Letters of T. E. Lawrence

EDITED BY DAVID GARNETT¹

‘I WONDER how the Powers will let the Arabs get on.’

The last line of a letter to Major Scott reveals what was to be Lawrence’s preoccupation for the three years following the war. He returned to England before the Armistice because he was already preparing for the Peace Conference. During the next three years he was engaged in lighting for Arab independence at Versailles, Downing Street, and Cairo, finding the work more exhausting, physically, mentally, and spiritually, than any of the hardships and dangers he had undergone during the Arabian Campaign.

J. M. Keynes, who observed him closely at the Peace Conference, gives the following estimate: —

The first part of 1919 was the only time when I was really acquainted with T. E. L. I agree with you strongly that it was subsequent events which twisted him. I have always thought that the view which attributed his state of mind to the privations and experiences of the war years was wrong. When I knew him in the spring of 1919, I should have said that he was a man fully in control of his nerves and quite as normal as most of us in his reactions to the world. He had, of course, his aloofness and his mingled like and dislike of publicity, but, reckoned nervously, he was a fit man.

A year later no one could have thought the same. There are two reasons which can be given for the change. One is a simple and physical one: he was in a bad aeroplane crash which resulted in broken ribs and an injury to one lung, which troubled him for the rest of his life. The second and more important is the disillusion and the bitterness of defeat resulting from the Peace Conference. He had complete faith that President Wilson would secure self-determination for the Arab peoples when he went to the Peace Conference; he was completely disillusioned when he returned.

What increased Lawrence’s disgust, and strained and warped him far from the normal, was that during the years when he felt himself defeated and dishonored a popularized legend of his achievement was being broadcast in the newspapers, and in a series of lectures by Lowell Thomas.

His feelings are expressed, to some extent, in the introduction to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which I quote here from the Oxford Text. It was omitted, on the advice of Bernard Shaw, from the Subscribers’ edition. This is, in my opinion, one of the most moving things Lawrence ever wrote, expressing the disgust and bitterness of the generation which had fought and won the war and which found all it had fought for was betrayed. It is because of that betrayal that the world is crumbling into war to-day, and I think this is a fitting introduction to the iragmentary records of the Peace Conference:

We were fond together, and there are here memories of the sweep of the open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. It felt like morning, and the freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for.

We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves any good or evil; yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took from us our victory, and re-made it in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace. When we are their age no doubt we shall serve our children so.

This, therefore, is a faded dream of the time when I went down into the dust and noise of the Eastern market-places, and with my brain and muscles, with sweat and constant thinking, made others see my visions coming true. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a new nation, to restore to the world a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundation on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts. So high an aim called out the inherent nobility of their minds and made them play a generous part in events: but when we won it was charged against me that the British petrol royalties in Mesopotamia were become dubious, and French Colonial policy ruined in the Levant.

I am afraid that I hope so. We pay for these things too much in honour and in innocent lives. I went up the Tigris with one hundred Devon Territorials, young, clean, delightful fellows, full of the power of happiness, and of making women and children glad. By them one saw vividly how great it was to be their kin, and English. And we were casting them by thousands into the fire, to the worst of deaths, not to win the war, but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours. The only need was to defeat our enemies (Turkey among them), and this was at last done in the wisdom of Allenby with less than four hundred killed, by turning to our uses the hands of the oppressed in Turkey. I am proudest of my thirty fights in that I did not have any of our own blood shed. All the subject provinces of the Empire to me were not worth one dead English boy. If I have restored to the East some self-respect, a goal, ideals: if I have made the standard of rule of white over red more exigent, I have fitted those people in a degree for the new commonwealth in which the dominant races will forget their brute achievements, and white and red and yellow and brown and black will stand up together without side-glances in the service of the world.

Any hope of such an achievement appeared to have been forever defeated by a peace treaty founded upon the principle of self-determination for all peoples. But Lawrence would not acknowledge defeat, and, after what he described as a ‘ dog fight in the corridors of Downing Street’ lasting for three years, he brought two Arab kingdoms into being and retired, feeling that he was quit of his Arabian adventure with clean hands.

