Wishing you the best of luck with your production,
Yours very truly,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Identity unknown.
2 It is now in the library of the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Illinois.
3 Barrie Livesey, b. 1904.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO DAME CHRISTABEL PANKHURST1
19 April 1938
Dear Dame Christabel,
Thank you very much for your letter; I am so glad that you liked the Sunday Times article.2 I do not really feel that the Press is my proper pulpit; I think myself that my Canterbury play now running at the Westminster represents my ideas better; perhaps it would entertain you to see that. It really is a beautiful performance, or I would not urge anybody to go to it.
With many thanks,
Yours very truly,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, the British suffragist.
2 See letter to Mrs Stevenson, dated 6 April 1938, note 2.
Dame Christabel replied on 24. April:
Dear Miss Sayers,
Thank you so much for your letter and for telling me about your play which yesterday I saw with admiration.
I think, however, that it is not a question of or play or press, but that both are your proper pulpit.
The press brings your message straight to your readers in their homes while they are yet unready to go out in search of it.
Also a newspaper article makes them understand the better that you believe that what you say in your plays is true for ordinary people, in real life, at the present day.
Each of your two modes of appeal to the public strengthens the other; plays and newspapers alike being written that they may believe that Jesus is the Son of God and believing may have life through His Name.
So I hope to see more both of your articles and your plays.1
Yours very truly,
Christabel Pankhurst.
1 Dame Christabel’s hope was to be fulfilled.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO FATHER HERBERT KELLY
1 May 1938
Dear Father Kelly,
I feel very discourteous at not having replied to your letter or come to see you, but last week was one prolonged and purgatorial agitation. We were reduced to desperation by the fact that although the business for Zeal was building up at the Westminster, we could not carry on there, and could see no prospect either of transferring or of raising money to finance a tour. In this hopeless situation we implored God for a miracle, to which He responded with His accustomed sense of humour by arousing the interest of the hardest headed and the hardest hearted management in town! We had nearly a week of frantic negotiations, during which they wanted first to make all the cast play for pittances, secondly to cut down half the cast, and thirdly to make the author give her work for nothing. After agitated bargaining on all these points, we at last succeeded in screwing out of them mean, though just barely adequate terms, and this Shylock bargain was finally clinched at midnight on Friday. The result is, that the play reopens at the Garrick Theatre on Tuesday week, May 10th. Amid all the whirling of the dust of conflict, I fear I quite lost touch with my friends and my correspondence; I hope you will forgive me.
I am so glad you liked the play; I am immensely pleased with the production and the acting that my company have given me. I have not yet heard from Mr. Clayton,1 but as soon as I am in a more coherent frame of mind, I will write to him.
With very many thanks,
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 See letter to Father Kelly, dated 19 October 1937, note 9.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO R. ELLIS ROBERTS1
3 May 1938
Dear Mr. Roberts,
I am afraid I had to reply rather hastily to Mr. Housman’s2 criticisms on Saturday afternoon; I hope he did not think I was discourteous. I had a very old friend who had seen the play just hurrying off to catch a train; another very old friend trying to convey to me a message from the Duke of Bedford; a new Ursula3 waiting upstairs in Harcourt Williams’s room to be vetted and a conference about archangels to be undertaken with the producers, one of whom was hurrying away to an appointment!
In addition to this we were all thoroughly worked up at getting the transfer at last signed, sealed and delivered. We are opening on Tuesday, May 10th at the Garrick and shall, I believe, be playing three matinées a week, with no performance on Monday evenings. We shall be exceedingly grateful to you for all the publicity you can get us in the religious and other weeklies; the managers of the Garrick will not, themselves, spend much money on newspaper publicity, though they will probably arrange for a good display on the theatre itself. Thus, anything we can get in the way of editorial mention will be extremely valuable to us.
We are all exceedingly happy to have got the transfer; we are all accepting very small salaries and microscopic royalties, gambling on the opportunities for a tour later on, which will, we hope, bring us back our money. The transfer means that we shall (a) go out with the prestige of having played at two theatres in town (b) that we shall have more time in which to collect money for the tour, and (c) that the company will be kept together during these arrangements. The cast will be practically the same as at the Westminster, except that Marie Ney’s4 part will be played by Ailsa Grahame, and Alan Napier’s by Raf de la Torre.5
With many thanks for all your kind sympathy and help,
Yours very sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 R. Ellis Roberts and his wife were in Carmel, California when war broke out. In December 1940 they sent as a Christmas and New Year greeting a little pamphlet of poems, privately printed, entitled In Exile: to Those in Exile. The first line of the first poem would have been to the liking of D. L. S.: “This is a war of minds, of faiths, of gods.” In 1939 R. Ellis Roberts published Portrait of Stella Benson.
