The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1 by Dorothy L. Sayers
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 See letter to Eric Fenn, 11 June 1940.
2 See letter to Father Herbert Kelly, 4 October 1937, note 4.
3 Scylla and Charybdis are a rock and a whirlpool between Sicily and Italy, used as a metaphor signifying two dangers. To avoid one is to fall into the other.
4 See letter to Father Herbert Kelly, 4 October 1937, note 3.
Eric Fenn sent her a 7-page, 1500-word commentary, proposing, in particular, that she should begin “straight off with a question: Has it ever struck you how very oddly the Creed starts off its second main division?”…against which D. L. S. scribbled in the margin: “Children’s Hour touch!” She replied as follows:
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE REV. ERIC FENN
4 April 1941
Dear Mr. Fenn,
Many thanks for returning the scripts and for your careful and valuable criticism and suggestions.…
I will go over my stuff again in the light of what you say. One thing, however, I’m afraid I shall be a little disappointing and tiresome about. I’m not good at the direct personal appeal – “Has it ever struck you – ?” “How about your own children?” “I want you to think about –” It always makes me embarrassed, and I can feel my voice getting that awful, wheedling, children’s-hour intonation – very bright and encouraging, like somebody trying to screw rational answers out of an idiot school. Flat statement and argument is my natural line, and I shall make a ghastly mess of the other if I try it. For the other points:
(1) I gather from Mr. Williams1 that Neville Talbot2 is only doing the preliminary talks on why we believe or want to believe; “the particular bee at present buzzing in his bonnet is the idea that credal statements are cold and clammy unless you first get fired by the red-hot experiences and agonising questions which they are the answer to”. So I expect he will cope only too earnestly with the question about why the Church believes. After the sort of opening he will produce, it may be rather a good thing to have a sober statement of what she actually does believe! The thing that horrifies me is that anybody should harbour such ignorant repulsive fantasies as, e.g. Ivor Brown,3 whose latest outburst in The Literary Guide has been thoughtfully forwarded to me – no doubt as a rebuke to my article on “Forgiveness”4 in The Fortnightly. It shows pretty clearly that the expression “God the Son” is one he has never separated from the historic Jesus. He is, of course, an old-fashioned and ignorant “rationalist” of The Freethinker type, brought up on Robert Blatchford;5 but his ideas are the ideas which his generation has handed down to the younger generations as being the Creed of Christendom.
(2) The theology of “The Father” is, apparently, being handled by Fr. John Murray. Being a Jesuit, he will probably give a proper dogmatic basis from which to work, and erect the scaffolding for the Trinitarian formula. All the better.
(3) Opening sentences of each talk – It’s difficult to begin brightly in the middle of the subject, when one remembers that half one’s audience will not have heard the previous talks. If the “Summary” of where we get to and what we are talking about could be transferred to the Announcer’s introductory remarks, it might help.
(4) “Father and Son” – I’m frankly a little afraid of stressing the “one of the family” idea too much, because of the Ivor Brown kind of misconception. (I have just written an entire book6 on Trinitarian analogy – of which a whole chapter is devoted to clearing up errors about analogy and metaphor!) What I feel is that if one gives them the metaphor of a “family likeness”, one is going to establish the concept of two personalities – whereas the point towards which I am getting is rather two persons with one personality. (Yes – I know you are thinking – “Sabellianism”!7)
(5) I will put this more clearly, and again explain that this expression is not concerned with the human Jesus. I can, I think, do it in a sentence – I can’t add very much anywhere, because of the time-limit, even allowing for my galloping rate of speech, which so confuses the official B.B.C. mind.
(6) The same applies to Nicaea. I like your phrase – “people fought about this word”; though I expect we shall only be told that this just shows how Christianity leads to riots, persecutions, wars and the Spanish Inquisition! I don’t mind that – except that it adds a good deal to one’s correspondence. Actually, that particular talk is the shorter of the two, so I might be able to squeeze in my favourite bit of rhetoric about the power of words, and the Power of “the Word”.
