Page:FM Bailey letters from LA Bethell.pdf/24

 make money by it: Arnold Bennett, Priestley, Galsworthy, for instance: but the remainder sink into the joyless slums of literature – just for lack of those experiences, those memories, which you and I have by the double handful.

Side note

(1 in 10,000. These are among 60,000 new books published in England annually.)

Memories, pre-eminently. There must be a mind to grasp and retain details: as e.g. what you now tell me of a certain impatience, on both sides, existing between you and that soft-skinned pussyfooted collection of pseudo-autocrats, the Secretariat. I've known it for long, from little things you've dropped, any time this last thirty years. Do you remember once remarking, quite in parenthesis, during one of our “ollopings” in Sisseri, on one of those pink and plastered popinjays in the Secretariat, who had got off some unoriginal quip or other, was pleased with it, sat back, rubbed his soft hands together, and congratulated himself on having written a “masterly minute”? Well, see 25 years later, Maga, January this year, page 40. These things stick. See also page 19, bottom of pink column, where is reproduced

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your dictum that if the soldier takes an interfering hand in politics, he gets it in his neck. That, I think. you said at Nizamghat, in the period of the unspeakable Bally: though apropos what, I can't quite remember.

Anyhow, not to labour the point, it is that these things stick: memories are invaluable: and you and I – you, particularly – possess stored up material under our hats, ready for a lifetime's writing, let alone our remaining years. But I won't for a moment suggest that it's easy. No worthwhile thing in this life ever was easy: for if it were easy, it wouldn't be worthwhile.

I'm fully aware that I'm risking a rap on the knuckles for saying all I've said: and it's quite inadequate for me to apologise, in advance, for having done so. But I've long had a mental vision, in your case, of what you've now put into words: when you speak of the immense mass of material at your command, and say “Perhaps I will be so overwhelmed that I will do – nothing”.

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Exactly. L’embarras du choix – which quills over here incorrectly quote as embarras de richesse. And here, I think, is one of the ways in which I can help you.

If I go on talking, this screed will finish by being too bulky for airmail. Will you drop me a line, giving me a sure address to which I can write in the next few months? This will presumably be my last chance of catching you in Nepal. And, if you can add a postscript giving me at any rate provisional absolution for anything apparently meddlesome I've said in this letter, my thanks will be twofold.


 * Yours very sincerely


 * L. A. Bethell