Page:FM Bailey letters from LA Bethell.pdf/21

 Please offer my sympathies.

About Newnes' proposal and offer –

You will do yourself no good in the literary world by association with that show. They are catchpenny “popular” caterers who's unequal and temporary interest in the grubbier side of French politics or a fire in a City warehouse (to give example of current trivialities) and you might easily find your matter,

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when written, presented to the public sandwiched between undesirable context. This offer for your undoubtedly specialised matter – at 3 guineas a thousand – the market price of which, in right hands and in proper surroundings, would be ten – is sufficient indication of the style of use they would propose to make of it.

Secondly, your having published with Newnes would make the better class publications look askance at your fuller presentation, when in book form. No reputable publisher would like to think himself second fiddle after the Newnes lot: and you would have to avow that you had already published part of your book – even if in different phraseology – with N’s. We, here, for instance condemn a thing ‘ek dum’, whatever its merits, if it or any part of it has been published anywhere before.

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Thirdly – Newnes’ request that “the whole should be full of action and interest, with no padding” shows the way in which they would propose to list it. Pure catch penny journalese. For want of a better word, Yawk.

What the public fail to realise is that there is a very hard and definite line, in publishing, drawn between “journalism” and “letters”. Geographically the two classes are divided by the big railway bridge that crosses the bottom of Ludgate Hill. Westward of it, you will find Fleet Street, and all its works and tricks. Eastward, Blackwood's, the Oxford University Press, and those like us. People may think of it as snobbery, of course, but the division, both psychic and actual, is very real: and our side of the line would no more establish, or allow, contacts with the other side, than you would of your free will go to a sergeants’ dance.

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I'm glad you asked me. To have accepted Newnes would have been a “gaffe”, a thing which would have given you a black mark which would have stuck to you, like a mole, for the rest of your literary life.

All of this leads inevitably to a corollary – that we, Maga, are your market and what Haldane would have called his “spiritual home”. Get your material finished, polish it up, and send it to George Blackwood at Edinburgh. He knows the value of what you have done, a thing which will have a considerable value when he comes to consider what you've written.

For the rest, I look forward, quite sincerely, to seeing you over here in the summer. I'm glad you've made up your mind to chuck, and come home – and share