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 G. W. M. Dunn

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Plymouth

15.XII.32.

Dear Dunn,

I got to my cottage last Sunday and in turning over the pile of books, lit upon the Blunden 'Owen': so I dragged it down here and duly posted it off to you.

Owen is a very beautiful technician, with great power of saying, (not to mention seeing) things. [2 lines omitted] Sassoon has told me a lot about him. Owen was a decent fellow, very modest and not tolerant.

I hope it makes up for the Eliot essays. they went to you because they are interesting, I think. I did not read them all, because many of them have already passed my eye in other publications. He writes freely for the Criterion and other papers, you know. His Dante I have as a small book. It is excellent.

Many of the other essays are not good. He has a confused and knotty mind, and makes more mess of a simple subject than any other conceived human being. I don't know any critic who more darkens the mists and confuses the faults of his authors. After an hour of Eliot I thank God for Arnold Bennett!

Bertrand Russell is foolish, I think. Silly. A fat-head: but there was his book stuck in my locker, and it did help to pack out the
Eliot parcel. Poor Owen went off lonely, by himself. I nearly sent you Figgis Children of Earth - an Irish novel of great scale: but I feared your mind was above novels.

Music? We have none here. Wireless is a very false-toned caricature of music, I think. Gramophone is my stand-by, and a
magnificent stand-by, surely. A Ginn gramophone which broods over my cottage and fills it with the sound of strings, when I want. Mostly old stuff: Beethoven quartets and concertos by anybody.

Yours,

T.E.S.

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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