One further scruple troubled a conscience which had developed into an abnormal character sharply separating him from the vast majority of his fellows. He must not benefit in any way from what he had done in Arabia. The honors which he had won were refused. The jobs offered on account of his reputation had to be declined, nor would he allow himself to exploit his success by profiting from writing a single paid piece of journalism under the name of Lawrence. As the war receded, his scruples of conscience about profiting from the part he had played in it became greater. The Subscribers’ edition of the complete Seven Pillars of Wisdom resulted in a large overdraft at Lawrence’s bank, but the profits of Revolt in the Desert, the abridged version, after wiping this debt off, were given by Lawrence to an Air Force charity.

The clue to what appears to many people to be Lawrence’s abnormality, eccentricity, or whimsical refusal to behave like other people, is simply that his conscience forbade him to profit from the part he had played in the war. All conscientious scruples involve inconsistencies and absurdities: Lawrence was involved in many —though, as he was n’t married, not in as many as Tolstoy.

THE EDITOR

To Lionel Curtis

[BOVINGTON CAMP]
19.3.23.
Lorde, My mind moves me this morning to write you a whole series of letters, to be more splendid than the Lettres de Mon Moulin. Nothing will come of it, but meanwhile this page grows blacker with the preliminaries.
What should the preliminaries be? A telling why I joined? As you know I don’t know! Explaining it to Dawnay² I said ‘Mind-suicide’: but that’s only because I’m an incorrigible phraser. Do you, in reading my complete works, notice that tendency to do up small packets of words foppishly?
At the same time there’s the reason why I have twice enlisted, in those same complete works: on my last night in Barton Street I read chapters 113 to 118, and saw implicit in them my late course. The months of politics with Winston were abnormal, and the R. A. F. and Army are natural. The Army (which I despise with all my mind) is more natural than the R. A. F.: for at Farnborough I grew suddenly on fire with the glory which the air should be, and set to work full steam to make the others vibrate to it like myself. I was winning too, when they chucked me out: indeed I rather suspect I was chucked out for that. It hurt the upper story that the ground-floor was grown too keen.
The Army seems safe against enthusiasm. It’s a horrible life, and the other fellows fit it. I said to one ‘They’re the sort who instinctively fling stones at cats’ . . . and he said ‘Why what do you throw?’ You perceive that I’m not yet in the picture: but I will be in time. Seven years of this will make me impossible for anyone to suggest for a responsible position, and that self-degradation is my aim. I have n’t the impulse and the conviction to fit what I know to be my power of moulding men and things: and so I always regret what I’ve created, when the leisure after creation lets me look back and see that the idea was secondhand.
This is a pompous start, and it should be a portentous series of letters: but there is excuse for it, since time moves slower here than elsewhere: and a man has only himself to think about. At reveille I feel like Adam, after a night’s pondering: and my mind has malice enough rather to enjoy putting Adam through it.
Don’t take seriously what I wrote about the other men, above. It’s only at first that certain sides of them strike a little crudely. In time I’ll join, concerning them, in Blake’s astonishing cry ‘Everything that is, is holy!’ It seems to me one of the best words ever said. Philip Kerr³ would agree with it (one of the engaging things about Philip is his agreement with my absence), but not many other reflective men come to the same conclusion without a web of mysticism to help them.
I’m not sure either that what I’ve said about my creations is quite true. I feel confident that Arabia and TransJordan and Mesopotamia, with what they will breed, are nearly monumental enough for the seven years’ labour of one head: because I knew what I was at, and the others only worked on instinct: and my other creation, that odd and interminable book. ... do you know I’m absolutely hungry to know what people think of it — not when they are telling me, but what they tell to one another. Should I be in this secret case if I really thought it pernicious?
[21 lines omitted]
R.

