The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1 by Dorothy L. Sayers
Witham
TO HER SON
7 September 1943
Dear John,
“Return of post” – You’re lucky, because in another day I shouldn’t have been here. However, here it is, and I’ve added a fiver to make whoopee with.
Here also is the play, which I meant to read through again before commenting on. However –
You can write dialogue, and that is the most important thing. I mean you can write speakable lines that sound like speech and not like writing. Anybody who can do that has got the first necessity for writing plays. If they haven’t got it, they usually don’t acquire it.
Most of the faults you have seen quite well for yourself – notably the lack of action. The reason for putting a thing on the stage rather than in a novel is that the story may be seen in action. (This is one of those tiresome truisms which are none the less true because Aristotle said them in the year dot.) My feeling about the thing is that it could have been told just as well, if not better, in narrative form, which would have allowed the author to do some of the character-analysis “off”, so to speak, instead of obliging the character to do so much undressing in public. The trouble about people explaining their own insides at such length is that they can scarcely help appearing the most appalling egotists – even if they were less egotistical than this bunch of people in fact are (is?). Of course Bernard Shaw can get away with plays that are all argument and no action, but how cunningly he manages to make things look like action even when they aren’t! But he is a law to himself, anyhow, and nobody has ever yet succeeded in learning his trick of perpetual surprise.
The general atmosphere of the play seems to me a bit stuffy and old-fashioned. It’s the kind of thing we had so much of after the last war, and which did so much to make this war inevitable. No character seems to have any conception of anything except as it happens to affect his private affairs – one almost expects somebody to say, like poor dear Neville Chamberlain, that it seems a terrible thing to be fighting about Czecho-Slovakia, a far-away country that most of us have never heard of. That, of course, is your affair – but dramatically speaking, I think you have fallen into the old trap of not giving the devil his due. If you are going to make a PLAY out of anti-war feeling, you get no real dramatic clash unless you give war the best spokesman possible. That’s why (to go back to Shaw) the Grand Inquisitor’s speech in St Joan is the most important and tremendous thing in the play, the focal point on which it all turns. It says everything that can be said on the “other” side, and in itself it is quite unanswerable – that is, it can only be answered in terms of emotion and action.
You’ve got the right idea about the Third Act – the idea of something that acts as a catalyst to precipitate the situation which has been saturated in the first two acts. But the thing doesn’t quite run clear. There are two catalysts, and neither does quite what it should – Phyllis’s affair with Michael and Michael’s death. The latter is not really motivated by the action of the play – I think that’s the snag in it. He has an air of being killed for the playwright’s convenience, and this gives an air of unreality to the last scene. (Which is rather unreal anyhow, because, when people die or get killed, their families don’t just sit around sneering at one another. They haven’t time. It’s all telephoning and writing letters, and making arrangements about whether one will have a private or a military funeral, or what.)
Technical details – You can’t have a five-year-old child. Nobody under the age of twelve is allowed on the stage, so that about nine years old is about as young as you can expect your child-actor to impersonate. I don’t think the child adds a great deal to the action; but if you must have her, you can make her a bit older, without greatly altering her attitude to life and war.
I’m not clear about the business with the clock in Act II. If it’s really got to strike all eleven hours the actors will go mad – a grandfather tends to have rather a slow strike and it will distract the audience. It would be all right if Michael removed the striking weight before he started.
You might make Phyllis’s position in the household a bit clearer at the start. Except for a vague mention of Chelsea there’s no background to her until a long explanation is dragged in rather late.
You know, I fancy your real difficulty is in constructing a story. Many good playwrights have the same difficulty, and that’s why so many of them, from Æschylus to Shakespeare and Shaw worked so much more freely with a ready-made plot. It might be good exercise to try – it means, in practice, finding motives for the action, instead of inventing an action to carry the motives –
Good luck to it,
D. L. F.
In June of this year Dr Welch wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Revd Dr William Temple, to ask whether a Lambeth Doctorate in Divinity might be conferred on D. L. S. in consideration of The Man Born to be King. He said: “My serious judgment is that these plays have done more for the preaching of the Gospel to the unconverted than any other single effort of the churches or religious broadcasting since the last war – that is a big statement, but my experience forces me to make it.”
