JRR Tolkien offers a stiff reply to a German publisher asking after his Aryan origins. He sent it via his publisher, along with a more co-operative letter, so giving his publisher the option to send either one. It is unknown which reply was sent.
Tolkein surely wasn't the only one. A request like that would have been sent to a lot of bestselling British authors in the 1930s; Germany remained a viable market. I wonder if any record exists of how they replied.
That's one of the few on 'Letters of Note' that I'd read before.
If TS Eliot received one, it and its reply are probably in a filing cabinet in Kensington.
Posted by: nick s | March 08, 2012 at 06:27 AM
Shades of Dizzy: "Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon."
Posted by: ajay | March 08, 2012 at 10:30 AM
Tolkien.
That's all.
(amended, thanks. Thing is his kid was our parish priest for a while and a renowned neighborhood drunk, so I should *really* have got that right - jk)
Posted by: Martin Wisse | March 08, 2012 at 06:07 PM
Surely the reply where he "delicately side-stepped" the question would have been more confrontational, not less? In this one Tolkein confirms he isn't Jewish, which presumably lets some publisher tick the appropriate checkbox and get on with printing. The abuse is neither here nor there.
Whereas, as with any bureaucratic process, failing to answer a question can nicely gum up the entire process.
Posted by: Dan | March 10, 2012 at 04:59 PM