To Lionel Curtis

27. vi. 22 [really 23]
Old thing, This correspondence nearly died: might have died if you had not asked whether I did not join for the sake of the others here. Of course I did n’t: things are done in answer to a private urge — not one of altruism.
You’ve been talking to Hogarth about my discomfort in the Tank Corps: but you know I joined partly to make myself unemployable, or rather impossible, in my old trade: and the burning out of freewill and self-respect and delicacy from a nature as violent as mine is bound to hurt a bit. If I was firmer I wouldn’t cry about it.
It is n’t all misery here either. There is the famous motor-bike as a temporary escape. Last Sunday was fine, and another day-slave and myself went off with it after church-parade. Wells we got to, and very beautiful it was: — a grey sober town, stiffly built of prim houses, but with nothing of the artificial in it. Everything is used and lived in; and to make the xvth century habitable today they have put in sash-windows everywhere.
One ‘close,’ the Vicar’s close, was nearly the best, it was so cloistered off (even from its quietest of streets): and so grey and green: for the local limestone has turned very sad with time, and has crannied, so that its angles are living with flowers of many sorts: and each of the ‘cells’ in this close has a little grassplot between it and the common path down the centre: and on these plots poppies stood in groups like women at a garden party. There was sunshine over it, and a still air, so that all the essence of the place was drawn out and condensed about our heads. It was a college-like place, and looked good to live in: so for a while the camp waiting here for me became an ungrateful thought. Hogarth had written, hoping to get me back into the R. A. F. and the prospect of such happiness had made the Army nearly intolerable. However that’s over, easily, for I was only hoping against the knowledge that it would n’t be possible.
Afterwards I trailed into the cathedral precinct, and lay there on the grass, and watched its huge west front, covered over with bad sculpture, but very correct and proper still, in the manner of the town. There is a remoteness about cathedrals now-a-days — : they are things I could not contribute to, if they were still a-building: and in front of Wells today there was a white-frocked child playing with a ball; the child was quite unconscious of the cathedral (feeling only the pleasure of smooth grass) but from my distance she was so small that she looked no more than a tumbling daisy at the tower-foot: I knew of course that she was animal: and I began in my hatred of animals to balance her against the cathedral: and knew then that I’d destroy the building to save her. That’s as irrational as what happened on our coming here, when I swerved Snowy Wallis and myself at 60 m.p.h. on to the grass by the roadside, trying vainly to save a bird which dashed out its life against my side-car. And yet had the world been mine I’d have left out animal life upon it.
An old thing (it pleased me to call him Canon) doddered over and sat by me on the grass, and gave me a penny for my thoughts: and I told him (reading Huysmans lately) that I was pondering over the contrasts of English and French cathedrals. Ours set in closes so treebound and stately and primly-kept that they serve as a narthex to the shrine: a narthex at Wells grander and more religious than the building proper. Whereas French cathedrals have their feet in market places, and booths and chimneys and placards and noise hem them in: so that in France you step from your workshop into the aisle, and in England you cannot even enter till the lawns have swept the street-dust from your feet. The old clergyman gave me another penny to read him the riddle and I did it crab-wise, by a quote from du Bellay, and that Christ-church poem about Our Sovereign Lord the King. He was a book-worm too, and we talked Verhaeren and Melville and Lucretius together, with great pleasure on my part, and the vulgar relish that I was making a cockshy of his assurance that khaki covered nothing but primitive instincts.
He took me round the bishop’s palacegarden, pumping me to learn how I endured camp life (living promiscuous seemed to his imagination horrible, and he by profession a shepherd of sheep!), and I hinted at the value of contrast which made all Wells crying-precious to me: and then we leaned over the wall and saw the fish in the moat, and it came upon me very hardly how excellent was their life. Fish are free of mankind you know, and are always perfectly suspended, without ache or activity of nerves, in their sheltering element.
We can get it, of course, when we earth-in our bodies, but it seems to me that we can only do that when they are worn out. It’s a failure to kill them out of misery, for if there is n’t any good or evil but only activity, and no pain or joy, only sensation: then we can’t kill ourselves while we can yet feel. However I’d rather be the fish (did you ever read Rupert Brooke’s ‘And there shall be no earth in heaven,’ said fish’)⁴ or the little bird which had killed itself against me that morning.
There, my letters always end in tears!
E.