You know, there is scarcely a word or phrase in the Creeds that doesn’t bristle with technicalities when one comes to examine it. An hour’s careful instruction on every clause might succeed in clearing away some of the more rooted misconceptions about these things.
I heartily approve your suggested instruction-classes for the B.B.C. Controllers. May I attend them and watch Duff Cooper’s8 reactions?
I have always thought it unfair to put “Lift Up Your Hearts”9 just before the eight o’clock news, so that one can’t escape it – like the vicar waylaying the congregation at the church-door. But now that Derek McCulloch has started in on the six o’clock, I am foaming at the mouth, and the blasphemy in my household would shock Satan himself. I won’t be prayed at over and round like this; it’s slimy, that’s what it [is].…
1 The Rev. J. G. Williams, assistant to the Religious Director, B.B.C., from 1946.
2 The Roman Catholic Bishop of Nottingham.
3 Ivor Brown (1891–1974), leader-writer for the Manchester Guardian and dramatic critic on the Saturday Review.
4 “Forgiveness and the Enemy”, published in The Fortnightly, New Series, vol. 149, no. 892.,
5 Robert Blatchford (1851–1943), author of God and my Neighbour (1903), a rationalist credo. He was the editor of The Clarion, a Labour journal. G. K. Chesterton crossed swords with him in an essay contained in The Doubts of Democracy.
6 i.e. The Mind of the Maker.
7 See letter to Father Herbert Kelly, 4 October 1937, note 3.
8 Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich (1890–1954), was Minister of Information from 1940 to 1941.
9 Title of a daily brief religious talk, which preceded the 8 a.m. news, later replaced by “Thought for the Day” or “Prayer for the Day”.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE REV. V. A. DEMANT1
4 April 1941
Dear Father Demant,
I am afraid I have had to refuse Canon Baines. I have had to do so much talking and lecturing lately, what with H.M.’s Forces and various well-meaning societies and assorted Bishops, that I am getting seriously behind with work and must refuse everything during the summer months. I have undertaken to do a series of plays on the life of Christ for the B.B.C. They hung fire during the winter on account of a ferocious quarrel between myself and the Children’s Hour Department. After an unchristian display of temper and pride on my part,2 I succeeded in getting the production of the plays transferred to Val Gielgud. Having got my way about this I must now really do the plays and do them properly.…
1 Vigo Auguste Demant (1893–1983), an Anglican priest, associated with the Christendom Group. (See letter to Maurice B. Reckitt, 8 May 1941, note 1.) “Of all the able men and women…associated with the Christendom Group none was at any time more admired and trusted than Demant.” (John S. Peart-Binns, Maurice B. Reckitt: A Life, Bowerdean and Pickering, p. 77.)
2 A nice touch of self-assessment! Cf. her letter to C. S. Lewis, 13 May 1943.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE REV. V. A. DEMANT
10 April 1941
Dear Father Demant,
How very good of you to write so large a letter with your own hand especially right in the middle of your busiest weeks! I am most grateful – and should have hastened to thank you earlier, but that when your letter arrived I was just starting off to address R.A.F.’
I am extremely glad you like the book,1 and very much relieved, because I feel sure you would have detected anything unsound or over-strained or fundamentally insincere about it. From the writer’s end I think it is all right, but it is fatally easy, when drawing analogies, to be run away with by the intellectual elegance of one’s own conceits and make the thing too neat to be convincing.
You feel this is the way theology should be written – and that is particularly gratifying, because my literary friends don’t look upon it as theology at all, but as an experiment in literary criticism. This encourages me to hope that I’ve so far succeeded as to get theology and letters where I want them – as two expressions of a single experience. The other books in the Series2 won’t at all take that line – it isn’t a specifically Christian or religious series, and the writer of the book on medicine3 is rather anti-religious than otherwise – but I hope all the writers will take what I rather vaguely feel to be the Christian attitude to their work, viz: that it is or ought to be the outward and visible sign of a creative reality. (This is a sort of Christian “attack by infiltration” – one must learn from the enemy.)
