It seems to me that in broadcasting we are freed from any of the obvious objections which attend the visual representation of Christ by an actor, and are protected from the vulgarities and incongruities which the ordinary theatrical or film producer might import into a stage or screen representation. Radio plays, therefore, seem to present an admirable medium through which to break down the convention of unreality surrounding Our Lord’s person and might very well pave the way to a more vivid conception of the Divine Humanity which, at present, threatens to be lost in a kind of Apollinarian2 mist. The only difficulty I foresee is in a right choice of language. It would not, of course, be suitable to give to Christ any speeches which do not appear in the Scriptures, but if all the other characters “talk Bible”, the realism will be lost, whereas if they talk modern English we may get a patchwork effect. However, the difficulty is not really insuperable; it is just a question of choosing language which is neither slangy on the one hand, nor Wardour Street3 on the other. This difficulty did not, of course, arise in the mediaeval mystery plays, whose authors were quite prepared to let Christ say anything that seemed natural and appropriate, but we could not go so far as this without arousing roars of disapproval among the pious.4 It is not that the thing cannot be done but that it requires a good deal of careful consideration and cannot be done in a hurry. I should like, if I may, to think it over and perhaps discuss it with you at some time, always provided, of course, that you can contemplate putting off the series until, let us say, the Autumn. Perhaps you will let me know what you feel about this.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 This prohibition ceased to be operative after 1965.
2 Apollinarianism is a heresy which consists in a failure to admit the completeness of Christ’s humanity. Apollinarius’ own position changed over time: his fullest developed belief was that Jesus had a human body and an animal, not a human, soul and that He had but a single, divine nature. It has been said that the phrase of becoming incarnate “by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary” was added to the Creed to combat this heresy.
3 See letter to May E. Jenkin, 22 November 1940, note 7.
4 Roars of disapproval were indeed raised after the press conference held on 10 December 1941. See Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul, pp. 320–323.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO REV. A. J. MORRIS1
19 February 1940
Dear Mr Morris,
Forgive my long delay in answering your letter and thanking you for sending me your fine hymn. Perhaps I may answer briefly some of your remarks about my Christian News-Letter article:2
1. I do not think there is any contradiction in saying that a man may be a genius though a savage in manners and temperament – Herod the Great was undoubtedly both. (I was referring to him – obviously not to Caesar Augustus who did not die until very much later.) Even in the eulogistic pages of Josephus, Herod bears all the marks of the semi-civilized savage, though a military and political genius beyond any question.
2. There is, of course, something to be said for the argument about the painless birth – it has been said by St Thomas Aquinas – but the Mediaevals were in little danger of being unreal about the Humanity. Nowadays, the difficulty is to convince anybody of its reality.
3. I don’t believe in the “Gate” or “Rope” explanations of the camel going through the eye of a needle! I think it was a joke of the right Oriental flavour, just like the one about swallowing the camel.
4. I am charmed by your suggestion that the tables of the money-changers and of them that sold doves have a parallel in charity bazaars. I believe one of the complaints was that the purchasers got very poor value for their money, so that the parallel is only too painfully exact – I have paid some wicked prices at church bazaars.
I have not read either of the books you mention but will take an early opportunity of doing so.
With many thanks for the kind things you say about the article,
Yours very truly,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Of University College, Oxford.
2 Supplement No. 8, 20 December 1939. The article was entitled “Is This He That Should Come?”
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO MAURICE B. RECKITT1
21 February 1940
Dear Mr Reckitt,
Thank you so much for your letter. I have written to Mr Gollancz, asking him to send a review copy of Begin Here to “Christendom”. It ought to have been sent to you in due course, but I fear Mr Gollancz is not so knowledgeable about Christian journalism as about the other kind.
It is very good of you to be interested in the book – everybody seems to have hailed it as Christian propaganda, although I rather pointedly refrained from drawing any conclusion from my own premises!
Yours sincerely,
Dorothy L. Sayers
1 Maurice B. Reckitt (1888–1980), an influential figure in the development of Anglican thought. He founded a group known as Christendom and edited the quarterly journal of that name from 1931 to 1950. In 1968 he founded the Christendom Trust which endowed the M. B. Reckitt research fellowship at the University of Sussex. (See John S. Peart-Binns, Maurice B. Reckitt: A Life, The Bowerdean Press and Marshall Pickering, Basingstoke, 1988.)
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE BISHOP OF DERBY1
24 February 1940
My dear Lord Bishop,
Thank you very much for your letter. I shall be delighted to come and address your Association2 on Saturday, 4th May.3 It is very good of you and Mrs. Rawlinson to offer to put me up, and I accept your hospitality with pleasure for the Friday and Saturday nights. I am not quite sure just at present what my engagements for the following week will be; if there is a Sunday train, I may have to leave by that in order to get back to London on the Monday, otherwise I shall be very grateful for your kind offer to allow me to stay the week-end. May I let you know a little later which day I shall be returning to Town?