To Mrs. Thomas Hardy

21.v.23.
Dear Mrs. Hardy, I’m afraid I’ll come on Saturday next at tea-time! Do la Mare is known to me only by his books — but he should be delightful, if he lives up to them: and most good people are better than their books.
It sounds greedy, always to come when you ask me: but your house is so wonderfully unlike this noisy room that it is difficult, to resist, even for its own sake: and then there is Mr. Hardy, though you must n’t tell him so, for the thrill is too one-sided. He has seen so much of human-kind that he must be very tired of them: whereas for me he’s Hardy, & I’d go a long way even to see the place where he had lived, let alone him living in it.
There, you will think me absurd: but still I’ll arrive on Saturday! Yours sincerely
T E SHAW

To Robert Graves

8. IX. 23
Peccavi: but always that happens. Look upon me as a habitual incorrigible sinner: and blame upon yourself part of this last silence: for in your letter to me (that which caused the silence) you said ‘Tell me about Max Gate’⁵ — and I can’t!
The truth seems to be that Max Gate is very difficult to seize upon. I go there as often as I decently can, and hope to go on going there so long as it is within reach: (Sundry prices I’ve paid in Coy Office for these undefended absences) but description is n’t possible. Hardy is so pale, so quiet, so refined into an essence: and camp is such a hurly-burly. When I come back I feel as if I’d woken up from a sleep: not an exciting sleep, but a restful one. There is an unbelievable dignity and ripeness about Hardy: he is waiting so tranquilly for death, without a desire or ambition left in his spirit, as far as I can feel it: and yet he entertains so many illusions, and hopes for the world, things which I, in my disillusioned middle-age, feel to be illusory. They used to call this man a pessimist. While really he is full of fancy expectations.
Then he is so far-away. Napoleon is a real man to him, and the country of Dorsetshire echoes that name everywhere in Hardy’s ears. He lives in his period, and thinks of it as the great war: whereas to me that nightmare through the fringe of which I passed has dwarfed all memories of other wars, so that they seem trivial, half-amusing incidents.
Also he is so assured. I said something a little reflecting on Homer: and he took me up at once, saying that it was not to be despised: that it was very kin to Marmion . . . saying this not with a grimace, as I would say it, a feeling smart and original and modern, but with the most tolerant kindness in the world. Conceive a man to whom Homer and Scott are companions: who feels easy in such presences.
And the standards of the man! He feels interest in everyone, and veneration for no-one. I’ve not found in him any bowing-down, moral or material or spiritual. [6 lines omitted]
Yet any little man finds this detachment of Hardy’s a vast compliment and comfort. He takes me as soberly as he would take John Milton (how sober that name is), considers me as carefully, is as interested in me: for to him every person starts scratch in the life-race, and Hardy has no preferences: and I think no dislikes, except for the people who betray his confidence and publish him to the world.
Perhaps that’s partly the secret of that strange house hidden behind its thicket of trees. It’s because there are no strangers there. Anyone who does pierce through is accepted by Hardy and Mrs. Hardy as one whom they have known always and from whom nothing need be hid.
For the ticket which gained me access to T. H. I’m grateful to you — probably will be grateful always. Max Gate is a place apart: and I feel it all the more poignantly for the contrast of life in this squalid camp. It is strange to pass from the noise and thoughtlessness of sergeants’ company into a peace so secure that in it not even Mrs. Hardy’s teacups rattle on the tray: and from a barrack of hollow senseless bustle to the cheerful calm of T. H. thinking aloud about life to two or three of us. If I were in his place I would never wish to die: or even to wish other men dead. The peace which passeth all understanding; — but it can be felt, and is nearly unbearable. How envious such an old age is.
[3 lines omitted]
I hope your writing goes: that your household goes: that your peace of mind grows. I’m afraid that last does not. Yet I have achieved it in the ranks at the price of stagnancy and beastliness: and I don’t know, yet, if it is worth it.
E. L.

