The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers Vol II: 1937-1943: From Novelist to Playwright
Page 33
1 The Bishop replied that he had only “rather incidentally” referred to sin.
2 A phrase used by G. K. Chesterton towards the beginning of the final chapter of Orthodoxy.
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO MAURICE B. RECKITT
14 May 1941
Dear Mr Reckitt,
Very many thanks for your prompt and helpful reply. I am delighted that my remarks about the abnormality of peace started a fruitful train of thought. …
I have sent Mr John Gloag a short list of names, telling him that if he wants to read further, I can xxxxxx
(Drat this typewriter! It is of German origin and I think it is suffering from hallucinations, like Rudolf Hess.)1
… that I can oblige him with plenty more. I put in Temple and Dawson, but I have disqualified Middleton Murry and I’ll tell you for why.2 He is exactly the sort of writer whom the scornful critic might expect one to quote as an example of Christian thought, and would take the greatest possible joy in tearing to pieces. Murry is an extremely able man, and the very last person to hide his light under a bushel. He has cashed in on the death of his wife2, and on the death of D. H. Lawrence, and when it comes to the death of God or of Society, he will be there. And, you know, he is worse than erratic. He is inaccurate and question-begging. I don’t mind his not believing in “the physical resurrection” – but why should he say that “St Paul (who, judged by the standards of history, is the chief witness) in no way distinguishes the appearances of the risen Lord to himself on the road to Damascus from the earlier appearances to the disciples”?3 St Paul never pretended to be a witness of the Forty Days, and the evidence for the appearance on the road to Damascus depends on St Luke, whose Gospel is also the evidence for the “physical” appearance at Jerusalem, with the broiled fish and the honeycomb. This is no way to treat ones authorities. The point might be argued, but not in that way. Am I being a cat about Murry? Maybe; but the half-dead scholar rises up in me and protests against the combination of so effective an emotion with so slap-dash a critical judgment. His own world of Letters accepts him only with cautious reservations – and while I admit his originality and “drive”, he offers far too easy a target for attack.
Williams and Eliot are much sounder; Williams is really an original interpreter of theology, I think; it is true that people who don’t find him illuminating find him wholly unintelligible, but it is good for men like Gloag to tackle the unintelligible.
Of the others, I have put in Watkin and also Barth,4 whom I have read. I find his style unendurable, but his influence is undoubted. He is a Calvinist, and accuses me of being a Pelagian5 – but what is a little total depravity between friends? …
“Christendom” shall certainly have the “curious book”.6 It isn’t a Gollancz publication, but the first of a series which is being edited for Methuen by M.St Clare Byrne and myself; I enclose a preliminary blurb.
With many thanks,
Yours sincerely,
Dorothy L. Sayers
1 Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Deputy from 1933. He had flown to Scotland on May 10/11.
2 Cf. her letter to Father Kelly, 24 May 1938.
2a Katherine Mansfield.
3 Cf. his book, Life of Jesus, 1926.
4 Karl Barth (1886–1968), Swiss theologian. He corresponded with D. L. S. and translated her two articles, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged” and “The Triumph of Easter”. He wrote: “I have read her detective stories with quite special interest and amazement” (quoted by Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth, SCM Press, 1975).
5 Relating to the heresty of Pelagius, a British monk of the 4th and 5th centuries, who held that good works were sufficient as a means of salvation.
6 i.e. The Mind of the Maker. It was reviewed by V. A. Demant in the March number, 1942.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE REV. J. G. WILLIAMS
19 May 1941
Dear Mr. Williams,
I am reduced to complete pulp by Bishop Talbot, who says that in FOUR talks devoted to Why we want a God to believe in, it has not occurred to him to explain what is meant by the word “Sin”!!!! You wouldn’t think anybody could overlook that theological trifle, would you? Consequently, I have had to squash Sin into two minutes filched from the Incarnation – since I have now ceased to put my trust in Jesuits or in any child of man – and am left to contemplate your letter with a gleam of wildness in my eye. …
My talks, I find, fall naturally into three sections; Lord, Jesus, and Christ. But since you must have a separate title for each, here they are:
1. Lord and God.
2. Lord of all Worlds.
3. The Man of Men.
4. The Death of God.
5. The World’s Desire.
6. The Touchstone of History.
I will send the text of the first four (I hope) this week.
I have firmly assumed that I shall be able to deliver about six pages in ten minutes – as Mr. Fenn knows, my natural pace is pretty quick, and efforts to alter it produce confusion! Tell Mr. Fenn I have decided to do the preliminary summaries myself in the text of the talk. This, I am afraid, rules out his desire of a “smash-hit” first sentence, but will save time, as I shall get over the ground quicker than the Announcer. Don’t let the Announcer have a lot of verbiage on his own account! Let him just say, “Our [fourth] talk on the Creed is called ‘The Death of God’. Here is Miss Dorothy L. Sayers” – and it’s done. (But let him not say: “The World’s Desire – Miss Sayers”, which would be indelicate, as well as untrue.)