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 The Rt Rev. Alfred Edward John Rawlinson.
2 The Church Tutorial Classes Association, which was holding a biennial festival.
3 The address, entitled “Creed or Chaos?”, was published by Hodder and Stoughton on 10 June 1940. It was included in the book Creed or Chaos? and Other Essays published by Methuen on 27 February 1947.
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO HELEN SIMPSON
27 February 1940
Dearest Helen,
What a blasted nuisance! I was rather afraid it might work out that way, because I’d noticed that your face, while retaining all its original charm, had gradually been getting smaller and smaller – a curious and interesting phenomenon which, according to my observation, usually presages a visit to the hospital. Never mind! I expect you will feel much better now you have got rid of the beastly thing. (Not your face, of course.) I rang up the hospital last night, and was told that your “condition was very satisfactory”, which I took to mean, as usual, that the patient was feeling like death warmed up, and that the medicoes were gathered in the bar, congratulating one another, over a round of quick ones, on not having actually removed your liver by mistake for your kidneys.
Don’t worry about the lectures and things; we shall manage somehow. It’s tiresome, of course, and infuriating for you, but these things can’t be helped. Thank you for having dealt with John Armitage; I will try to get on to him when I am in Town this week. I shall also do my best to be allowed to come and bring you the statutory grapes – I will promise not to eat them myself, because I do not care very much for grapes.…
I have no particular news, except that the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral have decided to revive Zeal for the Festival, as Laurence Irving prognosticated. I shal
l therefore remove myself from the Lecture-list for June – and you can make up for your present inaction by delivering all my eloquence for me! Attagirl!
Well, good luck to it, my dear, and I’m most frightfully sorry and hope all will be well soon. Mac sends his best wishes. He went up to the War Office yesterday and returned in good spirits, having seen a general and two colonels, whereas his previous visit produced only a colonel and two majors. He hopes the next interview will be adorned by a field-marshal and two generals, after which he will only have to be presented to the King before being entered on a list for a job as 2nd. Loot1 in a training camp.
That fool, Hilda Matheson, has written asking me to give a Wireless Talk to France on “some aspects of religious thought in England”! I replied that (a) all I know about religious thought in England was that it was in a state of great confusion, (b) that in any case, I should only offend French Lutherans by my Catholicism and Catholics by my ignorant Protestantism, (c) that if the French had ever heard of me (which was doubtful) it was as the author of “romans policiers” and not of Zeal or Devil To Pay, and finally, (d) that I would talk about detection or nothing. I feel like the Scotch minister who said to his wife: “I’m aye thinkin’, Jeanie, the whole warld’s daft except you an’ me – an’ whiles I doot ye’re a wee thing daft yersel’”.
Best love to you, and be good and get well quickly,2
Yours ever,
Dorothy
1 American pronunciation of Lieut[enant].
2 Sadly, Helen Simpson did not get well. She died soon afterwards in a convalescent home of inoperable cancer.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO K. C. HARRISON1
4 March 1940
Dear Mr Harrison,
I am sorry you and your readers have been so much puzzled by Mr. Charles Williams’ book, He Came Down from Heaven.2 The particular chapter you quote either strikes people as being extremely illuminating, or else says nothing to them at all.
The sentence you ask about: “Men had determined to know good as evil”, links up with the passage on page 17 about God’s knowledge of evil: “Not by vision, but by simple intelligence” (St. Augustine).
Possibly a very simple illustration may make the line of thought clearer:
I am standing on the Hampstead and Highgate platform of the Underground at Piccadilly. So far, all the trains which go through the station are morally indifferent to me. But the moment I make up my mind to go to Hampstead, the Hampstead train is the “right” train for me, and the Highgate train is the “wrong” train. That is to say, by my decision to create a rightness in the one, I have inevitably created a wrongness in the other; but the wrongness is a purely mental concept and does no harm to anybody; but if I then proceed to step into the Highgate train, I have called the wrongness into active existence, with evil results to myself, (I shall get to the wrong place); to my husband, (who is waiting for me at Hampstead to go to the Everyman Theatre); for the audience in the theatre (over whose feet we shall trample after the curtain goes up), and no doubt for the tempers of everybody concerned.
This illustration3 is, of course, very much over-simplified, but it will serve to make the point Mr. Williams is dealing with. There are three things to notice:
(1) The wrongness is not in the trains themselves – to God or the Railway Company both are equally good trains.
(2) By my free choice to go to Hampstead I have created – I cannot help creating – a wrongness in all trains that go elsewhere, but I know this wrongness only by pure intelligence.
(3) But when I step into the wrong train, I know its wrongness, not as God knows it, by intelligence, but as man knows it, by experience, and the wrongness then becomes a real evil. That is to say, my ignorance, carelessness, or perversity, has caused me to know the perfectly good train as an evil train, and that is to create positive evil in the world.
