The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1 by Dorothy L. Sayers
Dear John,
Now that the intolerable uproar surrounding two successive productions of The Devil to Pay has subsided, or at least eased off a trifle, I can look round and find out what is happening elsewhere.
So you have been mumping – I gather, and fervently hope that you are now de-mumped. It is a dreary and unbecoming disease. I had it in France, a good many years ago, and thought poorly of it as an entertainment. How does this affect the question of holiday camps and things? I can’t remember anything about the length of quarantine and so on.
About your History Vth question – I think I must get your Head to write me a full report on the matter, since I see no possible chance of getting away from this dashed play for a little time yet. I had a letter from Mr Whats-his-name at Dumpton House about holiday cruises, but it all seemed (a) a bit expensive, (b) dubious, in the present state of things abroad. What with Musso in the Mediterranean, the Danzig confusion in the Baltic, Japan in the Pacific, unrest in the Balkans, mystery in Russia, settlement in Spain, and confusion on the Alps (where, I am told, German troops have arrived to keep the French out of Italy – a position that must be extremely mortifying to the Italians) – I can think of no spot, except perhaps the Arctic Circle, to which it would be agreeable to go.
Music – I am inclined to agree with you that if one isn’t going to do anything much with it, it’s rather a waste of time and energy. I’ll take this up with Mr Cosgrove.
I hope the collar-bone is now satisfactory, and ready to stand up to life’s requirements.
In the midst of everything else, the Government chose this moment to haul me up on the question of what will you do in the next Great War, Mummy.1 I have written them a bright set of suggestions, which will either impress them very much or make them decide that I am too uncontrollable for their purposes!2 Drat them. I hear from people who have been in Germany that the man in the street there has been rather staggered by our appearance of determination, and is deeply disinclined to have any sort of row with us, so that poor Goebbels and Goering and Co. have to set out and work up their anti-British stuff all over again, which must be very tiresome for them. I also heard a good tale, which didn’t, I think, get into the papers, that a short time ago, there occurred an inexplicable and apparently irreplaceable failure in the electric light supply at Milan, which plunged the whole city in darkness for the night – and that in the morning a perfect rash of anti-German propaganda was found to have broken out all over the walls. I hope it is true. The Italians have a grand knack of stage-craft in political matters!
Love and best wishes,
Mother
1 An echo of the recruiting slogan and cartoon published during the first World War, showing a child asking its father: “What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?”
2 See James Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers: The Life of a Courageous Woman (Gollancz, 1981), pp. 175–176.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO MARGARET BABINGTON
28 July 1939
Dear Babs,
Thank you very much for your letter; I am so glad you enjoyed the show.1 We have not yet heard from Queen Mary, but are still hoping that she may turn up one night.
We seem to have annoyed some of the atheists and agnostics considerably, to judge by the papers. However, we are hoping for the best, but do push along any well-wisher you can find, because it is vitally necessary to get money into the theatre during the coming week.
With many thanks,
Yours ever,
[D. L. S.]
1 The performance of The Devil to Pay at His Majesty’s Theatre.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHURCH TIMES
1 August 1939
Dear Sir,
It is usually unwise for a writer to undertake the defence of his own work; but when your dramatic critic complained that, in The Devil to Pay, the Devil’s claim is not answered “on its own plane” he raised a question of more general importance than the merits or defects of my play.1
The objection is a natural one; but The Church Times is the last quarter from which I expected it to come. Anybody rash enough to contend with the Devil on the Devil’s plane is bound to yield his adversary “the best of the argument” – just as anybody who attempts to answer the famous question, “what does poetry prove?” is lost before he begins.
That the possibility of evil is implicit in Good, so soon as Good is expressed in Time-Space-Matter, and that the knowledge of Evil is therefore implicit in the self-conscious knowledge of Good within the expression of Time-Space-Matter, are facts to which the only possible answer is the Time-Space-Matter expression of the Incarnate Good. This the Judge asserts, the Devil admits and Faustus finally accepts; as the result of that acceptance, the resolution of the problem is found to be
…in the person of the very Christ
In Whom stands all the meaning of creation.2
It is true that this solution removes the argument from the Devil’s plane altogether; how should it not? That is what the whole Christian doctrine is about.
The subject is very suggestively treated by Charles Williams in He Came Down from Heaven (Heinemann, 5 shillings), in Chapter 2, “The Myth of the Alteration in Knowledge” and Chapter 7, “The City”. If I had read this little book before writing my play, I should have suspected myself of thinking under its influence; as it is, I am happy to find myself groping, by a very different path, to a similar conclusion.