Dr Temple, having consulted the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford,1 wrote to ask if she would allow him to confer upon her the Degree of Doctor of Divinity, “in recognition of what I regard as the great value of your work especially The Man Born to be King and The Mind of the Maker.” He added that she would be the first woman to receive the Degree. She replied:
1 The Rev. Oliver Chase Quick, M.A., D.D. (1885–1944), Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford from 1939 to 1943, author of The Christian Sacraments, 1927, The Ground of Faith and the Chaos of Thought, 1931, The Doctrine of the Creed, 1938, etc.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
7 September 1943
Your Grace,
Thank you very much indeed for the great honour you do me. I find it very difficult to reply as I ought, because I am extremely conscious that I don’t deserve it. A Doctorate of Letters – yes; I have served Letters as faithfully as I knew how. But I have only served Divinity, as it were, accidentally, coming to it as a writer rather than as a Christian person. A Degree in Divinity is not, I suppose, intended as a certificate of sanctity, exactly; but I should feel better about it if I were a more convincing kind of Christian. I am never quite sure whether I really am one, or whether I have only fallen in love with an intellectual pattern. And when one is able to handle language it is sometimes hard to know how far one is under the spell of one’s own words.
Also, you know, I am just a common novelist and playwright. I may not – in fact I almost certainly shan’t – remain on the austere level of The Man Born to be King and The Mind of the Maker. I can’t promise not to break out into something thoroughly secular, frivolous or unbecoming – adorned, if the story requires it, with the language of the rude soldiery, or purple passages descriptive of the less restrained and respectable passions. I shouldn’t like your first woman D.D. to create scandal, or give reviewers cause to blaspheme.
My husband says, helpfully, that after all I could scarcely be more scandalous than Dean Swift! He also says (being military-minded) that I should do as the Archbishop says and not argue. Perhaps he is right. Probably I am only trying to keep a bolt-hole open into which I can retreat, crying: “I never really committed myself to anything – I only wrote books!” I don’t know. I find it very difficult to tell where conscience ends and pride, or cowardice, begins.
I expect I had better leave it to your judgement. If you tell me that I ought to accept, I will. It is a very great honour, and I am deeply sensible of it. I feel as though I had not expressed myself very gratefully, but I do appreciate it very deeply and I thank you …
I shall be in Town from tomorrow till Saturday morning if you would like me to come and see you or anything. My address is 24, Great James St., W.C.1. Or I could come up at any time.
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
The Archbishop replied that if she would prefer to receive a Doctorate in Letters he would readily agree to that, but assured her that a Doctorate in Divinity was not to be regarded as “a certificate in sanctity”. A few days later, however, he wrote to say that the object he had in mind would not be quite fully met by a Doctorate in Letters and that he was hoping more than ever that she would agree to accept the D.D. Still uneasy, D. L. S. asked for a few more days in which to think the matter over.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
18 September 1943
Your Grace,
Thank you very much for your letter. I quite see that a D.Litt. wouldn’t be the same thing from your point of view – I only mentioned it as the kind of thing I should have no qualms about accepting.1
I do still feel a little uneasy about it. Will Your Grace forgive me and not think I am making a silly and ostentatious fuss if I ask for two or three days more in which to consider? I seem to be behaving very ungraciously, but I can’t help feeling horribly like the jay in peacock’s feathers, with a touch of Judas Iscariot.
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 She did accept a Doctorate in Letters from Durham University in 1950.
Having consulted several friends, among them probably Muriel St Clare Byrne and Marjorie Barber, whose opinion she often sought, D. L. S. decided not to accept the Lambeth Doctorate in Divinity.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
24 September 1943]
Your Grace,
Thank you very much for your letter. I have been thinking the matter over very carefully and have consulted, confidentially, one or two people whose advice I thought would be valuable, and have come to the conclusion that it would be better for me not to accept the D.D. My consultants all felt on the whole the same way about it, though not all for the same reasons. (If you cared to have their names, I am sure they would readily explain to you why their judgement supported my instinctive feeling about it.)
Quite apart from my reluctance to sail under anything that might appear to be false colours, there are certain practical considerations. The first, and perhaps the most cogent from the Church’s point of view is this: that any good I can do in the way of presenting the Christian Faith to the common people is bound to be hampered and impeded the moment I carry any sort of ecclesiastical label. In the present peculiar state of public opinion, it is the “outsider” with neither dog-collar nor professional standing in the Church who can sometimes carry the exterior defensive positions by the mere shock of a surprise assault; but the power to do this depends largely upon remaining a free-lance. The moment one becomes one of the regular “religious gang”, or (in the elegant phrase used by the Daily Herald) “the pet of the bishops”, everything one says is heavily discounted. That is why I have lately been refusing to appear on the platform at religious meetings, or to sign protests and manifestoes – the oftener one’s name appears in such contexts, the less weight it carries.
