Contents lists
Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to Edward Garnett
5.12.30.
Dear E.G.
What a good book it is! I ungratefully delayed writing while I read in it. How nearly big, as poet, Blunt was. Only his vanity saved him from doing really good things in three or four roles. I think these Gregynog people are printing beautifully. I understand the money is the Davies family, and that Tom Jones is in it, somehow. Hodgson, the pressman of course was mine. Who runs the press? And who chooses their books? They have taste. I would like them to do Crane's Jenny (out of print and hard to get) and Vansittart's Singing Caravan which Heinemann printed poorly: and there is room in England for a really fine translation of Niels Lyhne by Jacobsen. You put me on to two of these. Did I ever put you on to the Vansittart? It is that rarest English thing, light poetry.
I do Odyssey all spare days and half the nights: with luck it will be finished before the end of March. What a relief. I am tired of all Homer's namby-pamby men and women.
It is very good of you. I have just had the new Scenes and Portraits by Manning, which is inscribed to me. Really, I am coming on. If only I did not so intensely admire these people who seem to like me. What one needs is the love of one's enemies!
Yours
T.E.S.
| Source: | DG 708 |
| Checked: | jw/ |
| Last revised: | 31 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