Page:FM Bailey letters from LA Bethell.pdf/25

Letter 14, 19th April 1938

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Letter 14, 19th April 1938

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TELEGRAMS, MAGA, LONDON

TELEPHONE 10663 CENTRAL

37, Paternoster Row, E.C.4

19 . IV. 38

My dear Bailey,

Very many thanks for yours of the 9th. How things have brushed up since we first knew them! Ten days from Kathmandu to Paternoster Row!

I am more than interested in all you tell me, especially about your movements. Lacking, however, a fixed address at which to find you in the next few weeks, I send this c/o the Travellers’, in the hope that you have given then directions re forwarding.

Best news of all is that you are likely to be here at the end of May. I've much to talk over with you. Principally, I want you to read, and if possible give your approval to the typescript of a full-length book, in which you (under a different name) are the leading figure. It is about the N.E.F. jungle hopping: the whole thing purely imaginary,

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but in parts, friends of yours might recognise you from certain events described. I sincerely hope you will be able to say “Right. Push along with it”, for one thing, Blackwoods’ are expecting it and have kept tally, throughout, with its progress, for publication in the “Autumn List” of our things, if and when “O.K.’d” by you. For another: my wife has had a serious breakdown and has had to go away to a nursing home in the country for a treatment which may be indefinitely prolonged. This, while halving my assets (forgive these details!) has also thrown on my hands my boy, still suffering from T.B. The net result is that this book has to be a success: and if you say “No” to it, the work of many months past will fall to bits. So it's rather a case of an appeal to your kindness in casting a favourable and permissive eye on it: always when you have time: which, of course, will not be so long as you are on the move. This letter, therefore, is only a curtain raiser to the time when you say “Send it along, and I'll look over it”. If of course,

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it's only a matter of cutting out a bit here or there, that wouldn't spoil it. But if you veto the whole, no amount of patching would make it a success. However – far be it from me to commit you to anything until you've seen it.

Yes: I'm afraid Arnold Wilson has fallen out of the ranks of the “do-ers” and into the ranks of the talkers. “All hope abandon, ye who enter here” is a thing that might be written in brass over Westminster, the home of false values. What a pity. The