T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 262

To James Hanley 2. VII. 31 -2- soldiers worrying their prisoner. You can draw characters as and when you please, with an almost blistering vividness. . Now a couple of notes on your last letter. Conditions go to make Sex - yes: I suppose so. I don't know much about ships; once I spent a month on the lower deck of a C... b..t. There was plenty of flesh talked and dreamed about, and to be "for" I've never heard any man dreamed about, I think. Anyway there wasn't what was it. And I've lived in barracks, now for nine years: preferring the plain man to the elaborated man. I find them tooth-coming, lads, honest, friendly and so comfortable. They do not pretend in all, and with them I have not to pretend. Sex, with them, is something you put on (and take off) with your walking-out dress; on Friday night, certainly, and if you are lucky on Saturday afternoon, and most of Sunday. Work begins on Monday again, and is really important. I think that we are kinder to each other than your fellows: and less ignorant. Of course the R.A.F. is probably no milder than Liverpool or Glasgow. Service fellows don't fight, and enlist mainly for a refuge against the pain of making a living. So probably we do miss the "larger life" you try to write about. You need not bother about the Latin Quarter, or about schools & cliques. They will bother more about you: and if you don't pay attention they will fail to praising everything you do. Whereas praise is always ease of kind, to hear, and [word crossed out] harmful, in overdose. After years of it you look for it and credit it, and then are soiled. Take poor D.H.L. who must have been wonderful when he was your age, fifty years ago. Now he is pedestalled, and not so good as you are. Whereas 50 years hence you may be rotten. Yeats, I think, suffers in his middle years from Lady Gregory and others; but his later poems have been wonderful. Of course he's a great poet, and alive. I think the second quality the better[ I will not throw "Poy" away. I propose to read it more. It is good. I like it better than "Shella" (while seeing that it is less) for subjective reasons, because I like