[Lawrence had taken a cottage, Clouds Hill, a mile and a half from Bovington Camp, across the heath. There are some acres of wooded land, with oak trees rising among rhododendrons. E. M. Forster has published a description of Clouds Hill, from which the following passages are quoted: —

In those days the two bottom rooms were full of firewood and lumber. We lived upstairs, and the sitting room there looks now much as it did then, though the gramophone and the books have gone, and the fender with its bent ironwork has been remodelled. It was, and it is, a brownish room — wooden beams and ceiling, leather-covered settee. Here we talked, played Beethoven’s symphonies, ate and drank. We drank water only or tea — no alcohol ever entered Clouds Hill . . . and we ate — this sounds less romantic — out of tins. T. E. always laid in a stock of tinned dainties for his guests. There were no fixed hours for meals and no one sat down. If you felt hungry you opened a tin and drifted about with it. . . . T. E. slept in camp, coming out when he could during the day, as did the rest of the troops. It was fine being alone in Clouds Hill at night: so silent. . . .

I don’t know whether I’m at all conveying in these trivial remarks the atmosphere of the place — the happy casualness of it, and the feeling that no one particularly owned it. T. E. had the power of distributing the sense of possession among all the friends who came there. When Thomas Hardy turned up, for instance, as he did one sunny afternoon, he seemed to come on a visit to us all, and not specially to see his host. Thomas Hardy and Mrs. Hardy came up the narrow stairway into the little brown room and there they were — the guests of us all. To think of Clouds Hill as T. E.’s home is to get the wrong idea of it. It was n’t his home, it was rather his pied-à-terre, the place where his feet touched the earth for a moment, and found rest.]

To John Buchan

CLOUDS HILL MORETON DORSET
19.V.25
Dear Buchan, I don’t know by what right I made that appeal to you on Sunday.⁶ It happened on the spur of the moment. You see, for seven years it’s been my ambition to get into the Air Force, (and for six months in 1922 I realised the ambition), and I can’t get the longing for it out of my mind for an hour. Consequently I talk of it to most of the people I meet.
They often ask 4 Why the R. A. F.?’ and I don’t know. Only I have tried it, & I liked it as much after trying it as I did before. The difference between Army & Air is that between earth & air: no less. I only came into the army in the hope of earning my restoration to the R. A. F. and now the third year is running on, and I’m as far away as ever. It must be the ranks, for I’m afraid of being loose or independent. The rails, & rules & necessary subordination are so many comforts. Impossible is a long word in human dealings: but it feels to me impossible that I should ever assume responsibility or authority again. No doubt any great crisis would change my mind: but certainly the necessity of living won’t. I’d rather be dead than hire out my wits to anyone importantly.
The Air Ministry have offered me jobs: a commission, & the writing of their history. These are refinements of cruelty: for my longing to be in the R. A. F. is a homesickness which attacks me at the most casual sight of their name in the papers, or their uniform in the street: & to spend years with them as officer or historian, knowing that I was debarring myself from ever being one of them, would be intolerable. Here in the Tank Corps I can at least cherish the hope that I may some day justify my return. Please understand (anyone here will confirm it) that the Battalion authorities are perfectly content with me. Nothing in my character or conduct makes me in any way unsuitable to the ranks: and I’m fitter & tougher than most people.
There, it’s a shame to bother you with all this rant: but the business is vital to me: & if you can help to straighten it out, the profit to me will far outweigh, in my eyes, any inconvenience to which you put yourself!
I think this last sentence is the best one to end on, Yours sincerely
T E SHAW

[Approval of Lawrence’s transfer from the Royal Tank Corps to the R. A. F. was signed on July 16, 1925.]

