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Updated June 2012

T. E. Lawrence to Edward Garnett

Monday, 9.10.22.

Your Tuesday letter came, not to the pig-stye but to the barrack square. The Government's scare over Turkey (wind and vanity) has pushed forward our training and we wheel and turn and form fours and mark time and forward and wheel again from dawn till dark. I'm completely dead to decency: but your letter has been a sort of life-line, and I've read it about six times to cheer myself.

It's good of you to (or rather that you should) like my effort more on the re-reading. My test for a book is that one should finish it each time with a mind to read it again - some day. It's particularly interesting that the last fifty pages seem to you alive: I've never been able to see them at all: always by the time I have got so far my eyes have carried forward to the end, and I've gone through the last fighting like a dream. Those pages have been worked at very hard, but I've never got them in perspective: and I've always had a lurking fear that they were flatter than the VIth and VIIth parts (the failure of the bridge and the winter war) and formed an anticlimax - a weak ending. It was impossible for me to last out so long a writing with my wits about me: and I've feared that there would be found no reader long-winded enough to get there either. Your judgement that the book is in excess, as regards lengths, is also, I judge, true as regards intensity and breadth. I've had no pity on myself writing it - nor on my readers reading it. There's a clamour of force in it which deafens. A better artist would have given the effect of a fortissimo with less instrumentality. It's unskilled craftsmen who are profuse.

What you say about the oddity of my brain doesn't surprise me - but it helps to explain the apartness of myself here in this noisy barrack room. I might be one dragon-fly in a world of wasps - or one wasp among the dragon-flies! It's not a comfortable place: but if the oddity of my standing produces a fresh-feeling book, I suppose I shouldn't grouse about my luck.

The personal chapter clearly bothers you. A man (a metaphysician by nature, who was at Oxford with me and knows me very well) read it, and told me that it stood out as the finest chapter in the book. I tend more to your opinion: it's not meant for the ordinary intelligences, and must mislead them: but to set it out in plain English would be very painful. However six months away from it, and then a fresh approach may work a change in my feeling towards it: may even give me energy to re-write it. At present nothing sounds less probable. I don't even feel capable (though I'd love to) of writing a fresh book on this place. I've made some rather poor notes, which show me how hard it would be to bring off a picture of the R.A.F. Depot.

I wonder how the reduction seems to you now. If you get it to 150,000 and satisfy yourself, and then I take out 20,000 or so, that should do the trick. What an odd book it will be! It's over-good of you to attempt such a business. I decided yesterday in church (church-parade!) that I ought to publish nothing. Today I feel inclined to publish. Am I neurasthenic or just feeble-willed?

I'm afraid I can't come away, even for a day.

E.L.

(Glad you like Auda, I did!)

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Source: DG 368-9
Checked: jw
Last revised: 5 February 2006


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