Here at the Wade Center, I’ve been working through some of Dorothy L. Sayers’s correspondence, for which “voluminous” is not adequate as a description. “Torrential” maybe.
In midlife one of her closest friends was Helen Simpson, who, had she not died in 1940 at age 42, probably of cancer, would surely have remained a major figure in Sayers’s life. There’s an interesting period in the mid-Thirties when Sayers sends to Simpson some letters she has been receiving from a gentleman in Rapallo, Italy — she’s not sure quite how to respond to them.
The gentleman was Ezra Pound.
Pound had just read one of Sayers’s detective novels and had concluded that “you are manifestly NOT a complete idiot” (high praise indeed!) and now thinks that she should turn her talents to More Important Things. So he addresses her with exquisite politeness: “Dear Miss Sayers or Lady Peter W. or whoever you now are” — and goes on to suggest that she should think less of murder and more of mass murder, the mass murder inflicted on us by our economic system, and especially the practice of USURY (as he usually capitalizes it in his Cantos). “MONEY … is the root of so much Krrrrime.” And if any one individual is going to be murdered, he thinks it should be the British Prime Minister. (“OR how to kill off all the god Damn Nevils Chamberlains.”) He signs off — he’s writing on 27 December 1934 — “With the seezunz greetinz.”
Sayers politely demurs at his suggestion: “Poor Neville Chamberlain!! Indeed I will not have him murdered. If carefully cherished, he may some day take another sixpence off my income-tax.”
Pound will not be deterred. Sayers writes to Helen Simpson, “A mild and brief reply addressed to Mr. Ezra Pound has now elicited a tremendous epistle. Three sheets long & full of Quaint Devices, & accompanied by a (very badly) printed questionnaire about Volitionist Economics, whatever they are.”
He reads a second Lord Peter novel: “I hav bin readin anuther ov ’em and it WONT DO.” Also: “We are under a secret and damngerous REAL gov’t.” And: “Nobody understands ANY history, without econ/ there is a lot in my cantos/(condensed ).” When Sayers apparently — only one of her letters to him seems to have survived — declines to accept his view of things, he replies, “Thet m’eh de’h ge’l ( as yr/ grandfather wd/ ? have pronounced it ) is because you have not read my estimable writings.” He is unfamiliar with the place in Essex where she lives (“Where is Witham.?”) and hints at a possible meeting: “I spose you get to London nown again?”
I think we may assume that Sayers did not acknowledge this hint. Rather, she says, “I will reserve my wrath for those who commit mayhem upon English spelling and syntax — a subject on which I feel strongly. Would you like something lingering, with boiling oil in it?”
A fascinating and strange non-meeting of the minds! I was at a loss to account for it until I did a quick Google search for “correspondence of Ezra Pound and Dorothy Sayers,” and got:
Mystery solved! And wow, do I need to revise my account of her adolescence.
