Page:FM Bailey letters from LA Bethell.pdf/23

 Nine-tenths of what I've advocated, and good half of what I have written, for years past, has been directed at imploring the retired man to construct a disciplined and strenuous life for himself, dating from six months after his retirement date, and thereby avoid the soul killing result of being indefinitely and continuously “on leave”. The first six months, of course, he must have. He's earned it. Anyhow, he’ll want it, in which to look about him and make his plans. But, thereafter, his future happiness will depend in sole and direct measure on the amount of system he can instil into his life, and his energy – constructive energy – he can put into his new master: his job.

I fully and frankly apologise for this apparently unpardonable intrusion into your personal affairs. But, apart from the fact that it is what I myself have found

IMG 0384

to be true, it brings us to the short point at issue between us. Your writing.

I'm immensely relieved to hear that you are going to do as I suggested, and give up the idea of a volume of autobiographical reminiscences. You've material by the cartload: and the best and soundest use you can make of it is to turn it into “longshort” stories on the Maga plan. There's a certain trick about it, and a good deal of hard work. But, once learnt, you can chuck your cap over the windmill and dive in. You know that Maga’s doors are already more than half open to you; A state of affairs rarely reached by the hoi polloi, who try to get in with a tin opener, and a corkscrew, finally with a crowbar: and then fail. As I know well – I, whose job it is to keep out all but the best, anyhow at the London end. And as for the way of getting the material into publishable form, if you want my help, you know well that you have me at your command.

Quite apart from the satisfaction which anybody,

IMG 0385

I don’t care how highly placed, gets from seeing himself in Maga, the thing is really profitable. The key of the situation being that if the paper is good, G.W.B. never limits you (within reason) to length. And at 30/- a page of 480 words, the payment tends to pile up. I've had as much as £57 from him for one paper before now. Admittedly, that was the longest. But £30 to £35 I think is about my average, over the 26 things I've had in. Forgive these personal details: advice is valueless unless illustrated by demonstrable fact.

People like ourselves – you, pre-eminently – have a mine of wealth in our past experiences. Yours are ten times greater, and of more value, than mine. Nine tenths of the writers, here at home, have never been a mile from a cooked dinner in all their lives; their nearest approach to the wild places of this earth, the smell of a Chinese restaurant in Soho. And those writers sit about in soggy lumps, searching and winnowing the stale and profitless life around them for something, anything, out of which to dodge up a story. Poor devils. About one in ten thousand

IMG 0386