To Edward Marsh

[KARACHI] 10. VI . 27
Dear E. M., It seems it was n’t Freeman, so much as the London Mercury, which was inept: for a ‘Clennel Wilkinson’ goes one worse about me, this last number. ‘The happy warrior’ who ‘enjoyed his little scraps.’ A reckless, cheerful, man of action. ‘The fact is that everything worth having in the Arabs comes to them from the days of Saladin, who was born a Christian. ‘The fact is’ who told the idiot that? The supreme assumption of it! And Saladin was born a Kurd, which I’ve never heard tell was the same thing as a Christian. Poof! Piffle!
Also he says that I was a physical weakling. I’m not that yet, despite my extreme age. In fact I passed into the Army as a first-class recruit, in 1923. In 1914 I was a pocket Hercules, as muscularly strong as people twice my size, & more enduring than most. I saw all the other British officers’ boots off in Arabia: they went to base, or to hospital, while I did two years in the fighting areas, and was nine times wounded, & five times crashed from the air, and had two goes of dysentry, & suffered enough hunger & thirst & heat & cold and exposure, not to mention deliberate maltreatment, to wreck the average constitution. I go so far as to claim that I’ve been perhaps the toughest traveller who has ever written his true history. ‘Mooning about the towns of South Italy.’ Gods! [4 lines omitted]
Winston wrote me a gorgeous letter. Called his Crisis a pot-boiler! Some pot! and probably some boil, too. I suppose he realises that he’s the only high person, since Thucydides & Clarendon, who has put his generation, imaginatively, in his debt. Incidentally neither T. nor C. was impartial! That does n’t matter, as long as you write better than anybody of your rivals.
He alarms me a little bit, for I feel that he wants to go for Russia, and the ex-bear has n’t yet come into the open. It’s hard to attack, for its neighbours, except Germany, are n’t very good allies for us. We can only get at her, here, through Turkey, or Persia, or Afghanistan, or China, and I fancy the Red Army is probably good enough to turn any one of those into a bit of herself, as the Germans did Rumania. Persia certainly: Turkey will be very strong, soon, and should be our ally, if common interests make for anything. China I know nothing of, but she is too huge for anyone to swallow. The most dangerous point is Afghanistan. Do you know I nearly went there, last week? The British Attaché at Kabul is entitled to an airman clerk, & the Depot would have put my name forward, if I’d been a bit nippier on a typewriter. I ’ll have to mug up typing,: for from ’14 to ’18 I served a decent apprenticeship in semi secret-secret work, & Russia interests me greatly.⁷ The clash is bound to come, I think. In modern Europe it was first Spain which tried to dominate: then France had two tries (Winston’s ancestor the spoiler of the first. I wonder what he thinks of him? England’s only first-rate military genius, I fancy . . . but a doubtful honour to us in other respects): then Germany has her go. It works from West to East, does n’t it? And England has been the main obstacle each time. Usually there has been about a hundred years between each effort: but the tempo of life has grown so much faster since the age of machines opened, that it’s quite on the cards Russia may have her go in our time. It will be a complicated and difficult affair, which we will win, of course, after we have learnt the necessary modification of tactics. The Dardanelles & the Tanks both show how much dead weight has to be moved in favour of a new idea. Do you know, if I’d known as much about the British Government in 1917, as I do now, I could have got enough of them behind me to have radically changed the face of Asia? Russia, to these people, seems the new and growing idea: whereas there is more promise and capacity in our structure than she will contain in the next thousand years.
Apologies. I burble. This is Drigh Road and my proper job is hut orderly. The explanation of this recent shower of letters upon you was: —

(i) My delight in The Crisis

(ii) My fury at Freeman’s blindness & prejudice

(iii) This letter: my apology for being furious with as little a thing as Freeman.

It does n’t seem to me that evolution will produce a No. iv. So you will have peace now. Yours
T. E. S.

