T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 640

To Eric Lucas, Cambridge 3.7.40 I have now read Cecile, for a first time. After I have read it again I will feel more sure of what I think about it. That is the worst of my slug-like mind. It delays its impressions far beyond most men's. However I am pretty sure about some things -- and the first is your advance as a novelist. That first book was very good; it had bigger lights than this; but there is no comparison in sustained weight and momentum. This book hangs solidly together and goes forward, all in a piece. Also your range widens. There are excellent main characters: or not perhaps excellent, but credible and vivid and diverse and lively. Yet it is in minor pages that your still shone: I felt best, amongst the people brought in just for a moment, to adorn an angle and deflect your current. That picture of the King, a Yergeance & Geaton, near the end, is as straightforward. You were there, as near to the reality of a novel audience as anyone could. Landscape & atmosphere, sun & light and wind & cloud & rain, one takes for granted from you. After all, they have been perfectly done in your poetry. Sometimes I felt them a few lines too long -- the visit is more than I felt them a few lines too long -- the visit is more than you perhaps realized a novel of action, and one grudges a little anything that delays its speed. I do not think this is a criticism. I would not take anything out. The arguments, the politics -- the meaning-of-the-landscapes, the micro-dramas: there are so many whets to sharpen us in search of the next move of your people. I fancy this is not wholly what you intended. You were trying to write a study of the inter-actions of marriage and companionship upon a group of characters: and you were, more keen on their psychology than upon their doings. Well, and more interested in what these various people did -- in the expressions of their moods in action, than in the moods themselves. That happens to be my make-up. I can see, too, that in writing Cecile you were, in a sense, clearing up your own history. So far, good. I think there is a very ... tional valance and proportion, amity almost --in all but Gabriel who hardly comes off. Yet I have a brother who is a saint, and so I know how baffling saints are.