" INK OF POPPIES "
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—In a Mite in your issue of June 4th you express regret that " a document " of mine should, through the medium of The Spectator, have been used by Miss Dorothy L. Sayers in a way of which I disapprove. I do not think that you make it sufficiently. clear that the document in question was a personal letter, so headed and bearing my signature, addressed, not as you say to "well-known writers " but to a number of people known and unknown, on the subject of the present state of international affairs. My letter requested an answer, a personal
answer to be addressed to me, that might with other answers contribute to the formation of an effective attitude to these affairs I also indicated in my letter that it, with the answers, would be the substance of a book on the subject. The people to whom I sent my letter have been extremely generous in their answers. Miss Sayers is the only person to whom it was addressed who departed from the courtesies of the occasion.
Miss Sayers had every right to disagree with the attitude of my letter ; and when my book is published she will have the right to criticise its style as well as its attitude in as public a manner as she pleases. But to use it, as she has done in your issue of May t4th, as a peg on which to hang wearisome cliches about literary, style (i.e., to make an article of it at so much per word).is,a breach of taste, and confidence that all the people who have taken serious pains to answer my letter deprecate.
I must refuse to treat Miss Sayers' notions of style seriously, as being irrelevant both to the subject of my letter and to style. If I were conducting a questionnaire on style, I should not address myself to a writer of detective fiction who proudly con- fesses herself to be "a scholar. spoiled." In sending my letter to people I deliberately took the risk of receiving many useless replies, for which I would have to be nevertheless grateful— the subject of our present international unhappiness seemed worth the risk. I did not anticipate any such public and irrele- vant rudeness as Miss Sayers' and in protesting against it I wish at the same time to record that her response is a fortunately
unique one.—Yours truly, LAURA RIDING. s Nottingham Street, London, W.I.
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