The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1 by Dorothy L. Sayers
21 March 1940
Reverend Fathers,
(This sounds rather like a speech at a public meeting, but the etiquette-books supply no handy formula for addressing two clergymen at once.)
Thank you very much for your kind letter, and for the somewhat alarming extract from Home Words. Well do I know that publication; it formed the internals of our own Parish Magazine many years ago, and was felt by my father, who introduced it there, to be a distinct improvement on its predecessor, called, if I remember rightly, The Dawn of Day. Its printing and paper were superior, and it was held to have a definitely “higher” flavour – without, of course, any whiff of Popery.
I can scarcely imagine anything more frightful than a competition in prayer-making under the liberal auspices of The Spectator – I may say, for your consolation, that I cannot at all imagine Wilson Harris lending his columns for any such purpose. Prayers should, in any case, appear anonymously – or at most attached to an author whose name is as remote and beautiful as St. Chrysostom’s. And I must say that the efforts to produce modern prayers for national crises are as a rule so ghastly in their results as to send one fleeing back to the “liturgical experts” of the past. It isn’t so much liturgical or theological knowledge that is lacking as the ability to write good English, and I refuse to believe that God is well served, or a spirit of worship promoted, by knock-kneed, broken-backed phrases that sound as though they were written by a tired journalist in a hurry. So far, the writer of the article is right – it takes a good writer to write good prayers; and they are, as a matter of fact, more difficult to write than anything in the world. T. S. Eliot or Charles Williams might manage it, though goodness knows what children would make of their petitions.
But it’s very unwise to dogmatise about children – how does one know what they make of anything? They don’t tell one. When I was a youngster, I might have asked the meaning of the phrase, “there is no health in us”, but what I should never have mentioned to any grown-up was the secret rapture with which I hailed the all-too-rare appearance in the programme of the Quicunque Vult.2 I had a feeling that they would not approve of this fantastic preference, and I knew they would say, in their shy-making and unimaginative way, “Oh, but you can’t possibly understand that!” Of course I couldn’t understand it, but it was grand. So mysterious and full of rumbling great words, and it made such a wonderful woven pattern. And it didn’t talk down to me, like those embarrassing hymns about being but little children weak. It was queer and exciting, like the beasts full of eyes, and the people casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.
Children have a disconcerting knack of not liking the things intended for their liking. Christmas was nice, because of the presents, and the story of the shepherds and the wise men with their myrrh (what on earth is myrrh?) and frankincense (what a lovely word) – but it couldn’t compare for fascination with the gloomy drama of Good Friday; besides, it too had that “children weak” touch about it. Some psalms were good (“sitteth between the cherubims”, “Og the king of Bashan”, “the mountains skipped like rams”), but not the 119th,3 which was dreary beyond description, or “The Lord is my shepherd”, which was rather smarmy.
You can’t generalise about children, except that talking-down is pretty well always fatal. And it’s probably true that if they learn the solid meaty stuff when they are young, they won’t have so much to blush for when they remember it later. I still enjoy the Quicunque, only now, instead of being magnificent and obscure it seems to be magnificent and lucid. But there are some morbidly sentimental hymns which I liked as a child and which now give me a stomach-ache to think of. They are just plumb bad, and whether they appeal to children or not, they have no business to be there. They produce a horrible reaction of loathing which the good stuff never does.
I agree to some extent about the archaic words and unreal sentiments, only I think this is rather a matter for explanation in sermons and instructions than for alterations in the liturgy. It’s no good running anxiously out with new words, trying to keep pace with changes in language – it takes all the running we can do to make words stay in the same place.4 We call a hospital for mad people a Bethlehem, and it soon becomes Bedlam, and a word of fear. We change the word to Asylum, and it goes the same way. We hastily abolish Asylum and call the thing a Home, and the same thing happens again. All we have got by the changes is that three beautiful words have become corrupted instead of one. It would be better to stick to Bedlam, and keep on reminding people of its original meaning. What have we gained by calling a dogma an ideology, except the totally false notion that an ideology is a more liberal thing than a dogma? I do think, though, that parsons and others might bear in mind that language does change, and that the meaning of words like Person, redemption, love, substance, worship and so on is not self-evident to the man in the street.
I seem to have rambled on at great length. Forgive me for being tedious. No, I don’t think I will enter for the competition – I am quite sure that if I did, the result would not satisfy the writer in Home Words.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 The “Reverend Fathers” had written from Clonroe Vale, Tinahely, Co. Wicklow, Eire.
