Contents lists
Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to V. W. Richards
[August, 1920]
[22 lines omitted] (ii) Re Oxford. To finish my 'Boy-Scout' book by Sept. 30 will mean my spending August and September in All Souls: solid: the more you can come down in that time the better I will work: so please don’t limit yourself to Sept. 24 etc. Any date in those days will do perfectly: and the longer the better. Your critical faculty would be invaluable: because though it's only a cheap book written to buy Pole Hill and build its house, yet it's got to have my name on it — therefore I don’t want it to be despicable.
(iii) Re prose. The extract sent is nearly perfect: but prose depends on a music in one's head which involuntarily chooses and balances the possible words to keep tune with the thought. The best passages in English prose all deal with death or the vanity of things, since that is a tune we all know, and the mind is set quite free to think while writing about it. Only it can't be kept up very long, because of mortal weakness and the wear and tear of things, and the function of criticism, revision, and correction (polishing) seems to me to be either
(i) putting a thing into thought
(ii) [putting] thought into rhythm
(iii) putting expression into meaning.
It seems to me that if you think too hard about the form, you forget the matter, and if your brain is wrestling with the matter, you may not have attention to spare for the manner. Only occasionally in things constantly dwelt upon, do you get an unconscious balance, and then you get a spontaneous and perfect arrangement of words to fit the idea, as the tune. Polishing is an attempt, by stages, to get to what should be a single combined stride.
L.
| Source: | DG 318 |
| Checked: | jw/ |
| Last revised: | 22 January 2006 |
T. E. Lawrence chronology
1888 16 August: born at Tremadoc, Wales
1896-1907: City of Oxford High School for Boys
1907-9: Jesus College, Oxford, B.A., 1st Class Hons, 1909
1910-14: Magdalen College, Oxford (Senior Demy), while working at the British Museum's excavations at Carchemish
1915-16: Military Intelligence Dept, Cairo
1916-18: Liaison Officer with the Arab Revolt
1919: Attended the Paris Peace Conference
1919-22: wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1921-2: Adviser on Arab Affairs to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office
1922 August: Enlisted in the Ranks of the RAF
1923 January: discharged from the RAF
1923 March: enlisted in the Tank Corps
1923: translated a French novel, The Forest Giant
1924-6: prepared the subscribers' abridgement of Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1927-8: stationed at Karachi, then Miranshah
1927 March: Revolt in the Desert, an abridgement of Seven Pillars, published
1928: completed The Mint, began translating Homer's Odyssey
1929-33: stationed at Plymouth
1931: started working on RAF boats
1932: his translation of the Odyssey published
1933-5: attached to MAEE, Felixstowe
1935 February: retired from the RAF
1935 19 May: died from injuries received in a motor-cycle crash on 13 May
1935 21 May: buried at Moreton, Dorset