
Dear John,
Many thanks for your letter and birthday greetings – the enclosure which you mentioned was not enclosed, but from the context I take it to have been something in the nature of a bill. I don’t know whether it had to do with some kind of extraordinary expenditure, as it’s called, because you didn’t say; but on general principles I don’t think it’s a good thing for me to anticipate your allowance by too long a period. If you get it a fortnight early, it merely means that the sum of money has to cover three and a half months instead of three; and if one goes on along those lines one soon finds one’s self in a rather Micawberish state, financially speaking. So try and arrange things to fit in with the proper [word missing] because finance is pretty tight these days.
I know it’s extremely difficult to keep one’s mind alive when one’s doing other sorts of work. I can only say, “Do your best not to cultivate an ‘interim-mentality,’ because that’s what people did in the last war, and it led to all the troubles of the ‘20-30’s. I am reminded of my daily woman, who looks on the war-years as a period during which she’s compelled by circumstances to take care of pottery and hardware and looks forward eagerly to the day when she may again light-heartedly smash plates and burn the bottoms out of saucepans, knowing that she can always run out to Woolworth’s and replace them. (I haven’t the heart to tell her that I don’t think that merry state of things is coming back, and that things will be much better if it doesn’t.)
As far as I can make out, finance and power are due for a divorce. This seems to have happened already in Russia and (under rather different conditions) only comparatively few people see that here, and probably still fewer in America, where they are due for a few shocks. It’s all very exciting to watch, though a little unnerving when one sees that the reins are mostly in the hands of people who don’t know which way the horses are going, so probably it’s too much to expect that they should begin now. All the same, I fancy Peter Drucker has got hold of the right end of the stick. I thought so when I read The End of Economic Man, and The Future of Industrial Man1 confirms me in that opinion. The people who base their utopias on the notion that markets are going to expand seem to me to be talking like children. But of course, they may succeed in staving off the inevitable for another twenty years and a third world-war. I don’t know; but be prepared accordingly! – Meanwhile, one does the necessary amount of vegetation while the present conflict is got on with. We had two strange Belgians to tea the other day. Their opinion of the French was not printable. Of all the nations, France is going to be the most troublesome and unhappy after the War, and some of the people who know most seem to think she is due for a really frightful civil war. Which is what comes of saying that one will do and suffer anything rather than fight! The usual enantiodrame2 in a particularly spectacular form. But, my God, it’s enthralling to watch! The trouble is that one dare not – indeed cannot – remain merely a spectator of things, and that it’s difficult to know precisely which part of the universal muddle one should prepare one’s self to take active part in. I should like to be twenty years younger, with my present mind and attitude. But we never can have that, and that’s the devil of it.
Your affectionate
D. L. F.
1 The End of Economic Man, 1939; The Future of Industrial Man, 1943.
2 Interaction of opposites (from Greek, opposing, and spectacle).
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO MISS J. HODGSON1
8 July 1943
Dear Miss Hodgson,
I certainly agree that the Church’s record is a bad one as regards the position of women, and I said so with some emphasis in the Christendom article to which you refer.
The question of admission to Holy Orders, however, leaves me cold. In any case, I think it is perfectly idiotic to start this particular hare at the present moment. One cannot possibly expect such a proposition to receive serious attention until the basic position (infinitely more important) is conceded; viz: that a woman possesses status as a human being, and that all her functions are not necessarily related to her sex.
As matters stand it is almost impossible to get the clergy to tackle the subject of the status of women, because they always think it is going to be something or other about Orders; and the agitation about this has only succeeded in side-tracking the dispute and confusing the issues. I think that to clamour for admission to the priesthood (whether or not it is desirable) is to throw the whole thing out of proportion; it is bound to look like just one more effort to get women into a paid profession, whereas the real controversy is about something much more fundamental. As for preaching and prophesying, I know to my cost that there is no difficulty whatever about doing that – the difficulty is to avoid it!
Quite apart from all this – where is the sense of introducing an entirely new spanner into the works at a moment when the Churches seem a little more disposed than they have been for centuries to pull together and show some sort of united front? Can you conceive anything more likely to [affront] and alienate the Orthodox and Roman Communions or the more traditional parties in the Church of England? It’s running your head against a stone wall to no purpose. And if “women who have made their mark in public life” are not going to attend to spiritual things until they see the chance of getting something out of it, their spirituality is such as the Church can very well dispense with. Do let us preserve some sense of proportion.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Identity unknown.
The following letter and the one which concludes the present volume, mark the beginning of a correspondence with Helmut Kuhn,1 the interest and importance of which will further emerge in volume three.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO HELMUT KUHN, ESQ.
c/o The University of North Carolina Press,
Chapel Hill,
North Carolina
U.S.A.