2 Latin: “Whoever wishes…”, the first two words of the Athanasian Creed. Her memory of her reactions to the Athanasian Creed varied. In a letter from school to her parents, dated 22 May 1910, she wrote: “What a peculiarly ugly sort of chant [the creed] is sung to…like a very dreary litany, with, I am really very much ashamed to observe, a certain amount of comic relief. It is very wrong, of course, but I really do think it is comic in parts…” (See The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1899–1936, p. 43.) In The Mind of the Maker she said: “In my childhood, I remember feeling that this verse formed a serious blot upon a fascinating and majestic mystery. It was, I felt, quite unnecessary to warn anybody that there was ‘one Father, not three fathers; one Son, not three sons; one Holy Ghost, not three holy ghosts’.…I found myself blushing faintly at the recitation of words so wildly unrelated to anything that the queerest heathen in his blindness was likely to fancy for himself.” (Methuen, July 1941, p. 120)
3 Beginning: “Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord”.
4 Echo of Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE PROVOST OF DERBY1
21 March 1940
Dear Mr. Provost,
Thank you very much for your letter. I have received some further suggestions for titles from Miss Fone.
What I rather feel about all of them, including “Sound Doctrine for Critical Times”, is that they scarcely somehow suggest a faith that anybody would be prepared to live or die for. They seem to lack a challenge. A more ringing note is struck by Eric Mascall2 in the title of his book Death or Dogma?,3 but we can’t very well use that again. Christ (as usual) hit the nail on the head when he said “Ye worship ye know not what; we know what we worship”.4 The totalitarians do at least know what they worship, and that is their advantage; but Christians have too weakly acquiesced in a vague religiosity and the worship of nothing-in-particular. We have been so anxious to avoid the charge of dogmatism and heresy-hunting that we have rather lost sight of the idea that Christianity is supposed to be an interpretation of the universe.
Here are a few suggestions along these lines:
CREED OR CHAOS?
DO WE KNOW WHAT WE WORSHIP?
UNDERSTAND OR PERISH
A PEOPLE OF NO UNDERSTANDING
UNDERSTANDING AND ANSWERS (too subtle, perhaps)
THE ONLY WISE GOD
I don’t feel that any of them is quite right – the first two perhaps come nearest to what we want.
I am sending a copy of this to Miss Fone, hoping I am not too late. I have been rather addle-headed this week with the fashionable influenza-throat. In any case,
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 The Very Rev. P. A. Micklem, D.D.
2 The Rev. Eric L. Mascall, D.D., F.B.A. (1905–1993), theologian and mathematician, professor of Historical Theology at King’s College, London University, 1962–1973. See his article “Whatever Happened to Dorothy L. Sayers that Good Friday?” in SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review (published by Wheaton College, Illinois), vol. 3, 1982, pp. 9–18.
3 Death or Dogma? Christian Faith and Social Theory, 1937.
4 John, chapter 4, verse 22.
5 The title chosen was “Creed or Chaos?”.
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO IVY SHRIMPTON
22 March 1940
Dearest Ivy,
No – I’m sorry – it was my fault. It was rather a job getting any money in this quarter. However, now it is in I can send the money for the Easter holidays as well.
This last six months seem to have been nothing but influenzas, burst pipes and confusion. My secretary started the flu in November, and everybody I know seems to have gone on having it in waves ever since. Some people put it down to black-outs and shut windows, but I think it’s more likely to be camps and evacuation. However, by the time the War’s over I daresay we shall be hardened to these things. I seem to have spent my time delivering lectures and writing articles which nobody can afford to pay for, in the hope of stimulating the morale of the nation and all the rest of it. We are lucky to have known one war already – our generation stands up to it better than the generation next below; which is all at sixes and sevens. In the intervals one knits socks, an agreeable exercise which I thought I had left behind for ever!
Glad you got your claim to the missing £20 settled – the posts have been quite potty lately. I wish they would contrive to lose some of the nonsense written to me by perfect strangers! But they prefer to lose important papers and such!
Love,
D. L. S.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO ANMER HALL
15 April 1940
Dear A. B. H.,1
Thank you so much for your kind telegram of good wishes for Love All.2 We had quite a good First Night, in spite of clashing with Mr. Hitler’s gala performance in Norway and Denmark, and when I went in on Friday, I found a very good house, all roaring with laughter, so I trust we shall not do too badly. I do hope that you and Miss Scaife will be able to get in some time to see our little show – it is running for three weeks, with matinées on Thursdays.
As a rule, I make a firm resolution not to give away school prizes, but in your case I think I must make an exception, and shall be happy to come on the 19th July, and say what I can. It is very good of you to offer to take me, and perhaps you will let me know later on all about the arrangements.
I expect you will have heard that they have decided to revive The Zeal of Thy House this year for the Canterbury Festival.3 Harcourt Williams and Raf de la Torre will be playing their original parts, and by great good luck, most of the best amateurs are still available.
With affectionate regards,
Yours ever,
[D. L. S.]
1 See letter to Father Herbert Kelly, dated 7 February 1938, note 1.
2 The play had been put on at the Torch Theatre, Knightsbridge. It ran from 9 to 28 April.
3 See letter to Dr James Welch, 4 March 1940, note.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO SIR RICHARD ACLAND1
17 April 1940
Dear Sir Richard Acland,
Thank you very much for your letter, and for the copy of your book,2 which, indeed, I had already read with much interest.