Also, knowing the world of journalism as I have only too much reason to do, I think we might find ourselves up against some very disagreeable publicity. It is, I think, your generous intention that the recognition given to my work should be publicly known. But women are “news”, in a way that men are not, and peculiarly subject to the attentions of the sensational press – some of which does not love me very much. There might well be some rather disagreeable comments, impossible to refute or argue about,1 whose [barb] would stick, ranging from, “Thriller-writer Dorothy Sayers, having made Christ a best-seller to the tune of 30,000 copies, has been rewarded with a D.D.” to “This not very seemly farce, dealing cynically and light-heartedly with divorce (or what not) is by Miss Dorothy Sayers, D.D., and will probably make the Archbishop rather sorry that he ever …” and so forth. And to the extent that this might happen, and that one would not wish it to happen, there would always be a sort of interior inhibition in the handling of secular work. I know, of course, that there is nothing to prevent the writing of detective stories – mostly a very innocuous form of entertainment; but there would always be the strain of an obligation to be innocuous and refrain from giving offence, and that is a strain under which no writer can work properly.
By all means say to those people who have been demanding that “something should be done about” the author of the books that you have offered her a Degree, and that she has, with a deep sense of appreciation, thought it nevertheless better to decline the honour. I understand very well, I think, the purpose you had in mind – and indeed I have often felt, and said, that it would be a good thing and helpful to the work of what it is fashionable to call the Lay Apostolate, if their books could receive some form of official recognition – not in order to reward the writer so much as to establish the orthodoxy of his doctrine. As it is, the reader is only too apt to suppose that Christianity interestingly presented is not historical Christianity at all, but a new “interpretation” deriving from the author’s individual taste and fancy. (As, only too often, it is.) But I would suggest, with submission, that the best way would be to accord recognition, not so much to the workman as to the work. If, for example, the Church had something analogous to the power of the French Academy to “couronner” the actual book, when it appeared to be both orthodox and valuable to God’s work. I am not thinking of anything quite like a medal or a “prize”, but something which would act both as a “nihil obstat” and as a mark of honour – which would say, in effect, “This book, though readable and even exciting, stands within the Catholic tradition, and the Church commends it”. This should satisfy any writer who was not making Divinity his life-work, and would also be of some guidance to the reader (who at present is in some uncertainty about what is and is not “in the tradition”); while the Church would not have committed herself to approving any subsequent errors and extravagances into which the amateur theologian might (through sin or ignorance) so easily fall. (I often wonder what the Popes think of the FID. DEF.2 on English coins, and if they ponder on the rashness which conferred that title on Henry VIII!)
But all this is by the way. I hope very much that Your Grace will understand why, after very careful deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that I must refuse the very great honour offered to me, and will believe that I have done so in no ungrateful spirit.
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 It is possible that she also thought that the discovery by a journalist of her son’s existence would cause embarrassment.
2 Latin: Fidei Defensor, Defender of the Faith.
The Archbishop replied on 30 September:
I am extremely grateful for your most kind letter. I think I do fully understand the situation; indeed you have persuaded me that if I were in your position I should have reached your conclusion. Meanwhile I am still glad that I made the proposal and that you are willing for me to mention it to some of those who have been eager that the Church should show some real recognition of the great value of your plays and also the book The Mind of the Maker.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DR HELMUT KUHN
2 December 1943
Dear Dr Kuhn,
Thank you very much for your kind letter. I will certainly recommend Freedom Forgotten and Remembered whenever I can find an opportunity. My difficulty up to now was that I didn’t know whether it was yet on sale in this country, but I can now refer people to the O.U.P. I gather, from what you say, that they do not publish, but only distribute it; that may account for the fact that I have not seen it reviewed over here. I will prod my friends at the Press and see what they are doing about it.
As regards England: I know we are a tiresome, irritati
I am venturing to send you an article2 I wrote, in a popular style for a popular paper – legitur, non laudatur3 – which you may use to infuriate your victims further. If you can pardon the necessary vulgarity of its style, it will show you what it is I am afraid of, and why I eagerly welcome any voice from overseas which is ready to praise, or cheer, or interpret, or explain us, or in fact do anything but scold.
As for Mr Gandhi, all I can say is that if he is half Jesus, he is not the half that died for the sins of the world, for he has always been particular to see that his passion stopped short of the cross. India is a difficulty – what national unity she has is of our making. She is not a country but a sub-continent; the job of unifying her is like the job of unifying Europe, and that is a thing that nobody has found very easy. I think, perhaps, one reason why it appears to Americans easier than it is is that though in the States you have a population of many races and creeds living in harmony together, they have been torn up from their European or Asiatic roots. In India and in Europe they are still living on their roots with all their age-old loyalties still in full life and strength. The parallel case is not so much what America has done with her immigrant Swedes, Danes, Chinese, Japs, Irish, Germans – not even what she has done with her negroes, but what she has done with her Red Indians. Perhaps (I don’t know) it is a sign of grace in us that our rule should produce subject peoples bursting with energy and national self-consciousness and eager to throw off our yoke and run things for themselves. Whatever else we have stupidly or cruelly done, we have not let the roots of India wither. Nor has the Welsh root withered after seven centuries of English domination.