Square Haunting
Page 39
‘a shy Irishman’ – Eric Whelpton interview in the Sunday Times, 30 March 1975.
hotfoots to Battersea – Sayers herself was familiar with the route used by Lord Peter: her cousin Raymond and his wife lived in Battersea, and she visited them several times from Mecklenburgh Square. ‘I saw Ray and Lucy the other day – stodging out to Battersea all in my smartest clothes in the vilest of weather. Fortunately there is a ’bus which goes all the way.’
The novel – The twist in Whose Body? may have come to Sayers some years earlier. In The Women at Oxford, Vera Brittain refers to ‘an Oxford parlour game in which the players each add an incident to make a story. Dorothy Sayers added the naked corpse of an unknown person discovered in a bathtub, and thus provided herself with the plot for a mystery novel.’
‘conventional to the last degree’ – DLS, ‘Gaudy Night’, in Denys Kilham Roberts (ed.), Titles to Fame, p. 75.
is often seen – Martin Edwards’s The Golden Age of Murder is an excellent history of Golden Age detective fiction, as are the essays in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction.
‘It may be’ – DLS (ed.), Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, Horror, p. 9.
‘Things have been’ – DLS to her parents, 1 July 1921.
‘One reason why’ – DLS to her parents, 19 December 1921.
‘Lord Peter’s large income’ – DLS, ‘How I Came to Invent the Character of Lord Peter Wimsey’, Harcourt, Brace News, 15 July 1936.
‘I simply must’ – DLS to her parents, 29 May 1921. Wheaton.
telephone directory – Decades later a Mr Freke wrote to Sayers asking how she chose the name of her murderer. She replied: ‘I was terrified when I first saw the name on the envelope, thinking that you were intending to sue me for libel.’ She told him she had never met a Freke in real life but the naming was probably ‘the result of a pin stuck at random into the London Telephone Directory’.
‘I’m just going on’ – DLS to her parents, 15 March 1921.
‘lots of parties’ – DLS to her parents, 1 July 1921.
‘I can’t get’ – DLS to her parents, 16 July 1921.
‘I’m inviting a friend’ – DLS to her parents, 27 July 1921.
‘Just now’ – John Cournos to John Gould Fletcher, 26 December 1921. Arkansas.
‘Perhaps I could’ – DLS to her parents, 30 October 1921. Wheaton.
‘has consoled me’ – John Cournos to John Gould Fletcher, 11 February 1921. Arkansas.
‘prisoners of life’ – idem.
‘these cliques and gangs’ – John Gould Fletcher to John Cournos, 29 April 1920. Houghton JC.
‘Few friendships’ – DLS to Leonard Green, 29 August 1919. HRC Sayers.
‘a man I wouldn’t’ – DLS to her parents, 2 January 1920. He had written three years after the unfortunate proposal, to tell her of his engagement. Wheaton.
‘To have somebody’ – DLS to her mother, 11 July 1917.
‘sort of abject hero-worship’ – DLS to John Cournos, 25 January 1925.
‘a rotten companion’ – DLS to John Cournos, 4 December 1924.
‘How stupid’ – DLS to John Cournos, 13 August 1925.
‘having tramped’ – idem.
‘You can’t be both’ – John Cournos to John Gould Fletcher, 27 May 1921. Arkansas.
‘Personally, I think’ – DLS to her parents, 7 October 1921.
‘I fear he has’ – DLS to her parents, 8 November 1921. In her 1930 novel The Documents in the Case a character is described as ‘not a bad old bird, but an alarming bore on the subject of Art with a capital A’.
‘It makes me’ – idem.
‘full of mouldy sandwiches’ – DLS to her parents, 14 February 1922.
‘I’ve been promised’ – DLS to her parents, 8 November 1921.
‘I think of’ – DLS to her parents, 14 February 1922.
‘I spend all’ – DLS to her parents, 8 November 1921.
‘I shall either’ – DLS to her parents, undated (November 1921).
‘I’m afraid he’ – idem.
‘Nobody can feel’ – DLS to her parents, 19 December 1921.
Great James Street – She had paid annual rent of £65 for one room in Mecklenburgh Square; her new digs cost £70 for a sitting room, bedroom and kitchen with the use of a new bathroom and lavatory: ‘a delightful little set’. A blue plaque marks the site today.
‘actually settled’ – DLS to her parents, 15 June 1922.
‘showed signs of’ – DLS to her parents, 14 August 1922. Wheaton.
‘I want to’ – idem.
‘he has’ – DLS to her parents, 24 July 1922. Wheaton.
