T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 360

To Major Yeats Brown 18. VIII. 27 Dear Y-B You are a man! one Celia Simpson wrote & told me so. Well. I got your "Ocean of Story". It is fatuous, I think; but I will turn it over again in my slow mind. Haklurt goes on. It is hard work. Old H. had not the judgment of a white ant, or the keen vision of a dormouse. The times gave him the best material in the world, & he made an awful mess of it. However the later stuff not even his editing could spoil. The recenter volumes are I've written about Vol. I. II. III., and will jump together II - III & IV probably in one general article. Don't burst yourself trying to find books for me to revise. I write such miserable stuff that it isn't worth printing, to my mind. You'll have seen two or three samples by now; and I hope you won't hesitate to say what you think of it. Popular opinion has absurdly overestimated the literary merit of my Arabian book. Even your "Celia Simpson" was taken in by it so much as to cut out a sentence in which I contrasted the permanent greatness & gorgeousness of D.H.L. with the vogue of T.E.L. and the would-be smartness of G.E.L; too other published people of the same name? Neither of us is fit to black D H L 's boots. Your imagination of me wandering about Karachi is at fault. I have not yet been outside the gates of the camp. So I have not, no Indians, and am not likely to. They do not venture inside, into airmanland. Yours T.E.S.