T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 594

15.11.27 Dear K, Your photograph has just turned up. It's amazing: and very curious. Of course the plaster gives double pitch to both high lights and shadows: and the top-light is very hard: and Chase structure of my head and face. Consequently emphasis is piled on emphasis, till the whole almost shouts. The Wood bust becomes for it. It represents not me, but my top-moments, those few seconds in which I succeed in thinking myself right out of things, so far as the subject contributes any merit to the achievement, partly for the monumentality of the first impression. You have simplified out, and simplified out, and concentrated on what you liked of the material to your hands, and produced - well I liken it to a Cross between that Giottesque Dante, and the Galtamelata - Colleone. Only I hope people won't think I look being a public monument after you're dead. Before I left you I felt that, barring accidents, you were on the way to doing something big. But Lord, you've pulled it together and pulled it up and out and forward more than I thought possible. The face and neck are treated with a dry precision and strength and confidence very unusual in recent sculpture: in any portrait sculpture. I trace a little hesitation in your handling of the lips. But there is a smile on them, which clashes with the "up-by into Valhalla" motive of the jaw and eyes. They have just started up the hut gramophone on the Traumerei, our very best record, and I am tempted to draw parallels between Wagner and yourself. But that is an accident of Room 2's taste in music. They had only jazz till I came in with some Wagner Fragments and a little Bach. Now the air is a perfect 'Amen' of cross-vibrations. Two of them are trying to dance to the Funeral stuff: and the dog has begun to howl. How in God's name can I write coherently about sculpture in this rumpus?! Sheriff has just come behind my bed, and yelled into my ear "Excuse me, but what is an iconoclast?" I've now safely delivered a short speech on Byzantine religious controversies of the Fifth Century. Back to the head!