Contents lists
Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to William Rothenstein
Karachi.
12.V.27.
Dear Rothenstein,
Hot foot by the next mail appeared The Enemy! Wyndham Lewis has done it very well: much better than The Lion into Fox, which was a falling short after The Art of Being Ruled. [4 lines omitted]
But on people like Pound, and Gertrude Stein, and Joyce he's extraordinarily interesting. I wish he would let himself go properly over the whole area of modern letters, and tell us where he places D.H. Lawrence, and Forster, and Graves and Sassoon and all the rest of the people who write. There is so much being written, and so few guides to help occasional visitors to books through the masses of them.
However perhaps he will carry it on. If The Enemy is successful it may encourage him to branch out into criticism. I take it his creative side, which produced Tarr so long ago, had dropped off withered.
It was very good of you to send it out. Don't you think the cover-design, the Tartar horseman, very beautiful?
Yours,
T.E.S.
| Source: | DG 516 |
| Checked: | dn/ |
| Last revised: | 9 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