I’m beginning more and more to think that this business about Vocation in Work is absolutely fundamental to any proper handling of the “economic situation”. I have been hammering at it now, in a rather groping sort of way, since the War started, and I think I had better go on hammering. I’ve tapped at the W.E.A.4 and thumped deafeningly at Brighton5 (on Point 9 of the Archbishop’s Manifesto6), and I have written this book, and now I am chiselling away at the troops; also I shall hammer at the Sword of the Spirit meeting on May 11th, and at a Welfare Workers’ meeting in Leeds. It seems to be a thing I can make a shot at saying something about, so unless I am silenced by bombs, or by being carried away to the asylum labouring under the impression that I am a woodpecker, I shall hammer unceasingly. I am persistently knocking away at Tom Heron7, in the hope that I shall be able to knock a book out of him for the Series; because he does understand what it’s all about – as very few employers of labour do; and if he can’t write the thing himself, he can give us the stuff, both from the men’s point of view and his own.
One is hampered by the abominable phrase “vocational education”, which usually means the very opposite of what it says. It shows how far we have lost the very idea of “vocation” in work, that we give the name to a training which is chiefly designed to train people for employment. We ought to recognise the profound gulf between the work to which we are “called” and the work we are forced into as a means of livelihood.
I’m rather at a loss, too, about the “theological criterion”. Basically, I see perfectly that an Incarnate Creator is the fundamental sanction for looking on all man’s work in a sacramental light – the manifestation of his divine creativeness in matter. And that this is all tied up somehow with a proper reverence for man and matter, and is opposed to the exploitation of the soil and of men’s labour. But apart from that, which is somehow implicit in the dogma, I can’t find much explicit theological doctrine about it. I recognise the ruthless imperative vocation in the visit to the Temple and in the injunctions to hate father and mother and let the dead bury their dead, but it’s all somehow taken for granted. Is it that it was only in these latter days that the inalienable divine right of man’s calling came even to be questioned? What workers say, when faced with the difficulty, is that “human needs” come before the “worth of the work”; and it is difficult to persuade them that one of the first human needs is, precisely the conviction of a purpose in the work they are doing.
I am persuaded that no economic schemes for giving workers more wages and more leisure will do any real good if their sense of their own purpose is so corrupted that they can neither get satisfaction from their work nor employ their leisure in creation. And what is the use of preaching sexual morality to people whose lives are so deadened and embittered that a dreary promiscuity offers them their only chance of even a semblance of purpose and pursuit? Look at Charles Morgan,8 fumbling away about single-mindedness in The Flashing Stream. If his male and female mathematicians had been really single-minded about their practical mathematics, they wouldn’t waste three acts arguing about the ethics of going to bed, and whether or not they should humiliate themselves to a Government department as the price of getting on with the job. They’d have cheerfully allowed the War Office to think anything it chose, so long as the work was done, and they’d have been too busy to bother with the bedchamber crisis. The old, hackneyed stuff about “la femme jalouse de l’oeuvre” was much closer to reality: it is the person who hasn’t got a real job to do who sticks the personal feelings and the human needs like so many spanners into the world’s work.
We haven’t begun to tackle the “woman-question” either. It’s no good trying to bring the men back – or forward – to a sense of the sacredness of work if the women are left as an exploiting class to suck the heart out of them and demand that they should make money for money’s sake. After the war there’s going to be another drive by the Trade Unions to push the women out of “the men’s jobs” and back into “the home” in the name of economics. But the women’s jobs have in the meantime been collared by the men – they’ve disappeared from the home into the breweries and bakeries and jam-factories and distilleries and spinning-mills and power-looms;9 there’s nothing left in the home for the women to be vocational about, except one baby instead of nine and the job of “keeping” her man by exploiting his labour, and taking out her share of the loot in lip-stick and emotional crises.