Yours faithfully,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 In The Church Times, 28 July 1939, p. 88, under the heading “From a Journalist’s Note-Book: The Week’s Jottings”, The Devil to Pay was defined as “a play of high ambition and inspiration”. The critic went on to say: “The devilish claim that the world is ‘the work of a mad brain, cruel and blind and stupid’ is amplified by Mephistopheles with great gusto, but neither the subsequent rebuke of the Pope, nor the speech of the celestial judge, seemed to me to answer it on its own plane. One left the theatre with the uncomfortable feeling that the devil had the best of the argument.”
2 Scene 4.
On Sunday 3 September 1939 the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced that Hitler had invaded Poland and that consequently Great Britain was at war with Germany.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DR J. H. OLDHAM1
10 September 1939
Dear Dr. Oldham,
Thank you for your letter of the 7th. I expect to be in Town some time this week – I am not sure of the exact day, because it depends, among other things, upon when I can get hold of my dentist, but I should think it would be towards the end of the week. I will find out tomorrow and let you know.
I shall be happy to see you and do what I can about all this. But I don’t think it’s going to be enough merely to keep the Christian flag flying; I fancy that now or never is the time to bring it out and carry it ostentatiously down the street. In a sense Christianity is in a good position – even if it is only that of being able to say, “I told you so”. Materialism is dead, and the people who have been busy for the last fifty years secularising everything are now thoroughly frightened by the results when they see the idea carried to its full conclusion. Even the intellectuals, whom the Church was foolish enough to lose, seem to be wavering in their self-confidence, though most of them still dislike the Church, and prefer fancy brands of Christianity of their own. There are a good many complaints from those who ask why “the Churches” don’t say something loud and definite, and I think the Church has got to do it.
On the other hand, I do think it very important that Christianity shouldn’t make the mistake of identifying itself with any political or economic panacea. That is fatal – and incidentally, a thing that Christ was far too shrewd to do. In any case, the panaceas are liable to be discredited by hard facts just about the time that on
But I do think it is necessary to bring the statement of Christian doctrine into some sort of relation with reality. A lot of the stock phraseology has become meaningless, so that people not merely don’t know what it means, but are unaware that it ever had any meaning.
However, there’s no point in writing what I can perfectly well say when we meet. As soon as I know my plans, we can fix a time. So far as I know, any day or hour will suit me, when once I have coped with the dentist problem. It is disconcerting these days not to know whether people are going to be there or evacuated or tied up with war-work. But I suppose somebody has to be about to deal with civilian teeth!
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Dr. J. H. Oldham, founder and editor of The Christian News-Letter, a weekly which ran from 1939 to 1957. See also her letter to him, 2 October 1939.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO T. S. ELIOT
11 September 1939
Dear Mr. Eliot,
Thank you for your very kind letter about The Devil to Pay addressed to Alan Bland;1 I do not think anything much could have been done about it. Despite my warnings, the management insisted upon putting it on at a hopeless time of year when all our special audience was out of London, while at the same time, they put off until far too late the publicity to Church congregations, which might have done us some good. I was not very much upset about it, because I had a very good reason at the time to suppose that there would be war, and that we should come off in any case; but I do thank you very much for your expression of sympathy and kind offer to help.
I have had a letter from Dr. Oldham about getting together and doing something to keep the flag of Christianity flying; I gather you are more or less connected with this movement. Could you tell me anything about it? I have said I will meet him in town on Friday to talk things over, though I do not know that there is very much that I can do.
I do not know what you are doing at the moment, so I address this c/o Faber and Faber; if you are likely to be in town at any time it would be very nice if we could meet. I shall be hovering between here and 24, Great James Street, W.C.I, and letters addressed to either place will reach me.
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Savers]
1 Alan Bland (1897–1946), press representative with Sir Barry Jackson at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and then for the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells Theatres.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO J. H. JONAS1
26 September 1939
Dear Sir,
I must reply briefly to your long letter about my article “What Do We Believe?”2
(1) What I have written is a true statement of Christian belief as formulated by the Church. (Not a full statement, of course, but true as far as it goes.) That many Christians have a more limited conception of it is also true, nevertheless, that is the Faith.
(2) “No real comfort to the rank and file” – I said, and I repeat, that the creed is primarily not intended as a comfort but as a statement of truth.
(3) Free will – I have dealt with this question in another article, published in pamphlet form under the title Strong Meat.3 In Christian theology the only uncaused Cause of will, or anything else, is God. The human will partakes of His freedom in so far that it is not caused (though it must, of course, be influenced) by anything within the framework of creation.