That, roughly speaking, is what Mr. Williams means when he says that man had determined to know good as evil. I do not gather from your letter that you have yourself read the whole of the book, but if you will read the second chapter attentively, I think possibly my illustration may help you to an understanding of Mr. Williams’ thesis, which he has of course elaborated with much more richness and profundity than my parable is capable of carrying.
Trusting this may be of some assistance to you,
Yours faithfully,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Identity unknown.
2 Published by William Heinemann, 1938.
3 D. L. S. used this illustration again in a lecture on Dante: “The Meaning of Heaven and Hell”, given at Jesus College, Cambridge at the Summer School of Italian, August 1948. (See Introductory Papers on Dante, Methuen, 1954, pp. 64–65.)
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DR JAMES WELCH
4 March 1940
Dear Dr Welch,
Many thanks for your letter of the 1st March. I am very glad you feel able to take this line about the plays and about the presentation of Our Lord, and greatly welcome the courageous spirit which, in order to get the reality of the Gospel across, is prepared even to “give slight offence to some adult listeners”! Under these conditions, I should like very much to tackle the series of little plays, and think I ought to be able to get down to it about July, when I shall have finished with the revival of The Zeal of Thy House which is to be produced at the Canterbury Festival, June 24–29.1 Between that time and this, I hope to be able to come and see you, to discuss details as to the episodes to be selected, and so forth. Between us, we should be able to think out something which shall be realistic in presentation, while giving as little offence as possible. …
1 The revival was cancelled owing to fears of a German invasion.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO LORD DAVID CECIL1
10 March 1940
Dear Lord David,
That’s a grand article in the Fortnightly2 – I whooped with joy when I saw it. And my God! how right you are about the hopeless attempt to abolish human passions by miracle! If only people would determine to use the existing machinery to deal with concrete evils they might get somewhere. But they will imagine that they can somehow devise a new kind of machinery which will automatically eliminate the devil without further effort.
Look! can you do anything to clear up a point that has been worrying me a lot lately, and that is the distinction which we find we have to make between men of intellect and the “intelligentzia”?3 The current contempt of learning and reason which drives men of intellect out of the control of human affairs is a new and bastard growth in the body of society. But if you tell people that society needs the man of intellect, they point to the gutless “intelligentzia” and say, “Look at that!” – and can you blame them?
Is it that, just because the power of “money and push” has driven the intellectuals out of public affairs, the intellect has turned inwards to feed on itself and produced this set of detached and unpractical rabbits, who run away from any situation when they see it developing itself in life and action? Just as so many of the poets took recently to chattering to one another about the books they had read, in terms unintelligible to the common man, instead of transmuting experience into poetry, as was always supposed to be their job?
It seems to me there really is a profound division today between two sorts of people, both with some claims to intelligence. One lot, like the Auden4 and Mitchison5 crowd, retire to America, or to some sort of soul-solitude, and denounce society from a distance, refusing steadfastly to be mixed up with the War. The others (like, shall we say, you and me and a good many more), who seem to have a more earthy and vulgar constitution, remain angrily scolding in the midst of the uproar, crying, “We told you what would happen, you adjectival idiots! but since it has happened, we suppose we’re all in it – give me that battle-axe!”
&nb
sp; What I want to know is, what makes the difference? Is it just physiological make-up? Or is one lot really cleverer than the other? Or is it (as I am inclined to suppose) a difference of philosophy? And if so, is the difference between the intellectual man and the “intelligentzia” in fact a conflict of philosophies?
This beautiful piece of confused thinking was started by your opening paragraph. Can you cope with it in something sometime? (How about that book?)1
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Lord David Cecil (1902–1986), son of the Marquess of Salisbury; critic and biographer; Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature at Oxford University; known during this period for his Early Victorian Novelists (1934).
2 “True and False Values”, March 1940, pp. 296–303. D. L. S. quoted it in “Creed or Chaos?” (Methuen, p. 40) and in The Mind of the Maker (Methuen, p. 13, note 1).
3 Lord David Cecil’s article began: “To an ironical observer, the most curious feature of a hitherto uneventful war has been the collapse of the English intelligentzia – especially the intelligentzia of the left. Up till six months ago they seemed, with the exception of a few complete pacifists, to be united in a militant front against Fascism. To resist it was, in their view, the first obligation of every human being; their thinkers spoke with justified scorn of English weakness, their poets, headed by Mr Auden, adjured us to throw aside all other considerations and concentrate on ‘the struggle’. Now the war against Fascism has at last begun; and within a few months their morale is broken…Some, Mr Auden himself among them, are in America; others, like Mrs Mitchison, clamour forlornly for peace on any terms;…”
4 W. H. Auden (1907–1973), the poet, who emigrated to the U.S.A. with Christopher Isherwood when war was declared.
5 Naomi Mitchison (b. 1897), novelist.
1 D. L. S. had invited him to write a book for “Bridgeheads”.
The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers Vol II: 1937-1943: From Novelist to Playwright Page 19
