T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 389

To James Hanley, 27. 1. 36. Osone Hotel Bridlington Yorks. 27. 1. 36 Dear Hanley I have just finished the Furys. It was good of you to send it to me and I am sorry that by two re-addressings it has taken so long to reach me. At Bridlington here I am doing just 6 . .. job a week or two books a for in March my twelve years runs out and I have to leave. I go then to Clouds Hill, Moreton, Dorset, my cottage and do .... I do not know if I am in strict ... friends of yours. In the Furys you go forward. The good qualities of your writing, its force and conviction and heat and violence, goes through the stronger the more you control these. Don't take my opinion as a practiced one: but if you were here I would like to talk about this book. The strongest and fullest thing in it is old Hannan, Mrs. Fury is warm and more dubious but Mrs. is exasperated, living in quietude, at once too rich and too plain. To my mind the finest bit of work in the book is where she washes the house floor. Wilgre's re-appears, but does not develop. There are many minor characters in the book which you touch in enough to excite us and then drop, the Professor, Joe, Fr. Hornibrake. The boy is well done, but really a bore, he seems to fall between the ages, as though he had no body: which is a queer thing to say, after what you give him to do. It is seldom one finds a book quite so full of life: there are a dozen real people in (word crossed out )it: but I miss the sense of place that struck me so in Saurcraut Dominus. That fishing village existed: Liverpool, in this, does not, which is queer because Liverpool should be your more natural subject. I think the lame landscape, in the focus, was good: and the house of the money-leading woman was palpable, and, I fancied that, the motor journey to Garton missed an entirety. I did not see the ford where she or its going. The stable and the mare were admirable. 261