T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 239

- 5 - year and bonus of about £300) he paid me: I had to accept the salary, for his peace of mind, but put it to official purposes. And so with the profits of my book on the campaign. Consistency makes me refuse them too." ...... Re "Seven Pillars" "S.A., the subject of the dedication, is rather an idea than a person." (undated) "I don't see why everybody should leap to the conclusion that I'm better than average, just because I happen to be odd or different. It's at least as probable that my oddness makes me below average. And I think nothing of my literary product, either. The Seven Pillers is all full of weakness, and has few merits, outside the typography and page-design." _____ (undated) "There was one more line in that confession book. Is it too bitter? For "my greatest wish" I wrote "To be forgotten by all my friends". I wish it often, and am yet ashamed of it. Old T.H. once said to me, 'If we had been given the chance of being born, would not every one of us have refused?' I had to agree with him. All things are better not." _____ 17.VIII.27 "Of course you have 'done me very well' - but I don't really care a hoot about that. The thing that was really important was for you to do yourself really well, and I don't feel that it's up to the level of your other prose. In the rushed circumstances it could not be: and you will doubtless pull it together in the revise ..." _____ 22.IX.27 "No, of course that book will make no difference: but I shall be glad when it is out. I know, from my own experience, how much the work in hand fills all the horizon of the man who is writing it; and so much of the beginning and end of that draft you sent me was genuine R.G. work, that I suspect you are as deep in it as if the first motive of it was not re-tracing. I hope it will get thousands, and that its effect on the public will be surfeit. Let them say "We have too much of this odd fellow": and very quickly they will open their judgments to hints of the A.T.'t sort. It is proposed bluntly too much like a blood-minded bull of Bashan: but some subtler devil will soon arise who will sap round me artfully. That's why I begged you not to champion me again in the Preiss: Let 'em say, One more the better: they are doing everything I most wish done. Without my reputation I could live ever so well, like a pope from which its huge bubble of soap-suds has fallen. I'm a funny card really. I'd have been all right, apparently, if I'd never tried to do any of the things I have probably done well: or if I'd failed to do them. It's like having succeeded in all the details of a scheme, and then to have forgotten what was the master-scheme into which the bits were to fit."