T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 525

Need I repeat that I'm very grateful to you for getting me this chance? It is an astonishing one. 11/9/22 India Dear Isham Many thanks for the cheque. I am sorry that Israel sent back your first one. Very wrong of them, indeed. So you think the stuff good enough. That is astonishing. If this sort of thing continues I shall wake up some morning in the belief that I can write! But, not like Homer, I fancy. Still, there it is. That will mean nearly two years work for me! I hope to get it through by April 1930,barring the inevitable accidents of course. And that first book over again, after I have done half a dozen books, so that it shall be like the rest, in tone. Some job. It shall be done as well as I can do it. Your publisher friend stands to lose money, if he has to pay B.R. anything like as munificently as they usually do; but that is his poverty: is only com..., narrative. The being poor has compensations, and is all right, so long as one is fed and housed and (...ord crossed out) clothed, as we are in the R.A.F. the not too dire where mere to ...ok for subsistence would terrify me. I starved in 1922: and don't want to repeat! I'll gladly leave the contractual part of the business to you: only please remember that the anonymity is dearer to me than the money - literally! Your private editions of the Boswell papers sound marvellous, but you mustn't think of endowing me with a set. Remember I have no place even to read them in, except my bed in the barracks and to store them (as I have done my other books) in a friend's house in London is singularly unsatisfying. Send me a few proof pages, to let me see how the Baskerville founts go in it, and what the architecture of the page is. I'll enjoy that. No, the newspaper report had no truth in it. I am R.A.F. airman, and no more Yours ever T E Shaw