Contents lists
Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to Edward Garnett
13 Birmingham Street,
Southampton
5.10.33.
Dear E.G.
It is most good of you to have sent that Prussian Officer - a very difficult book to get. I now have all the essential D.H.L. - which is good! At the same time I feel a little guilty of greed: you should have sold this duplicate for much silver money, and had a weekend on the profits (Or perhaps you shouldn't; some scruple makes me unable to sell books by people I like. I profiteered once on Galsworthy firsts - but that was different. He left me cold.)
The curiosity is indeed a curiosity. I wonder what took you into publishing, forty-four years ago? And so small a book. As you say, the two short sketches show power and a sustained line of excitement which is very instructive. From them I turned to the first, long, story: and was left puzzled. The gift of description, the sense of character - and by contrast the XIXth Cent. Moral. Very strange it is. Whoever wrote it was no negligible person.
The book-plate is nice, but puzzling: for Ford Madox Brown was alive a hundred years ago, and the forerunner of the pre-Raphaelites. It's no use your pretending to be as old as that. Perhaps your father knew him, and he knew you as a child and did it for you as a gift? It is a remarkable spanning of the generations. Did you use it as a book-plate? I'm not able to put any mark in my books - unless, sometimes, T.E.S. in pencil on the fly-leaf corner. Whence, I suppose, my losses partly flow. However from the cottage there will be no borrowers and so no losses!
By my energy and your gifts I am now complete on D.H.L., Crane
and Reynolds. This weekend I am at the cottage, and aspire to read Wounds in the Rain or something of the sort - and then I'll try and
tell you more about my modern idea of Crane. I remember him as a man
of astonishment - one who surprised and shocked, by turns of incident
and vivid phrases. Rather that, than a sustained artist. But that is
an inarticulate memory, the surviving notion after years of neglect.
I have always meant, in my leisured age, to re-read all those men who
excited me in my youth.
T.E.S.
Little Dunn is so pleased and happy. Asked if he ought to thank you. I have said we will all three meet in London, some time. I think you would be good for him. He is too timid - and too drastic - by fits.
| Source: | DG 778-9 |
| 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