Contents lists
Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to D. G. Hogarth
14.XI.23
I'll send back your drafts when I next write from the hut: this is being scribbled standing up elsewhere.
Curtis and yourself are considering the idea of 10 guinea subscribers. Buxton is seeing the chance of one hundred at 30 pounds. Cape is looking for a single millionaire at £3000. I'm waiting events.
One of the three alternatives may happen. In anticipation of it I've taken a cottage (at 2/6 a week) near camp, and fitted up a writing room in it. There I can revise my text, in about a twelve-month, allowing say 2 hrs average per day. More than this is too much. I've got into an 'employed job' here, which will keep me in camp a year or two. I can let you (or whoever edits) have the revised text a book at a time, gradually. The pictures will take about a year to do, I expect. So that the whole project may be complete within 18 months.
For the text I want your copy, the only one left in sheets. It can be replaced with a bound copy, if you wish it: though of course if the new text feels better I'll destroy all the six copies of the old one.
Saw Trenchard on Sunday. He said something about a month's leave for me. I said no, since returning here would be unpleasant after so long a holiday. The Army does not improve upon longer knowledge.
Clarendon Press might well print: I want Caslon eleven point or its nearest monotype equivalent.
The book's size is determined by the ready plates (10 x 8, I think it is, a large quarto, much that of the 1st Edition). If I can get it to 250,000 words it will go in one vol. of 450 words a page.
.L.
I should have written earlier, but things have been muddled.
| Source: | DG 439-40 |
| Checked: | mv/ |
| Last revised: | 23 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