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Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to Sydney Cockerell
Jan. 13th, 1924
Dear Cockerell
Did I ever thank you for The Rover? A very good book; but not better than the other Conrad's. Don't you think a man would strain himself each time to surpass the last mark? There is no strain in this.
About the Tokio professorship - not for me I'm afraid. I'm not going to be respectable again. Also I'm not fit either to be respectable, or to preach what I don't practise. Literature is beyond my grasp as a craft, and I don't aspire to it as a science.
Haven't heard of Charlotte Mew: but all the women who ever wrote original stuff could have been strangled at birth, and the history of English literature (and my bookshelves) would be unchanged.
Is it true that Doughty is writing again?
Yours
T.E.S.
| Source: | SCC 361 (also, with variant punctuation, DG 450) |
| Checked: | jw/ |
| Last revised: | 1 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