‘very confident’ – DLS to her parents, 4 April 1922. Wheaton.
‘a lively discussion’ – DLS to her parents, 27 July 1922.
‘passionately wanting’ – DLS to John Cournos, 13 August 1925.
‘talk about being’ – DLS to John Cournos, 4 December 1924.
‘stripped love down’ – DLS to John Cournos, undated (January 1925).
‘turned up’ – DLS to her mother, 18 January 1922.
‘I had 5 courses’ – DLS to her mother, 24 July 1922. They had red wine (which Sayers described as ‘Spanish Burgundy’) and two kinds of vermouth, plus five courses: grapefruit rafraîchi, on ice with whipped cream, consommé aux vermicelles, beefsteak à l’anglaise with potatoes and salad, fruit jelly with cream and baked mushrooms casserole, with coffee and liqueurs.
‘John hasn’t’ – DLS to her parents, 28 November 1922.
‘grave physical’ – June Rose, Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution, p. 179.
‘every dirty trick’ – DLS to John Cournos, 4 December 1924.
‘excluded frankness’ – DLS to John Cournos, undated (January 1925).
‘Everywhere, in the hotels’ – John Cournos to John Gould Fletcher, 29 November 1922. Arkansas.
‘I’m getting more’ – DLS to her mother, 8 January 1923.
‘I’ve been lonely’ – idem.
‘Intellect isn’t’ – DLS to her mother, 18 December 1922.
‘a revolting slum’ – DLS to her mother, 8 January 1923.
Beatrice White – The source of this episode, revealed after Barbara Reynolds’s 1993 biography was published, is provided in an appendix to Reynolds (ed.), Letters, vol. 2.
‘I’m awfully rushed’ – DLS to her mother, 2 November 1923.
let down – In December 1924, Sayers found herself sitting next to Bill and another woman in a restaurant; while Sayers tried to discreetly ignore them, the woman spilled tea in Sayers’s lap and had to apologise.
‘I never meant’ – DLS to John Cournos, 22 February 1925.
‘of all motives’ – DLS, ‘Motives for Crime’, Sunday Times, 5 August 1934. In Martin Edwards (ed.), Taking Detective Stories Seriously: The Collected Crime Reviews of Dorothy L. Sayers, p. 178.
‘it would grieve’ – DLS to Ivy Shrimpton, 27 January 1924.
‘an infant’ – DLS to Ivy Shrimpton, 1 January 1924.
‘Everything I told you’ – DLS to Ivy Shrimpton, 27 January 1924.
‘affection rather’ – DLS to Ivy Shrimpton, 1 January 1924.
‘I hope he’ – DLS to Ivy Shrimpton, 2 May 1924.
one other person – Cournos was aware of his privileged position and seems to have relished the secret. Among Cournos’s papers at Houghton Library is a copy of a newspaper interview with Sayers. Two passages are circled. The first: ‘As sharp-tongued to bishops as to biddies, Miss Sayers refuses to have her beliefs or her privacy invaded for any reason.’ In the second, Sayers complains that critics ‘aren’t interested in my translation of Dante; they only want to know the great secret which I must be concealing – the secret of why I’m translating Dante instead of writing more detective stories’. Cournos has underlined twice the line ‘know the great secret which I must be concealing’.
In January 1953, Cournos wrote to James Babb of Yale University Library, to whom
he had previously sold some letters from the novelist L. A. G. Strong: ‘I have a singularly interesting series of letters, unusual because they have a unity and a sequence … These letters, written by Dorothy L. Sayers to me in the early days of her career, are of a very intimate character, and deal with an episode in her life of interest to any future biographer.’ He goes on to specify that the letters should not be made available to researchers until both he and Sayers are dead – ‘I have hesitated to dispose of these letters because of their exceptionally intimate sex character’ – then changes his mind: ‘On second thought I myself don’t mind, as the intimate facts concern her.’ The eleven letters were eventually left to Harvard’s Houghton Library, on the proviso that no one should see them until fifty years after Cournos’s death. Copies were nonetheless shown to the scholar Carolyn Heilbrun in the 1970s; the papers were officially made available to James Brabazon for his 1981 biography and are included in Barbara Reynolds’s edition of Sayers’s letters.
‘Dear John’ – DLS to John Cournos, 22 August 1924.
‘The one thing’ – DLS to John Cournos, 27 October 1924.
‘Last time’ – idem.
‘I have become’ – DLS to John Cournos, undated (January 1925).
‘interests are’ – idem.
‘everlasting breeziness’ – DLS to Eustace Barton, 7 May 1928.