(4) God, being the source of all things, is the ultimate source of evil as well as good. He knows evil, that is, “by intelligence” (His intelligence being infinite) but without calling it into being. Man, being a finite intelligence, if he determines to know evil, can only do so by experience, i.e. by calling it into being, which, having free will, he can do, but at his own cost and the denial of his real nature, which is good. Having found the evil in good, he can thereafter only find good by bringing it again out of evil and thereby restoring his own reality.
(5) “Saved in danger and suffering” – If we are afraid of a thing, there are two kinds of assurance that may be given us. One, that the thing feared will not happen; two, that if it does happen, it is not to be feared. Christianity makes no promise whatever of the first, but only of the second. It is not, for instance, suggested that a Christian will not die; but only that death cannot harm him.
(6) The resurrection of the body is not the same thing as the survival of personality, which might very well survive without bodily expression. Nor is “survival” an altogether happy expression for the “life everlasting” or “eternal life”, since it suggests mere duration, rather than something apprehended now and untouchable by time. But in any case, I had already said that the truth was indestructible; what I was chiefly concerned with was the resurrection of its material expression – the “new creation”. The indestructibility of matter within the time-space universe is a different thing and denied by nobody. Christian eschatology4 deals with matters outside that continuum altogether.
Yours faithfully,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Identity unknown.
2 First published in The Sunday Times, 10 September 1939. Later included in Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1969).
3 See letter to T. S. Eliot, 4 April 1939, note 1.
4 A theological term signifying the science of the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DR. J. H. OLDHAM
2 October 1939
Dear Dr. Oldham,
I was so glad to hear from you. I was, in fact about to write to you myself on another, cognate, subject; so that one letter will now serve both ends.
I am, as I said to you, very willing to do anything I can to help you on the news-sheet, the general programme of which seems to me to be excellent.1 I am particularly pleased to see sections (c) and (d) among the main fields for treatment, and also section (a); though I feel inclined to add that such is the astonishing ignorance of persons who ought to know better, that this section might well be widened to embrace “interpretation of the Christian faith in relation to experience”, or even “interpretation of the Christian faith”– but it is obviously wise to proceed from the particular to the general, and scarcely possible to interpret it in any relation without interpreting it universally.
I should be quite ready to come and see you at Chipstead, if you think I can be useful to you, and can, as you kindly suggest, transport me; I shall be in London from time to time, and if you like to suggest a day, I can probably make my own appointments fit in with yours.
It occurs to me that a man who might be interested and willing to write for you is Prof. John Macmurray.2 He has been writing for some years on the need for a revivified Christian philosophy, and can express himself so as to be understanded of the multitude. Like most people, he says he doesn’t like dogma (probably because, like most people, he thinks dogma to be something quite other than what it is), and he used to have great hopes of Communism, though what he feels about it since the Russian business3 I don’t know. But he is an excellent writer, and has a following.
By the way, I see you have not yet scheduled the name of the bulletin. Are you still calling it “The New Christendom”? I’m not awfully sure I like that too well, I almost think we’ve had too much of “new” this and “new” that – “New Thought” and “New Art” and so on – some of them rather bogus; and we don’t get the idea of continuity. On the other hand, it is still more fatal to suggest the “Return” of anything, as though we wanted to plunge back into the Middle Ages. This is rather negative criticism, I’m afraid. If you are still wanting suggestions, I will try to think of some.
The other subject4 I was going to write about was this. A couple of friends and myself were at one time anxious to put our services as writers at the disposal of the Min
Our idea is that we should each and all get our stuff published as far as possible through our usual channels, and not call ourselves anything in particular, nor advertise ourselves as a “group”, but just plug away and do what we can whenever we can get a foot in. Here and there we shall try and function as a team, where that may seem a good way of going to work – e.g., we have in mind a series of half a dozen pamphlets on reconstruction, to be put out by one publisher under one editorship – but otherwise, we don’t propose to have any constitution.
Our difficulty, of course, will be to get platforms, with the present shortage of paper and difficulties about unemployment on newspapers and so on, but we shall do our best to get people interested, though we shall have to begin in a small way. It looks rather absurd for three women, without any very special influence or qualifications, to embark on this kind of programme, but we have come to the conclusion that the most successful efforts don’t seem to start in palaces in Geneva, but in back-parlours and coffee-houses and inn-stables in obscure villages; so we mean to do what we can. Of the three of us who started it, one is R.C.,6 the other C. of E.7 and the third8 rather inclined to be anti-organised-religion of any kind, so that we can scarcely be called sectarian – but we thought we might possibly work in with you, if you would think kindly of us, and help to spread the news-sheet, while on the other hand you might be able to give us a platform from time to time, if you had room. We have got a historian and a doctor9 interested and several educationalists, and hope to attract others. We only started last week, so it’s all very much in the air.