Contents lists
Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to C. J. Greenwood
Plymouth
26.X.32
Dear Greenwood,
I must reconcile myself, apparently, to buying your cheap books and having the dear ones given to me! It is very nice of you, and I am sorry. Publishers ought to live.
The Cunninghame Graham duly arrived. It is a disappointing book. Anything about the old Don should have been written with swagger. He is an artist thereat, as you see if only he takes his hat off to a lady in the street. His pen swaggers too: and he cannot therefore sustain a book: though he writes the best of five or six pages imaginable, and has a rain-in-the-air-and-on-the-roof-dripping mournfulness of Scotch music in his time-past style. A wonderful old man. Moghreb el Aksa was his most ambitious effort at book-writing, and after it he relapsed into his proper role, of filling albums with snap-shots - the best verbal snapshots ever taken I believe. Not much brain, you know, but a great heart and hat: and what a head of hair!
I shall be glad, very glad, to have the Hanley. The book isn't artistically necessary, I thought. Hanley was only getting something phlegm-like off his chest. If I knew his life-history probably I would know what. Accordingly for all the terrific power of it, I cannot regard it as a child of his daylight hours. No doubt I am wrong: but there is too much feeling in it for an extravagance, too much extravagance for cold fury. I shall value my copy, permanently.
I am happy that you have your eye on Marshall. There is something in him that makes me want to help. Don't hesitate to let me know if any eventually arose.
Yours ever,
T.E.S.
| Source: | DG 750-1 |
| Checked: | jw/ |
| Last revised: | 21 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