T. E. Lawrence

Contents lists

1888-1910

1911

1912

1913

1914

1915-16

1917-18

1919-20

1921

1922

1923

1924

1925

1926

1927

1928

1929

1930

1931

1932

1933

1934

1935

Updated June 2012

T. E. Lawrence to Sydney Cockerell

---

Clouds Hill,
Moreton,
Doset

March 19th, 1924

Dear Cockerell

Miss Mew: too much emotion for her art, for her intellect, for her will. Such intensity of feeling is a sign of weakness. She is a real poet - but a little one, for the incoherency, the violence of over-wrought nerves does much harm to her powers of expression.

It's good stuff - Beside the Bed: On the Asylum Road: I have been through the Gates: On the Road to the Sea: these are four excellent things - but only the passion is molten: the form, the thought, the music, these are unresolved, to be guessed at, or worse, to be supplied by the reader if his passion is set burning by sympathy with hers. I'm frigid towards woman so that I can withstand her: so that I want to withstand her.

Moby Dick... ah, there's a titan of a book. Do you know Redburn, and Pierre, two of the less common ones? Whitejacket very good: Mardi dull: two early S. Sea adventures (Omoo and Typee) fair. One of his finest works is Clarel, in verse: but it isn't as fine verse as his War stuff. That's magnificent. Melville was a great man.

I got £20 for my Piazza Tales the other day. Someone is working a Melville boom, and I've sold all my early editions profitably.       

Doughty: will you suggest that he makes a new contract for A.D. with Cape? Direct, not with Duckworth. He should get better terms for what is now a fine property. A.D. is selling hot in U.S.A.

T.E.L.

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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