Contents lists
Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to G. Wren Howard
Ozone Hotel,
Bridlington,
Yorks
31.1.35
Dear Howard,
My sense of fitness makes me feel that all book people should take their hats off to Walmsley... whose Three Fevers has proved not a flash in the pan but the hefty beginning of a family. Of course he may count the E. African flying shocker, but I find it less admirable than these coastal sketches, which are charming. I want to prefer him to Stephen Reynolds, for he has not his predecessor's irritating sense of the difference between a complicated man and a worker: but am restrained by the sense of the surprise I feel, each time he brings a book off. It seems to happen ultra vires, or widdershins; it shouldn’t be possible to write great books like that... or are they just charming books? I don’t know, for I like them too well to judge.
Back to the hat-lifting. My R.A.F. cap (which will crown me for only a month more) doesn't lift; yet after it I shall probably never own a hat. So I can't actually honour him: but if he still sticks close to Robin Hood Bay wouldn't it be fitting if I ran up there late in February with one of these R.A.F. boats we are overhauling here (I could call the jaunt a trial, and it would take an hour each way, weather being good... and if it was dirty weather I couldn’t very well suggest such a trip) and blow my Klaxon towards his beach? He is not reverenced in his own county, I find. In Hull and York and elsewhere I have had mild rows with the local booksellers for their not selling him in basketsfull. I should like to show the R.A.F. here how they stand towards him. If it was summer time, I'd take the fleet of ten boats up and serenade him properly: but we don't launch the first till Feb. 20 and I'm due out by March 1. So that's impossible. Perhaps he is away, spending his enormous royalties at Monte Carlo? Anyhow he's a real writer. Cherish him.
Yours ever
T.E.S.
| Source: | DG 846-7 |
| Checked: | jw/ |
| Last revised: | 15 January 2005 |
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