N.B. The people who thought of this way of spending a pleasant Sunday should be boiled – rather slowly – in oil.
Yours savagely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO BROTHER GEORGE EVERY1
21 May 1941
Dear Brother Every,
Public Enemy No. 1 – if you must use these expressions – is a flabby and sentimental theology which necessarily produces flabby and sentimental religious art. The first business of Church officials and churchmen is, I think, to look to their own mote and preach and teach better theology. But the point which they do not recognise is this; that for any work of art to be acceptable to God it must first be right with itself. That is to say, the artist must serve God in the technique of his craft; for example, a good religious play must first and foremost be a good play before it can begin to be good religion. Similarly, actors for religious films and plays should be chosen for their good acting and not chosen for their Christian sentiment or moral worth regardless of whether they are good actors or not.2 (A notorious case to the contrary is the religious film society which chose its photographers for their piety, with the result that a great number of the films were quite blasphemously incompetent.) The practice, very common among pious officials of asking writers to produce stories and plays to illustrate certain doctrine or church activities, shows how curiously little these good people as a class understand the way in which the mind of the writer works. The result in practice is that instead of the doctrines springing naturally out of the action of the narrative, the action and characters are distorted for the sake of the doctrine with disastrous results.
This is what I mean when I ask that the Church should use a decent humility before the artist, whose calling is as direct as that of the priest, and whose business it is to serve God in his own technique and not in somebody else’s. Matters are only made worse when Sunday Observance Societies and other groups talk wildly about modern tendencies in art and so bring the Church into contempt, not only for bigotry but also for ignorance.
I quite agree that a great deal of ecclesiastical bric-à-brac needs purging. It is, as you say, so difficult to choose the really sound authorities to pronounce on the artistic merit of hymns and so forth. I believe that here again the soundest method is to purge at once the wo
rks which express a sickly brand of religious sentiment. They are pretty certain to be bad on all counts; it is very noticeable how well the great mediaeval hymns stand up to the test of time and the test of translation, on account of the soundness of the theology which inspired them. But I think they should be purged definitely on theological grounds, if the work is being done by Ecclesiastics as such, since here they are on their own ground and are not going outside their terms of reference. The whole question is extraordinarily complicated because of the gulf that has grown up between art on the one hand and on the other hand both the Church and secular society, so that the artists tend to be out of touch with the common man, while the latter, whether Christian or not, has only a very fumbling critical judgment to rely on.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Of the House of the Sacred Mission, Kelham, Nottinghamshire.
2 Cf. D. L. S.’ article “Why Work?”, first given under the title “Work and Vocation” at Brighton in March 1941. Published in Creed or Chaos? (Methuen, 1947), pp. 47–64; see especially pp. 60–61. (For further details see letter to the Editor, The Sower, 21 April 1941, note 2.)
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO BASIL BLACKWELL1
30 May 1941
Dear Basil,
Here are the two Wimsey items I talked to you about. Of the Wimsey Papers2 there ought to be about 150 copies already printed which are available. We had intended to keep these for private sale to people who might be interested, but we never tried to “stimulate a public demand” for them, and when Miss Simpson died her Executors handed the whole lot over to me. She was part author of the jest and responsible for some of the best passages. I am sure that there would be no objection at all on her husband’s part, as there is certainly none on mine, to the books being printed in America, always with the stipulation that copyright must be safeguarded; this, of course, applies also to the sale in America of the copies printed in England. The copyright had better be vested in my name.
Of the little pamphlet on Lord Mortimer Wimsey3 I have also a certain stock by me – about fifty I should think, but I should not want to part with them all. As you will see, the whole point of this one was that it should appear to be an early nineteenth century print. Graham Pollard, who wrote that book on The Forged Victorian Pamphlets,4 supervised the format for me, and I think has made a fairly good job of it, down to the wholly fictitious and misleading imprint.5
If you think that there is anything to be done with these two little works, go ahead. I don’t know how far the Americans are likely to understand or appreciate the solemn jest of the pastiche. Some simple-minded friends of mine became quite disturbed in their minds about these delusive booklets, which they received, without comment, as Christmas presents, and before thanking me for them, hastily rang up a mutual friend to enquire “whether there really was a Wimsey family”. It would be great fun to take in the American continent! – but I will leave the matter of presentation to you if you should decide to do anything about it.
Yours ever,
[D. L. S.]
P.S. The binding of the Wimsey Papers which were printed for sale is slightly different from this, and not quite so good.6
1 The Oxford bookseller and publisher, later Sir Basil Blackwell, for whom D. L. S. worked from 1917 to 1919. See The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1899–1936, letter to Muriel Jaeger, 8 March 1917, pp. 128–129.
2 Papers Relating to the Family of Wimsey edited by Matthew Wimsey, privately printed for the Family (Humphrey Milford, 1936).
3 An Account of Lord Mortimer Wimsey, The Hermit of the Wash, privately printed by Humphrey Milford, November and December 1937.
