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Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to Henry Williamson
Plymouth
13.2.33
Dear H.W.
I've been grinning through the week-end over The Falcon, of which a vellum and gold copy reached me from Faber on Saturday.
By the same post arrived a plain copy, sent me from an indignant reviewer, demanding to know why I had fathered this decadent bilge upon an innocent world! It's a queer world, my mistresses!
The Falcon has that jumpy, nervous, stippled technique that you were developing in The Dream of Women. It fits a jazzy subject, and conveys an astonishing sense of movement, all through the tale.
I thought old Homer duplicated too often. Tricks in books feel sharper than in real life. There are several astonishing bits of characterisation. The climax was perhaps your only way out of a difficulty... but about it I'd repeat my 'tricks' remark. All right in life, but too coloured for a tale.
Wrink I didn’t recognise: but all your contemporaries (except Priestley, perhaps) will recognise themselves preeningly. I preened. Are my letters real extracts, or have you polished?
To write the day after's not wise. I can't say how I really regard the book. You are a long way from the chiselled and rather static prose of your beginning: and it is always good to go on, and bad to repeat. Only I sometimes wonder where you are going.
They'll all call Manfred a self-portrait: but somehow I remember you as much more solid than that. I wish I could get over to you and see. Will they leave me in Plymouth this summer, or will it be Hythe, again? Ever so many thanks for the book. It has been a great pleasure for 8 hours reading, and will be re-read before I write to you properly.
Yours
T. E. Shaw
| Source: | DG 761-2 |
| Checked: | jw/ |
| Last revised: | 1 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