Contents lists
Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to Sydney Cockerell
Ozone Hotel,
Bridlington,
Yorks.
28.xi.34
Well, I read The Valleys of the Assassins. I am grateful to you for the chance. She unfolds herself as a remarkable person. It is astonishing how the book takes life whenever she or anyone else speaks in it. Subtract the characters and the journeys fall dead. She uses far too many names, and hasn't the faculty to express places as she does people. A gallant creature. I hope she does not meet mishaps in Yemen or Hadhramaut. I suppose it is this Sheba myth that she pursues. Better that, anyway, than an uncrossed desert which when crossed proved to be empty. The political complexion at the moment might be favourable to her exploration.
Thank you very much for it. Press her, some day, to care far more than she does for the communication of landscape to her readers. She fails to 'see' it.
Yours ever
T.E.S.
| Source: | SCC 371-2 |
| 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