4 An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth-century Pamphlets, by J. Carter and G. Pollard, 1934.
5 The imprint reads: BRISTOL: Primed by M. BRYAN, Corn-street. 1816.
6 The colour blue is lighter.
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO MAURICE B. RECKITT
“Date as Postmark”
[? June 1941]
Dear Mr Reckitt,
You should be receiving from Methuen, at the same time as this, a review copy of my “curious book” about the Trinity: The Mind of the Maker. As you will see, it is the first volume of a series called Bridge-heads, edited by M. St Clare Byrne and myself, of which the general idea is to deal with this business of “Creativeness” – both in theory and in practice. The object of this particular book is to start us off on the right lines by trying to examine, in the light of theology as interpreted by the writer’s experience, what “Creativeness” is, and how it works, because the word is rapidly becoming one of those catch-phrases which people use without always understanding them very well.
I hope you will like it. Fr Demant says, “Whatever priests may say, I think that is the way theology should be written. It is the way it was written in the formative periods of the Church” – so I feel a little encouraged, because I think he’d have cracked down upon it if it was fundamentally unsound or insincere, don’t you?
A copy is also being sent to the New English Weekly,1 as you requested.
Yours sincerely,
Dorothy L. Sayers
1 This journal, edited by Philip Mairet, ceased to exist in 1949, when it became incorporated in New Age.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
THE SISTER SUPERIOR1
The Hostel of God2
Lindfield
Haywards Heath
25 June 1941
Dear Madam,
It is a delicate and difficult matter to argue with pacifists, as with any people who have erected a single point of morals into an absolute.
The consensus of opinion in the Early Church is perhaps not quite as unanimous as your correspondent suggests; (it is handily summarised in A. C. F. Beales’ “Penguin” The Catholic Church and International Order – Chapters five and six).3 I think the sneer at the expense of the Church for changing the emphasis of her teaching after Constantine is scarcely justified. It was not until then that the Christians became responsible for the actual maintenance of world-order, and were forced to realise what a policy of complete “pacifism” involved in practice. This was a necessary consequence of the transference of power into Christian hands; and however much one may regret the anomalies produced by the interlocking of spiritual and temporal power, it is useless to talk as though temporal power were not an important fact.2 At all points we are brought up against the paradox so bitingly stated by Reinhold Niebuhr: “Goodness armed with power is corrupted; pure love, without power, is destroyed.” (Beyond Tragedy: p. 185).3
But apart from the historical question, the difficulty which (as it seems to me) the pacifists fail to face is the inherent corruption of all human virtues by original sin, which produces impurities when any one of them is erected into an absolute. (The “absolutism” attached to the command about turning the other cheek is very marked – it is seldom, for instance, that anybody insists that when a decision at law is given against a litigant, he should pay double the penalty imposed; though that might be equally well deduced from Matt.V, 40.4) If everybody lived in a state of perfect grace, moral codes would no longer be necessary, and the virtues, being perfect, would not contradict one another. But when men fall from grace they are brought under the operation of the law. And the moral virtues, being “of the nature of sin”, do contradict one another, so that any “absolutism” in them falls under the condemnation of the law. (See the very interesting passage in C. S. Lewis’s Problem of Pain, p. 70 and note; Christian Challenge Series.)
The human virtues are not single-minded (see Lewis again, p. 63). In their best expressions they are corrupt; and in the pacifist position there is usually mingled, along with a great deal of genuine love of God and mankind, a number of other factors: personal fear, inertia, unwillingness to sacrifice private i
nterest, and, more subtle and important, a certain refusal of responsibility, and a severing of the self from the universal guilt and its consequences. And there is also that secret accidie5 which produces a pacifism “founded, not on the doctrine that other people’s lives are sacred, but on the belief that nothing is worth fighting for” (Michael Roberts, The Recovery of the West, p. 48; Faber).
I feel that there is a kind of clue to all this in the much-disputed passage about the purse and scrip and sword in Luke XXII, 36.6 When the Perfect Innocence is bodily present, no money, no worldly provision, no sword; but now “the things concerning Me draw to an end”, and the world’s weapons will have to be used, with all they imply. It is as though only the Perfect Innocence can afford to ignore those implications, because He alone is completely single-hearted, and can practise a virtue which is altogether free from inward corruption.
I have always thought it curious that the last few generations should have so placidly recited, and approved, and taught to their children, that staggering passage in Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur”:
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world7
without seeing how trenchantly it went to the very root of the moral paradox.
The history of the past twenty years shows nothing more clearly than the havoc that can be wrought by more or less well-disposed people concentrating on Peace (negatively conceived as the mere avoidance of War), and the appalling corruptions that grow up through an absolutist concentration on this isolated virtue within the sphere of legality. The refusal to admit that a technical “peace” was to the advantage of vested interests, the total neglect of the natural virtues of justice, and fortitude, and the quite extraordinary falsehood which refused to recognise the fact of temporal power (e.g. in the naive assertion, in the face of all experience, that “public opinion” must be a sufficient restraint upon the unruly wills and affections of sinful men) are evidence of the corruption produced by “one good custom”.