‘with the infanticidal’ – DLS, ‘Gaudy Night’, in Denys Kilham Roberts (ed.), Titles to Fame, p. 79.
‘a drama’ – G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 19 August 1922.
‘persuade us’ – DLS, ‘Puppets or People in Stories of Crime’, Sunday Times, 26 May 1935. In Taking Detective Stories Seriously, p. 279.
‘a passion’ – VW, diary 4 January 1925.
‘to write a’ – E. C. Bentley, Those Days (Constable, 1940), p.249.
‘breathing and moving’ – DLS, Trent’s Last Case draft broadcast talk. Wheaton.
‘in every respect’ – DLS, ‘Gaudy Night’, in Denys Kilham Roberts (ed.), Titles to Fame, p. 79.
‘Bloomsbury bluestocking’ – Sayers created a prototype for Harriet in the character of Ann Dorland in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club: an artist, with Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence on her bookshelves, who is falsely accused of murder after a failed affair. Wimsey urges her to aspire to a different sort of relationship: ‘You have always thought of being dominated by somebody, haven’t you? … But you’ll find that yours will be the leading brain of the two. He will take great pride in the fact. And you will find the man reliable and kind, and it will turn out quite well.’
‘Notwithstanding the usual’ – DLS, ‘Apology for Peter’, The Book Society Annual (Christmas 1935).
‘a major operation’ – DLS, ‘Gaudy Night’, in Denys Kilham Roberts (ed.), Titles to Fame, p. 79.
‘good work’ – DLS, Why Work?.
‘What on earth’ – DLS, ‘Are Women Human?’, Unpopular Opinions, p. 114.
‘who are cursed with’ – DLS, Gaudy Night, p. 77.
‘a passport to’ – DLS, ‘What’s Right with Oxford?’, Oxford Magazine (Summer 1935).
‘by choosing’ – DLS, ‘Gaudy Night’, in Denys Kilham Roberts (ed.), Titles to Fame, p. 82.
‘an Oxford woman graduate’ – ibid., p. 81.
Cat O’Mary – Wheaton. Published in Barbara Reynolds (ed.), Dorothy L. Sayers: Child and Woman of Her Time, p. 155. She’d intended to publish Cat O’Mary – the ‘straight novel’ – under a pseudonym, Johanna Leigh.
as herself – Aspects of that unfinished novel recur in Love All, a comic play Sayers wrote in 1937, in which an unfaithful husband is shocked to discover that his wife has written a play while he was away with his mistress, and is now living a glamorous and successful life in London, with a flat of her own, a West End run and a constantly ringing telephone.
not entirely happily – To her son, who had announced he was to marry for a second time: ‘I do not know that romantic love is necessarily a good foundation – mutual respect and mutual courtesy are the essentials, and a determination to see the thing through. But I cannot give much advice on the subject, having done rather badly at it myself. However, I did stick it out for over a quarter of a century – and am therefore perhaps inclined to be a little short with the people who don’t stick it out.’
‘learning to cope’ – DLS to John Cournos, 25 January 1925.
‘quite satisfied’ – DLS to Ivy Shrimpton, 15 March 1926.
‘too old’ – DLS to Ivy Shrimpton, 27 January 1924.
Mrs H. Attwood – cf. a letter written by Cournos’s step-granddaughter, Marcia Satterthwaite Wertime, to the New York Times, 14 November 1993.
ongoing fight – On 16 June 1927, the university council voted to limit the number of women undergraduates to 620, meaning women at Oxford were outnumbered 1:4 by men; in Unnatural Death, Sayers made a passing reference to the fact that ‘Oxford decided that women were dangerous’, while in the preface to Gaudy Night she apologises to the authorities for having created ‘a college of 150 women students, in excess of the limit ordained by statute’. Until 1993, Somerville fellows had to resign their fellowships on marriage.
‘Whether you advertise’ – DLS to Victor Gollancz, 26 September 1935.
‘not really a detective story’ – DLS to Muriel St Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935.
‘a discussion’ – ‘Crime in College’, TLS, 9 November 1935.
‘For no bribe’ – DLS, ‘Would You Like to be 21 Again? I Wouldn’t’, Daily Express, 9 February 1937.
‘One thing’ – DLS to Hilary F. Page, 10 August 1944.
JANE ELLEN HARRISON
‘John is encamped’ – Quoted in Michael Holroyd, Augustus John, p. 364.
‘I felt’ – JEH to D. S. MacColl, 15 August 1909. Glasgow.
which she attributed – Jessie G. Stewart, Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait from Letters, p. 104.
