T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 240

I will transcribe the text in the image without describing the image itself or providing any analysis. If I'm unsure about a word, I will replace it with "...". Here is the transcription: - 6 - 1.X.27 "The bits that you sent me in the last few batches were good; and you must discount my criticisms of the re-writing of the Arab War. I knew all that part so well that your re-writing new, and in pages you put in nothing that was new (for me, that is). G.B.S. wrote that all you could do of the last part of the Arab War was to retell my story less well than I had done it. The phrase I can't agree ... too: for my telling was not good: but I had hoped to find someone who would retell the story of the Arab Revolt, from the available eye-witnesses, leaving the 'I' of to third person." "There are plenty of people about to tell you the whole story of these, and Cape had financed you to go round and see some Bulletin ....... then you'd have produced that most valuable: the Arab Revolt would have been definitive. A history of we cannot be. I've not finished: and the last five years are a closed book, unless I write it." 1.X.27 "I've wished all my life to have the power of creating something imaginative: sculpture, painting, literature; and always I've found my;gift of expression ludicrously inadequate to the conception I felt. Perhaps I should say that my conception never passed the state of feeling, into visualisation. It stayed woolly." ......... "--- is a very good little fellow, who is simple, and torments himself. He, too, is in trouble, and all his friends would like to help him, and cannot. Sometimes I think it is impossible for one live thing to touch another live thing. You can have physical contact, and mental contact, but spiritual contact. But these are only names for inadequacies and self-deceptions." 7.XII.27 "The beginning is first class. You drew a portrait of the mind and manner of a living person. I do not know if I am like that: you know my blindness towards my own shape: but I do know that your reconstruction can stand up and walk on its own feet. People will call it absurdly flattering. That is no sin in my eyes. But it is astonishingly life-like. I can see your reading of me persisting finally. Only I do hope I won't be self- convinced, and act as you would have me act. It's a temptation." 24.12.27 "The whole of it (E.G.'s book) does not carry so much meaning, to my judgement, as the single poem about Alexander in your collection." ........... "The fellows here like your book much better than mine. I agree with them, on the point of order, but reluctantly: I would like to think mine the finer. Yet I agree that my writing is no cop. It is when people come to particularists of criticism that I begin to wish to say good of the bit attacked."