30 August 1943
Dear Mr. Kuhn,
I have received from your publishers a copy of your book Freedom Forgotten and Remembered, with the request that I should “write and give them my opinion of it”. But I would rather write directly to you, so that I may at the same time thank you for the very kindly review you gave to The Mind of the Maker – in a periodical so learned that its very title makes me blush. It must have been only too obvious to you that my theology was amateurish and my philosophy extremely sketchy, and it was exceedingly kind of you to overlook the many faults of rash and inadequate terminology in which the book abounds, and to give it such generous and serious attention. I am glad you thought there was “something in it”, as they say. There are parts of it which I could wish better expressed, and which I could do better now, having read more and consulted people. At the time I wrote it, I was rather cut off from books and consultation, and also rather distracted of mind, owing to the fact that the Battle of France was startling us all through the first chapters and the Battle of Britain whizzing round our heads during the conclusion. Not that that is any real excuse. One should preserve one’s detachment; but as a matter of fact, one doesn’t altogether.
Is your book being published over here?2 I hope so, because there is a great deal in it that English people ought and need to understand. For example: the
distinction you firmly draw between incidental brutalities in time of emergency and the calculated brutalities that are an integral part of the order they seek to enforce. The English as everybody knows, are rather muddled thinkers; and also (as everybody doesn’t know) they are very easily abashed into self-criticism and scrupulosity. It’s not really hypocrisy that makes us demand moral justification for what we do; it’s really a rather childish feeling that we “want to be good”, and can’t get on if we are made to feel that we are hopelessly naughty.3 That’s why we are so much more lively and vigorous in defeat than in victory – because we feel pretty sure there’s a moral justification for staying alive if possible. But when we are safe and powerful, we get uneasy, and begin to listen to the doctrinaire people who argue and scold, and say: “What right have we to oppose Hitler or set ourselves up as champions of liberty? We’re just as bad. We put distinguished foreigners into internment camps with bad lavatory accommodation, we suppressed The Daily Worker, we suspended habeas corpus, we shot some people in India, we are uniformed and regimented up to the hilt, the police are empowered to pry into our store-cupboards and coal-cellars,4 we rejoice in the bombing of Berlin and sometimes speak irritably about Jews – we might just as well be in Germany!” And then we get worried, having been taught to despise the method of argument which begins with distinguo,5 and lose confidence and do silly things.
You say there must be a true victory – “a real victor who believes in the truth of his triumphant cause”. You couldn’t be more right – but that’s just where we are likely to come over all queer and lose grip. We do so dislike what we call “a bad winner” (meaning an ungenerous and boastful winner) that we shall probably end by confusing the triumphant cause with our triumphant selves, and so disown the triumph. This is a sort of pride and egotism, in one way, but also it’s a kind of disordered humility. “The great question is whether any one individual or any one nation is good enough to fight the good battle.” That is important. In a sense, of course, nobody is – but if God insisted on waiting till all His battles could be fought with clean hands, He would have no soldiers at all. The fact is, we have let our minds be taken captive by the Perfectionists and Absolutists and Whole-hoggers who are obsessed with the notion that there can be absolute perfection in human affairs. Therefore, having said with St. Paul that we “are not meet to be apostles because we persecuted the Church of God”, we proceed to the conclusion not that we should “labour more abundantly than them all”, but that we are disqualified from all apostolic function, and had better sit down and shut up.
You say that, after the war, existing ties and alliances should be preserved and strengthened – we should build on, and extend, that which already exists. Again, how right you are! And again, how the doctrinaire perfectionists will insist on doing otherwise. You include the British Commonwealth of Nations among the foundations to be built on. But they will try, in the name of equality, or internationalism, or something, to dissolve all such existing ties, and set up some [neopolitical ?] novelty in their place – a Federation of Europe, or a rejuvenated League of Nations, or some other fancy association of states without roots in heart or history. It can’t be done. Nothing will come of nothing. Nations are realities, like families. Frontiers are made by geographical facts like mountains and rivers and soil and coal-mines. Nobody can draw random lines over the map and say “Your loyalties begin at a place decided for you by a committee of experts”; or “You mustn’t have any loyalties except to humanity-in-general”.
Nor is it the slightest use – it’s the most wicked mischief – to talk about “abiding peace and lasting security”. There’s no such thing. Good God, didn’t we learn that last time? Then it was “No More War” – and that slogan landed us in the biggest war ever. Now it’s “No More Poverty” and “No More Fear” – I know what horrid enantiodramas6 of themselves the slogans are going to issue in. The worst slogan of the lot is “No More Risk”: that’s the thing that makes people run away from freedom and land themselves in a total tyranny, with the risk of the gallows at every corner.