‘seems to me’ – JEH to Ruth Darwin, undated (July 1909). Newnham.
‘a very charming person’ – Augustus John to Ottoline Morrell, 22 July 1909. Quoted in Michael Holroyd, Augustus John, p. 363.
‘odd & disappointing’ – Gilbert Murray to Jessie Stewart, 1 May 1928. Newnham.
bemusement at the choices – These are unknown, but for the memorial service at Newnham, Hope suggested reading the third chapter of Proverbs, minus verses 5, 6, 9, 10, 11 and 12, and ending with verse 24: ‘I cannot think of anything more suitable.’
‘Who is “God”’ – VW, diary 21 April 1928.
‘The problem’ – HM to Jessie Stewart, 29 March 1943. Newnham.
‘I thought’ – Gilbert Murray to Jessie Stewart, 26 March 1950. Newnham.
‘I never understood’ – Gilbert Murray to Jessie Stewart, 23 April 1952. Newnham.
‘I send you’ – JEH to Gilbert Murray, 31 October 1925. Newnham.
trimmed with fringe – Reminiscences of Marian Harrison. Newnham.
‘ignorant but willing’ – JEH, Reminiscences, p. 27.
staying at home – Reminiscences of Marian Harrison. Newnham.
‘the cleverest woman’ – Reminiscences of Mary Marshall. Newnham.
‘where all the’ – Quoted in Gill Sutherland, ‘History of Newnham’, www.newn.cam.ac.uk.
‘the newest thing’ – JEH, Reminiscences, p. 45.
‘perambulating lectures’ – Interview with Jane Harrison, Pall Mall Gazette, 4 November 1891.
‘the lady’ – idem.
‘A woman was’ – Interview with Jane Harrison, Women’s Penny Paper, 24 August 1889.
‘undesirable that’ – Quoted in Mary Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison, p. 62.
‘had not enjoyed’ – Jean Mills, Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism, p. 19.
honorary degrees – In April 1895 she received an honorary LL.D. from the University of Aberdeen, the first time a woman had received the degree. Two years later she received an honorary D.Litt. from Durham.
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‘one woman’ – Interview with Jane Harrison, Time and Tide, 27 January 1928.
‘the fat and comely one’ – JEH to Gilbert Murray, May 1904. Newnham.
‘Zeus is nowhere’ – JEH to Gilbert Murray, 21 April 1901. Newnham.
‘the products of art’ – JEH, Themis, p. xi.
‘a veritable little manual’ – JEH to Gilbert Murray, 21 April 1901. Newnham.
‘religious representation’ – JEH, Themis, p. 500.
‘We are so’ – JEH, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 397.
‘Few books are’ – T. S. Eliot, ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’, in Selected Essays, p. 62.
‘a keen emotion’ – JEH, Ancient Art and Ritual, p. 57.
‘it just fascinates’ – D. H. Lawrence to Arthur McLeod, 26 October 1913.
‘trying to make’ – JEH, Reminiscences, p. 26.
‘there were mother-cults’ – H. D. to Bryher, 15 April 1932. Beinecke.
‘and all the’ – VW to Violet Dickinson, 22 October 1904.
‘a really Apostolic’ – VW, Roger Fry, p. 92.
‘excess of sympathy’ – Saturday Review, 4 May 1912.
‘corybantic Hellenism’ – Harrison knew Duncan, and occasionally read Greek poetry at Duncan’s performances.
‘such an audacious’ – Jessie G. Stewart, Jane Ellen Harrison, p. 88.
‘To the orthodox’ – JEH, Themis, p. lviii.
‘knowing Greek’ – For more on this subject see Yopie Prins’s fascinating book Ladies’ Greek.
‘freedom to know’ – JEH, ‘Homo Sum: Being a Letter to an Anti-Suffragist from an Anthropologist’, Alpha and Omega, p. 112.
‘she was a little girl’ – JEH, ‘Scientiae Sacra Fames’, Alpha and Omega, p. 117.
‘confine man’ – JEH, ‘Homo Sum’, Alpha and Omega, p. 84.
‘we must free’ – JEH, ‘Scientiae Sacra Fames’, Alpha and Omega, p. 139.
‘made their god’ – ibid., p. 142.
‘to be set’ – ibid., p. 120.
‘With every fibre’ – JEH, ‘Epilogue on the War’, Alpha and Omega, p. 223.
‘freedom for ourselves’ – ibid., p. 252.
‘a notorious centre’ – Quoted in Shelley Arlen, ‘“For Love of an Idea”: Jane Ellen Harrison, heretic and humanist’, p. 178.