Contents lists
Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to C. M. Doughty
27. IX. 23.
Dear Mr. Doughty,
I'm reading Mansoul: it's not ended yet, for my reading time is only snips and snippets of time: but I want to give you my opinion that the added parts work perfectly into the old, and fill it out to a much better roundness. There is a strange finality across the whole poem, which makes a queer impression on me as I read it. What to call it (the impression) I don't know. I feel less human as I read, as if I'd been taken out of the world of living things, and had been made part of the hills or woods.
Probably I won't feel like this when I end the book: which is why I'm sending you this interim note on the power with which you have written it.
I mentioned Lord Hartington to you, didn't I, once in Eastbourne? He has just written to me asking for an introduction to you. I've replied that you have moved, and that he needs no introduction. If he can still come (Kent is not, like Eastbourne, a place where he visits of necessity) you will find him very good. His brother-in-law, Harold Macmillan, would like to come with him.
My regards to Mrs. Doughty. I hope that Merriecroft succeeds well.
Yours ever
T. E. Lawrence
| Source: | DG 432-3 |
| Checked: | mv/ |
| Last revised: | 20 February 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