It’s true that “the democracies” (as we agreed to call them for want of a better name) do really want and thrive on freedom. But the thing they want and instinctively fight for is not the thing they have become accustomed to call freedom. What popular speakers call “freedom” is nearly always the “freedom from” – and that’s why we don’t know how to explain ourselves when people point out that we, like every other [state], are obliged to impose certain restrictions on ourselves. Too much “freedom from” ends in leaving one no “freedom to” at all. If I am free from all bonds, even the right to bind myself, I am not free to believe in anything definite, to make any definite decision, even to love one person or thing more than another; and every daily choice becomes an agony, because there is no paramount claim to bind the will to a single course. That is where people begin to welcome regimentation, and find themselves more genuinely free in war than in peace – free to follow their fixed choice, without hesitation or conflicting claim.
Why should I say all this badly to you who know it already and have said it better? Only to tell you how passionately I agree with you, and because I want somebody to say it and go on saying it very loudly to our nation. The English are all right really. In a way they are protected by not being able to think too neatly, because, when a choice has to be made they make it instinctively without bothering too much about theoretical consistency. But they’ve got to the point where they can’t plump out with their choice till they have their backs against the wall and must choose or perish. I don’t want them to go further and get like France, which seems to have almost lost the power of choice. Even when she was right up against it, she didn’t choose anything, and so far as one can see she isn’t choosing yet. Not really. In some ways, the condition of France frightens me more than that of Germany. I think it’s nearer to what we might become. Though I don’t know. It’s queer how, in any desperate emergency, the British do all think the same thing at bottom (though you wouldn’t suppose it, seeing how violently they disagree in Parliament and the newspapers). But they do, though it needs the emergency to bring the essential agreement to the surface. I should think any outsider would wonder how the Government (knowing, as we didn’t know, the non-existent state of our armament) dared to take the risk of going on in 1940. But if they hadn’t there would have been such a howl of fury from one end of Britain to the other that they couldn’t have faced it. (Fortunately Churchill was there to howl the loudest, and we were spared a General Election or a revolution with the Germans at Calais.)
This letter seems to be all about Britain – narrow and national. But I’m concerned about Britain. I think we have something valuable here, if the theorists and the tolerationists will stop bewildering us and let us hold on to it. But a lot of people in positions of importance seem to me to be looking in the wrong direction and flogging dead horses. I have a feeling that while they are concentrating on divorcing money from power (which is all right as far as it goes) they may lose sight of the fact that this doesn’t mean abolishing power, but merely shifting the effective focus of power to some other quarter. Indeed, I think power has already evacuated the financial strong-hold and gone elsewhere, and that we are really doing mopping-up operations, under the impression that we are conducting a major campaign. Perhaps one never realizes where power is until the moment it is preparing to collapse. None of this is much to the point, I fear. All I really have to do is to express my appreciation of a very wise book, and to hope that it will be read, marked, and digested.
Yours very truly,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Helmut Kuhn (b.1899), philosopher, had undertaken to write a volume for “Bridgeheads”. It was eventually published, first in German (Begegnung mit dem Nichts; ein Versuch über die Existenzphilosophie, Tübingen, 1950 and next in English, Encounter with Nothingness: an Essay on Existentialism, Methuen, 1951) but by then the series “Bridgeheads” had been discontinu
ed. In 1949 D. L. S. was still sufficiently involved to ask C. S. Lewis if he would write an introduction to the English version, but he declined. A Foreword was written by Martin Jarrett-Kerr, C.R.
Helmut Kuhn, professor of Philosophy at Erlangen, had held a Chair of Philosophy also at the University of North Carolina (1928–1947) and at Emory University (1947–1949). His book Freedom Forgotten and Remembered was published in 1942. A History of Esthetics, co-authored by Katharine Everett Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn, was first published by Thames and Hudson in 1939 (revised and enlarged edition, 1956). Christianity and Reason, edited by Edward D. Myers (New York, Oxford University Press, 1951), a collection of papers read by the Guild of Scholars at the General Theological Seminary in New York, 5–7 December 1947, contains an article by Kuhn: “The Wisdom of the Greeks”.
2 It was distributed by the Oxford University Press.
3 Cf. her article “They Tried to be Good”, first published in World Review, November 1943, pp. 30–34; reprinted in Unpopular Opinions, Gollancz, 1946, pp. 97–105.
4 This was true during World War II.
5 Latin: I distinguish (used to present the points in mediaeval disputation).
6 She employs this unusual word also in her letter to John Anthony, dated 26 June 1943; see note 2.
From the following letter it is apparent that John Anthony, then aged 19, was developing literary talent. He had written a play, which he sent to his mother for her comments.
The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, Volume 2 Page 54