2 Laurence Housman (1865–1959), poet and dramatist. It is not known what the occasion was.
3 A character in The Zeal of Thy House.
4 Marie Ney (1895–1981), who played the part of Lady Ursula. It was played by Vera Coburn Findlay at Canterbury.
5 Raf de la Torre also played the part of the Persona Dei in The Just Vengeance at Lichfield Cathedral in 1946.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO A. MURE MACKENZIE1
15 May 1938
Dear Miss Mackenzie,
Thank you so much for your very kind letter about The Zeal of Thy House. We were a little hurt that the Times, which had given us two such magnificent notices from Charles Morgan,2 should then send their second critic to damn us at the Garrick. I do not think this gentleman knows the meaning of the word “rhetoric” – unless, indeed, he takes it in the mediaeval sense, viz: the art of presenting arguments by word of mouth. I hope this notice will not damage the play too much, it is difficult enough to get West End audiences to go and see anything which can be called religious or intellectual. I hope we may count on your personal support, and you will send as many friends as possible to see the show despite your colleague’s bad opinion.
I am so glad you and your sister enjoy the Peter Wimsey books.
Gratefully yours.
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 A colleague of the dramatic critic on The Times.
2 Charles (Langbridge) Morgan (1894–1958), novelist and playwright. He was the dramatic critic for The Times from 1926 to 1939.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO FATHER HERBERT KELLY
16 May 1938
Dear Father Kelly,
Many thanks for your letter. We are hoping to do well with the show at the Garrick, though, of course, it will again take a little time to build up busin
ess. I should be rather afraid of what the films might do to it; I fear the theology would be likely to suffer.
I am exceedingly interested to learn that I am about to join the Roman Catholic Church; if your informant had heard the things I said about that institution the other day (stimulated by Douglas Woodruff’s1 disagreeable criticism of Zeal in Punch) he might reconsider his prophecy. There are moments when I feel that the Inquisition was one of the least dishonest of its activities.
I went to see Tubby Clayton2 the other day, who was very agreeable though somewhat preoccupied; he seems to have got into a curious habit of saying: “Good, good; well done!” at intervals throughout the conversation, with curiously little relevance to the context. It must come of having so much to do with Boy Scouts and Leagues of Youth. However, I was inveigled by one of his young men into promising to go and talk about Religious Drama to Toe H, on the understanding, of course, that they would give me publicity for Zeal. I get to feel more and more like the unjust steward every day. I ought to be getting on with my new novel,3 instead I am impelled to write a play about Herod the Great;4 it will probably turn out to be another version of the downfall of the proud.
With all good wishes, Yours sincerely, [Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 See letter to Editor of Punch, 6 April 1938, notes 1 and 2.
2 See letter to Father Kelly, 19 October 1937, note 9.
3 Thrones, Dominations.
4 The first act of this play exists in manuscript and is in the possession of the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Illinois. It is significant that she had begun a play about Herod before introducing him into The Man Born to be King. See also the following letter to Herbert Kelly.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO FATHER HERBERT KELLY
24 May 1938
Dear Father Kelly…
John Middleton Murry1 is an author and critic, editor of The Athenaeum for some time after the War. He has written a number of books, including a Life of Christ2 (which I haven’t read, but which is probably what you connected him with – I should think it would be awful); according to Frank Swinnerton,3 he “turned first Christian and then Christian Communist”, whatever that means exactly. He was the husband of Katherine Mansfield4 and a friend of D. H. Lawrence5 (at least, until Lawrence took to calling him “Judas”, having indeed every reason to cry “Save me from my friends!”) and wrote a very emotional sort of biography of him, called Son of Woman. I should think he was probably quite right about Dick Sheppard.6 I only met D. S. twice. He possessed an astonishing amount of personal charm, but he made me feel a little uncomfortable. I think he was sincere, but he seemed to me over-anxious for the affection of all and sundry. He impressed me as being restless, feverish and essentially unhappy, always in quest of reassurance, and, I am sure, lacking in intellect – but then, I always tend to rate intellect too high and to be embarrassed by magnetic personality and that kind of thing.
Herod (confound him) is becoming very insistent, trampling ferociously into my mind over the heads of all the other things it is my duty to do. Can you or any of your brethren guide me to a book (not too learned and difficult) about the position of the Jews under the Roman Empire, between Maccabees and St. Matthew? I want to know how they carried on their daily life and institutions under that alien but tolerant despotism. Herod seems to have had a bad time with them, because, though he got back Jerusalem from the Parthians and rebuilt the Temple and did quite a lot of the enlightened-monarch business, they hated and despised him for being Rome’s nominee, and for building a wicked heathen amphitheatre, and especially for being a Philistine and not “hundred-per-cent Jewish” (thus the whirligig of time brings in its revenges!)7. I expect he had it pretty well dinned into his ears about the expected “pure-Jewish” Messiah and the “pure-Jewish” kingdom-to-be, and all the rest of it – his wife’s family apparently lost no opportunity of rubbing [it] in about his low antecedents. I don’t wonder that after a long lifetime of disappointments in his own offspring he lost his (always precarious) hold on his temper and determined to do away with Messianic pretenders. I can see the development of his character very clearly, but where I’m stuck is on domestic and political details – what sort of people he would have in his household, how far he could administer the province off his own bat and how much he had to act for Rome, what were the relations between the Jewish Church and the Roman State, and so forth. I am extremely ignorant of the history of that – and indeed of any – period. I imagine that to Rome he would appear very oriental and barbaric and to the Jews sadly occidental and internationalized – rather like an Indian maharajah who had been educated at Oxford, neither flesh, fowl nor good red herring.