I am glad you liked Begin Here,3 in spite of the fact that we do not see eye to eye about Russia! Capitalist or Communist, I cannot believe that salvation is to be found in any system which subordinates Man to Economics; but we need not quarrel about that, since there are so many things on which we can happily and fruitfully agree.
As to the “enforced leisure” which this rather odd kind of war has inflicted upon so many people, it is a very real problem, as you could not, I think, fail to realise if you did not yourself live a very active and busy life among those to whom war has naturally brought a great increase of work and activity. Some of the prevalent causes of boredom and discontent I have mentioned in my first chapter. Have you considered all the men and women who have to pass long hours in A.R.P.4 posts, or the hundreds of doctors and nurses immobilised in hospitals, deprived of their civilian patients and waiting interminably for casualties who, thank Heaven, have not yet materialized? The men who sit about all day and night looking after blimps5 and searchlights, often in remote places, almost entirely cut off from other society? Then there are those who, in the winter months, are too old or too timid to venture out in the black-out to visit their friends or the cinema, those who have had to put down their cars, and are forced back for entertainment on their own minds, quite untrained for any such exercise; those whose income has been so reduced that, even now that the cinemas are open again, they cannot afford to go; those townspeople who have had to retire into the country, and are quite unfitted for that kind of life; and those who are now unemployed through the readjustments in industry, and have not yet been reabsorbed. It is quite true that they ought not to be idle and bored, but the fact remains that they are, simply because they are the produce of a standardised civilization which does their thinking and feeling for them, and because it is a very long and difficult job for them to learn, at this late hour of the day, to think for themselves.
These are the people who write passionately to me, begging for more detective stories, “to keep their minds off the war”. I tell them, and have tried to tell them in this book, that they will be much happier, and much more useful citizens, if they will only put their minds on the war, and especially on the peace. Neither you, nor I, nor the Government, can do things for them – we have only too much to do already; they must learn to do things for themselves. There are plenty of people eager and anxious to do things – but what they chiefly need is to learn to think, and to be made to understand their own power. They need not be at the mercy of the bishops or the government or the press – they are the Church, they are the State, and they are the Public; but unless they are made to understand what they want and stimulated to go out and get it, they will remain a passive nation, ready to fall for the next Hitler or Quisling6 who comes along.
This is what you say yourself – but you go on to ask, What do I propose to do? It isn’t what I do that matters, but what I, and others who have done their “considering” can make the common man do. I can write and lecture and take the chair at committees, and in that way reach a number of people, but my political power is limited to a single vote, which has no more weight than that of the silliest nit-wit who can be cajoled into a polling-booth.
You say, xxxxxxxxxx the ways of doing the
(Sorry – something has happened to my type-writer ribbon!)
You say we must find ways of doing things “to force them to read and understand” – I only wish I knew any way of forcing people to read, let alone understand! If you have any plan for working that miracle I should be delighted to hear about it. I agree that the war has started a great outburst of real mental activity, and that we ought to catch the tide while it is on the flow, hoping to heaven it is not too late. I hope to be in Town at the end of this week and the beginning of the next, and should like very much to meet you and talk over what ought to be “done”. I will also tell you what small efforts my friends and I have already made to get in touch with people and fan the flame of their activities; we shall be very grateful if you can suggest ways in which we can help on the good work. On Monday evening, the 22nd., I have to be at Canterbury; otherwise I can come and see you almost any time. Will
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Sir Richard Acland (1906–1990) Liberal M.P., author and social commentator.
2 After the War: A Symposium of Peace Aims, 1940, edited by William Teeling.
3 Published by Gollancz, January 1940.
4 Air Raid Precautions.
5 Slang for barrage-balloons, so called after the non-rigid British airship of the first World War (B for British, limp for non-rigid).
6 Vidkun Quisling (1887–1945), the Norwegian traitor, appointed premier of the puppet government set up after the German occupation of Norway in April-June 1940.
In 1940 the London Zoological Society offered the public the opportunity to “adopt” certain animals in the Regent Park Zoo for the duration of the war. D. L. S. chose two porcupines and was duly photographed feeding them, as the following letter discloses:
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE SUPERINTENDENT
Zoological Society of London,
Regent’s Park, N.W. 8
18 April 1940
Dear Mr. Vevers,
I have now arranged with Mr. Suschitzky to be photographed with the Porcupines on Saturday afternoon, meeting him at the Zoo Offices at 3 p.m. No doubt you will be kind enough to arrange with the keeper that my adoptees shall be ready with their faces washed and their nails cleaned at the appointed time.
Dorothy L. Sayers with Stickly-Prickly
In view of the slight obscurity which veils the subject of Sex, it will be better to give them non-committal names, so as not to be embarrassed by the sudden birth of a family to the wrong partner. Was it of the Porcupine that Kipling wrote:
“Can curl up, but can’t swim,
Stickly-Prickly, that’s him”?’1