Letter by Norman Lindsay to Leon Gellert 1917

Springwood
1917

Dear Gellert,

...

The really curious result of all this overexpression of conventional emotion is that truth - even the truth of common facts, is regarded with suspicion. One would think that this war was a big enough fact to have penetrated the popular mind. There is a vague uneasiness, I believe, but hardly a deeper emotion, for the damnable fact is patent that all over Australia people read Ginger Mick, and The Sentimental Bloke, and find the maudlin rubbish a consolation for their dead. I maintain with Robertson a constant interchange of jeers on this subject, for he, as a publisher, must protest as his creed the virtues of a "best-seller", and he retorts as a rule by sending me some work from his stock marked cryptically "See page seven" - whereon I am understood to read an exposure of my latest fallacy. Robertson, as a very large, virile Scotchman, racially Calvinistic, conventionally moral, and physically driven to women, or so I divine, is naturally inclined to find satiation in the morality that his senses rebel against.

...

Fortunately, the mail arrived at tea time with your note, and I take this evening off to relieve my mind in the conversational, which I doubt may have some effect of incoherence in the reading. The mail brought me also, with Robertson's compliments, a thing called The Glugs of Gosh, by the author of The Sentimental Bloke. It is now in my dust bin. I admit to utter intolerance in such matters.

...

Norman Lindsay

Notes:
Leon Gellert was one of the major soldier-poets of the First World War. He was wounded at Gallipoli and in 1917 published Songs of a Campaign.
The "Robertson" referred to in this letter is George Robertson of Angus & Robertson publishers.

>From Letters of Norman Lindsay edited by R.G. Howarth and A.W. Barker, 1979, p100