To Frederic Manning

MOUNT BATTEN, PLYMOUTH
15.v.30
Dear Manning, That would have been a pleasant letter to get, for the tallest author alive: and therefore many times pleasanter for me, who think myself no great shakes at writing, from one whose writing I so vainly admire. Your prose has a very definite and deliberate manner, which appeals to me, as most ‘airs’ do. Your poems have helped you to that concision and force. The best of poetry is all the clauses it leaves out, and that is why poets so often write such tough and nervy prose — or so I fancy.
Your remarks hit off very closely the obstacles that attended the delivery of The Seven Pillars. I was a rather clumsy novice at writing, facing what I felt to be a huge subject with hanging over me the political uncertainty of the future of the Arab movement. We had promised them so much, and at the end wanted to give them so little. So for two years there was a dog fight, up and down the dirty passages of Downing St., and then all came out right — only the book was finished. It might have been happier, had I foreseen the clean ending. I wrote it in some stress and misery of mind.
The second complicity was my own moral standing. I had been so much of a free agent, repeatedly deciding what I (and the others) should do: and I was n’t sure if my opportunity (or reality, as I called it) was really justified. Not morally justifiable. I could see it was n’t: but justified by the standard of Lombard St. and Pall Mall. By putting all the troubles and dilemmas on paper, I hoped to work out my path again, and satisfy myself how wrong, or how right, I had been.
So the book is the self-argument of a man who could n’t then see straight: and who now thinks that perhaps it did not matter: that seeing straight is only an illusion. We do these things in sheer vapidity of mind, not deliberately, not consciously even. To make out that we were reasoned cool minds, ruling our courses and contemporaries, is a vanity. Things happen, and we do our best to keep in the saddle.
After the Arab business I rather foreswore saddles. The R. A. F. is a socket in which I fit safely: after many tribulations, as you will discover if P. D.⁸ lets you read my Mint which describes how the Air Force rounds off its pegs to fit into their holes. Now-a-days my mind does not concern itself greatly with abstractions. Hence the red face and round belly and comfortable port. I think I am happier than most people.
What you say about the descriptive stuff slowing down the narrative pleases me, rather. I had suspected it. Descriptions should n’t be more than a line or two. Only I was not really out to make a masterpiece (— or was I? I think I wanted to, and felt that I could not, and had not) and the sense of the country and atmosphere and climate and furniture of Arabia hung so tightly about me that I put too much of them into the story, in hopes that they would make it life-like. I wake up now, often, in Arabia: the place has stayed with me much more than the men and the deeds. Whenever a landscape or colour in England gets into me deeply, more often than not it is because something of it recalls Arabia. It was a tremendous country and I cared for it far more than I admired my role as man of action. More acting than action, I fancy, there.
Your seeing Jahveh and the Baalim is of course what I was trying to convey.⁹ My two years taught me the inwardness of all Semitic history, from its beginning: and that includes Zeno and other unexpected persons. As for my harnessing to my go-cart the eternal force — well, no: I pushed my go-cart into the eternal stream, and so it went faster than the ones that are pushed cross-stream or up-stream. I did not believe finally in the Arab movement: but thought it necessary, in its time and place. It has justified itself hugely, since the war, too. So, even to a political or statesman, the conflict is measurable and significant. I am still puzzled as to how far the individual counts: a lot, I fancy, if he pushes the right way.
Joyce¹⁰ and his party try to ‘present objects to the vision simply by enumerating’ not all, indeed, but a careful selection of their qualities. I was at least as selective as Joyce, in intention. Only perhaps I did n’t see, precisely enough, what was significant. I’m sorry about ‘dolerite’ and ‘striated’ . . . but these seemed easy enough, after one had thought of them. I tried not to be technical, unnecessarily.
‘Slowing down the dramatic action’ Yes: as I hinted, much of the dramatic action was very reluctantly put in. It felt cheap, then, and looks cheap now. I preferred Arabia when I wasn’t in it, so to speak! [3 lines omitted]
The first draft was not destroyed by me, but stolen from me; left behind in the refreshment room of Reading Station, and taken by some unknown! It was shorter, snappier, and more truthful than the present version, which was done from memory. I do not think it was franker and angrier, for I do not get angry much, and 1920 (the date of this text, in the main) was a worse year for me than 1919, the date of the first draft. My compromise with fate you will see happening gradually in 1922-23, as I settled into the R. A. F.; if you read The Mint. Here is the chronology:

1914-1918 : the War.

1919 : Peace Conference: misery

1920-1921 (Aug) : Dog fight in London with the British Government

1922 : Eighteen months work with Winston Churchill settling the Middle East after my lights.

1922 (Aug)-1930 : R. A. F.

It is exceedingly good of you to have taken all that trouble. T. E. S.