It seems to me that the “planners” are getting further and further away from these root realities in their post-war schemes. It’s only the Churches who appear to have the first glimmerings of a notion what the real question is. They must have got the idea from somewhere, so I conclude it is at least implicit, if not explicit, in their theology. But it seems to have to [be] looked for and shaken into view, and never to have been put into a handy formula.
Whatever “vocation” is, it is imperative. But I think it is often obeyed quite intuitively and without conscious tenacity. It works by a series of instinctive but peremptory rejections. Sometimes it is only in looking back that one sees quite a track of purpose made by one’s self across time. While one was going along, one seemed to be darting about in aimless zig-zags, but seen in retrospect the track runs like the path in the Pilgrim’s Progress, “straight as a rule can make it”,10 never deviating, and with no fundamental error anywhere in its course, whatever nasty messes there may be to right and left of it. Some of the messes turn out to be the peremptory rejections – which links up with your quotations from Denis Saurat.11 I must get that book; it sounds as if it made sense.
Artists, who are emotionally sensitive to pain and suffering, are the last people who ought to have any intellectual difficulty with it, because their whole life and work consists in making sense of it. They do experience the difficulty, but that is largely because they are not consciously aware of their own creative processes. They make vocal the outcry of the bewildered common man, but in their hearts they know otherwise; – and in their actions they display the same ruthless purpose which they protest against when they see it in the universe; or, if they do not, they are false to their calling.
There is something in this which religion should be able to see and interpret for the common man; but some necessary link of understanding has been lost.
I seem to be spawning a whole shoal of half-warmed fishes12, with which I ought not to bother you.
In the meantime, thank you again very much, and not least for your kind assurance of practical support. If, when the book appears, you could see your way to
(a) reviewing it anywhere in the theological andor religious press (they are not quite the same thing) or steering it into the hands of a reviewer who will see what it’s meant to be about;
(b) defending it against the assault of the Philistines in any correspondenc
I shall be deeply grateful.
With all good wishes,
yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 i.e. The Mind of the Maker. D. L. S. had sent Father Demant the typescript.
2 i.e. “Bridgeheads”.
3 Denis Browne, the husband of Helen Simpson. His book was never written.
4 Workers’ Educational Association.
5 See letter to Editor of The Sower, 21 April 1941, note.
6 Issued by Dr William Temple, Archbishop of York, after the Malvern Conference held in January 1941.
7 Thomas Milner Heron (1890–1983), a socialist-minded entrepreneur of Leeds who tried to improve conditions of employment in the clothing industry. He was also committed to the National Guilds League. He began a book for “Bridgeheads” but did not complete it. (Cf. letter to the conveners of the Theological Literature Association, 28 November 1941.) He had previously written a pamphlet, Christian Vocation in Industry and Marketing. 1926.
8 Charles Morgan (1894–1958), novelist and playwright, drama critic of The Times from 1926 to 1939 and contributor to The Times Literary Supplement under the pseudonym of “Menander”. The Flashing Stream (1938) is a play.
9 Cf. “Are Women Human?”, an address given to a Women’s Society in 1938, published in Unpopular Opinions (Gollancz, 1946, pp. 106–116); see particularly pp. 109–110. See also “The Human-not Quite Human”, first published in Christendom: A Journal of Christian Sociology, vol. XI, no. 43, September 1941, pp. 156–162, later republished in Unpopular Opinions, pp. 116–122.
10 The Pilgrim’s Progress, First Part, Good Will to Christian: “Look before thee; dost thou see this narrow way? That is the way thou must go…it is as straight as a rule can make it.”
11 Denis Saurat (1890–1958), professor of French, London University. The book mentioned may be Regeneration, 1940, or Watch Over Africa, 1941.