I too, you see, am bursting over with ideas, and seem to have no time to deal with them. But it’s great fun. It would be awful to come to the end of one’s ideas. Good luck to the Inquisition. As to blasphemy – the R.C.’s seem to me to specialise in blasphemous explanations. Some well-wisher (anxious to keep me out of the Roman fold) favoured me with a revolting little R.C. pamphlet on Purgatory, full of stuff about Hell which I shouldn’t have thought anybody would have the face to publish at this time of day.8 Anyway, the Vatican seems to be in rather bad odour to-day, even among its own people, for its political dishonesty and the pruriency of its sexual ethics. R.C. theology seems to me to be chiefly dialectics – though I suppose some of the really important writers attach some meaning to the terms they bandy about so freely – even if Douglas Woodruff doesn’t!
Lord! what a long letter to bore you with –
Very sincerely yours,
[Dorothy L Sayers]
1 John Middleton Murry (1889–1957), was the editor of The Athenaeum from 1919 to 1921. His Son of Woman, published in 1931, is a study of D. H. Lawrence’s sexuality. See also her letter to Maurice B. Reckitt, dated 14 May 1941.
2 Life of Jesus, published in 1926.
3 Frank (Arthur) Swinnerton (1884–1982), novelist, critic and publisher.
4 Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp (1888–1923), writer of short stories, born in New Zealand. She was first married to George Bowden, whom she left. She married John Middleton Murry in 1918.
5 D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) lived near Mansfield and Murry for a time in Cornwall.
6 The Rev. Dick Sheppard (1880–1937), Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields from 1914 to 1917, Dean of Canterbury from 1929 to 1931, a popular and charismatic preacher.
7 Shakespeare, Twelfth Night V 1.
8 See her Introductions to her translations of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio (Penguin Classics).
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO M. N. WHITELAW1
8 June 1938
Dear Miss Whitelaw,
Thank you so much for your letter; I am very glad you enjoyed The Zeal of Thy House so much. Your suggestion about “The Keys of Canterbury”2 is interesting and ingenious, though in most versions I think the song is called “The Keys of Heaven”; I do not know what gave it the local application.
As regards the Peter Wimsey story of the “Copper Fingers”,3 I think it is mentioned there somewhere that the modelling seemed inferior to that of the sculptor’s usual work. The story actually derived from an astonishing advertisement by an American firm of morticians who demanded: “Why lay your loved ones in the cold earth? Let us electroplate them for you in gold and silver”. So apparently the thing has been done.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Identity’ unknown.
2 “The Keys of Canterbury” is included in Folk-Songs from Somerset, collected and edited by Cecil J. Sharp, Set 1, Novello’s School Songs, Book 201, pp. 18–19. The tune and words are not the same as those of “The Keys of Heaven”.
3 “The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers”, first published in Lord Peter Views the Body, Gollancz, 12 November 1928.
24 Great James Street
W.C.I
TO IVY SHRIMPTON
18 June 1938
Dearest Ivy,
I learnt with horror from John that I had forgotten to send you his report. So sorry. This play of mine seems to preoccupy my mind to the exclusion of all memory and common sense.
I enclose £10 for bills etc. Will this be O.K., as he wasn’t at home for very long?
I have received warning of the American invasion,1 and now await the assault. By a Special Providence and my own slackness, there is no spare room fit to occupy at Witham, so I shall do my entertaining in Town, packing them off to see Zeal at the earliest opportunity! What in the world is one to do with people one has never seen, all bursting with family enthusiasm?
Hope your cold is now all right. John seemed very fit when I saw him, and said nothing about a bad foot.
Best love,
Dorothy
1 The visit of her cousin Kenneth Logan and his wife from California.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE SECRETARY
Advisory Committee on Spoken English
British Broadcasting Corporation
27 June 1938
Dear Sir,
I pronounce my name to rhyme with “stairs”.
Yours faithfully,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex
TO HER SON
27 June 1938
Dear John,
As usual I have to apologise for being so slow in thanking you for my nice birthday present. As usual, the excuse is that I have had a very heavy fortnight, full of theatrical business interspersed with dashing about the place to speak at places and open things. Next week is going to be worse! – so I seize the day when I’ve contrived to land up at home. I was away the day of your half-term, and now again it’s quite impossible for me to get along tomorrow to see the Geographical Exhibition at the school. I didn’t get Mr Tendall’s message till yesterday, by which time it was too late to make any arrangement for today – and tomorrow I have a date in Town – and on Wednesday. It’s all rather tiring! The other day I had to go and open a garden fěte at Bluntisham, where I used to live – very exhausting, with lots [of] people coming up to say, “Do you remember me?” (which I never did) and “I knew you when you were so high” (a thing which ought not to be permitted – no one should ever have known one at such a time, or be allowed to make any allusion to it!). Well, anyway, thank you very much for thinking of my birthday, and congratulations on your contributions to the exhibition, which Mr T. tells me are very good indeed. Perhaps I may get down one day to see them in the school.