To Henry Williamson

OZONE HOTEL, BRIDLINGTON, YORKS. 11. XII. 34
Dear H. W., I have so much the better of you: for when I want a talk, it is just putting out an arm and taking a book from my shelves. That’s as it should be, at least; but just now I live in this house with a jesting name (here to watch the refit of ten R. A. F. boats for next season’s work on the bombing range) and for a word with you yesterday I had to go to York and lay out three days’ pay on The Linhay¹¹ . . . which I have been dipping into, with satisfaction, all this too rough Sunday. Too rough for a walk from lodgings. No clothes, poor fire for drying.
What a sentence for No 1! Do you find it hard to begin books? Let me take down your hackles by two quotes from the Linhay bad sentences. P. 67 ‘how heat and the floating algae . . . takes’ . . . P. 36 ‘many old bucks are caught in gins which otherwise would eat young rabbits.’
It is n’t fair, for I would like to write like you, easily or grudgingly but copiously, able to make a sentence of all you see and do, with a catching intimate easy speech, like a man in slippers. For a mannered writer, you have the best manners in the world.
Don’t vex yourself over Walpole or Shanks or Hanks or Banks: or vex yourself only because they discourage your book-buyers. Or do they? The best way to sell a novel was to persuade the Bishop of London to preach against it. I can conceive Hugh Walpole being second-best. I fancy writers get so wrapped up in their own sort of writing, that they find all variations from it bad. At least, they seem to me to make poor critics of contemporary stuff. You write almost disarmingly well. You write better than Richard Jefferies, splendid fellow though he was. Better for me, that is: I feel more heart and see less eye, in you. You look for the unusual, he for the average. Of course he had an awful life. No Alvis, no country contentment, or comfort, anyhow. Few concerns aside from earning, and no war to light his background. We learned a lot in those years, which makes us immemorially older and wiser than the old or the young.
Stop burbling? All right, I’ll stop. Let’s get back to history. I am discharged from the R. A. F. (my life, almost) next March: and cannot make even the ghost of plans for afterwards. There is my cottage in Dorsetshire (Clouds Hill, Morcton, Dorset) on the heath just north of Bovington Camp, between Dorchester and Wareham. I’ll have to go there for my savings have not been very successful: I’ll have only 25/a week. So I must sit under my own roof, and do nothing till I want to do something. Is that a programme?
I hope an Alvis may visit me, for if you ever go to England, via S. Dorset is not much further than via the Plain. In my cottage is no food, and no bed. At nightfall there is a flea-bag, and I lay it on the preferred patch of floor in either room. The ground-room is for books, and the stair-room is for music: music being the trade name for a gramophone and records. There are five acres of rhododendron and fires every evening from their sticks. It sounds to me all right for living, but then so does your valley — yet you often throw yourself angrily away from it. Well, we shall see. But bring your own food. I shall have no cooking. It smells in so small a house. A tiny house. No water near, alas!
As I said, at the beginning, I have the advantage of you, for when I want a word with Henry Williamson, it is only the stretching of an arm to a shelf. If I want him objective, there’s Tarka: subjective, there’s The Pathway or Falcon or Dream of Women. I feel greedy, at having so much of so many people (though not the half I should have had. Books have gone from my hands wholesale while my back was turned. My cottage holds only the rags of a collection) and at liking them so much without making a return. (By the way, did I ever lend you the typescript of my R. A. F. book? Surely I did, poor return though it is.) Sometimes I sit on my chair amidst the books, afraid to open any of them, not having earned it. If only I could write like I read.
Stop burbling again? All right, but this sea rushing and sliding in my ears won’t stop. My room is a tower room, over the harbour wall, and the waves roll all day like green swiss rolls over the yellow sand, till they hit the wall and run back like spinning rope. I want to walk out in the wind and the wet, like at Clouds Hill, and can’t, for my landlady’s sake.
Keep cheerful. And let us meet after my R. A. F. life is ended. Yours
T. E. S.

[On May 13, 1935, Lawrence rode into Bovington Camp on his Brough motorcycle to send off a telegram to Henry Williamson. He was on his way back to Clouds Hill when he came on two errand boys, riding pedal cycles, in a dip in the road. He swerved violently to avoid them, lost control, was thrown over his handlebars, and received severe injuries to the brain. His physical vitality was so great that he lay unconscious for nearly five days before he died of congestion of the lungs and heart failure. Mr. Cairns, the brain surgeon, stated that had Lawrence lived he would have lost his memory, been paralyzed and unable to speak.]